Go to the space was a dream of few, until the 50s, when the United States (POT) and the Soviet Union engaged in a race for the stars. So motivation became a matter of honor in the midst of the Cold War. At that time curious stories arose, such as the ghost astronautlost in the immensity.
They were almost always fictional stories, or stories that, based on real events (true missions), were given an ending that never happened.
The issue is that in the 1950s and 1960s, when the incipient space race still had more of a military character than a fully scientific one, secrets were the order of the day. And when there are secrets, rumors always arise, passing from there to legends.
Even more so if those tales came from behind the Iron Curtain, in the former Soviet Union.
Although it is said that the first ghost astronaut was part of Project Mercury… and was a mannequin capable of inhaling and exhaling air, generating heat and producing water vapour. It would have been on two Mercury test flights in 1961. NASA does not recognize it as such, so it is taken as a legend.
The Italian brothers who promoted the story of the ghost astronaut
There is another story about two Italian brothers, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia, radio amateurs who in the early years of the space race intercepted communications from space.
The Judica-Cordiglias were aware of the launch of the first artificial satellite in history, Sputnik I, by the Soviet Union. In those times, Radio Moscow released the frequency of the beacon of 1 Watt power at 20.005 MHz and 40.002 MHz of a continuous carrier: anyone in the world could monitor the signals.
Achille and Giovanni Battista, as VICE recalls, They would have captured in 1961 some heartbeats of an agitated person, with panting breath, of a supposed cosmonaut. Over time, it was said that they were from Gennady Mikhailovwho died aboard Sputnik 7, becoming the first human being killed in space.
But really Sputnik 7 was a Soviet attempt to launch an exploration probe to Venus, and it had no human beings inside it. So everything was a legend.
Valentin Bondarenko officially became in the first cosmonaut to die during an experiment related to the space race, in 1961. And the first to die in space was Vladimir Komarov, on April 24, 1967.
Komarov’s story You can read it at this link.
By May of that year, they recorded the voice of a certain Ludmila Tokovy, who was supposedly the first woman in space, but who reported in her last return transmission that something was wrong “and she was burning.”
Another ghost cosmonaut? What actually happened?
Nothing could be confirmed, and officially the Soviets give Valentina Tereshkova as the first woman who traveled to space. You can learn more about its history at this link.
With the consolidation of the space race came the goodbye to the legends
This type of situation decreased over time, when the space race had already strengthened. To highlight others, there are those of Pyotr Dolgov (a fictional accident) and Alexey Grachov (a rocket engine engineer who was credited as having been a cosmonaut).
The Soviet Union took the first man into space in 1961, the great Yuri gagarin; and the United States reached the Moon in 1969, with Neil ArmstrongBuzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.
Each space program was revealing real victims, proclaiming them as heroes, and the stories of the ghost astronaut, or of the men lost in the immensity, began to fade.
Mysteries were no longer necessary.