OT- China in Space

Quite wrong in that statement.

Many - and I mean Many were lost before their 'first!' !

We sent a dog up and they treated their early men worse than dogs.

Those are the facts. : from a listening post at White Sands.

Martin

The Russians killed quite a number of people, and many of them orbited for a number of years before burning up.

Gunner

There have been only four known astronaut deaths from the Soviet/Russian space program. Do you know of any others?

The death rate for the U.S. space program is roughly comparable to the USSR/Russian space program, if you compare the total number of people who have flown.

Key word here: known

The Economist remarked today that the Chinese launch cost US$2 billion, but that the Chinese haven't said (or aren't saying) whether that's the cost of the program, or just the cost of the rocket and orbital vehicle.

Ed Huntress

Ok, then ESA is the all time champ. They only launch payloads, no people. Up until now, that was true for the Chinese too. But that's a silly metric for manned spaceflight.

A more realistic metric is the number of deaths divided by the number of flights. That's hard on the US because we launch more people on fewer flights.

Or we can look at the number of failures divided by the number of launches. That makes the Russians look even better since they've done over 5,000 launches of the Soyuz type vehicle with only two failures resulting in fatalities. That's a roughly 1 in 500 chance of dying on a Soyuz. Meanwhile the US Shuttle yields a roughly 1 in

50 chance of dying on a Shuttle flight.

So perhaps I was mistaken when I said the US was more risk averse than the Chinese. According to the historical record, the US program has the highest risk.

Gary

Four in Soyuz type spacecraft. That was the result of two failures very early in the program. None since then. In other words, those deaths can be blamed on the vehicle and procedures being very early on the learning curve. The same can't be said for the US Shuttle program.

Gary

Those are the ones we KNOW about. Humans were rocket fodder to the Soviets, they erased from the record any failures. I have seen many documents where they were literally airbrushed out of the picture. There are many rumors and myths, too, but we here in the west simply do not know. Hell, many in the Soviet programs do not know either. They did kill plenty on the ground in testing alone.

yeah, so?

IOW there may have been dozens of Soviet deaths for all we KNOW. They were notorious for using up men in their endeavors in the air, space and the military - and not reporting it -or- erasing the record.

5,000 launches? That would average out to one every other day for more than 27 years! Do you have a cite for that figure? Also, how many launches were manned? It doesn't seem right to include unmanned launches when comparing human casualty rates.

R, Tom Q.

We do know about every Soyuz launch. By the time the Soviets started that program, we had a very good surveilance, tracking, and monitoring capability. We know less about their earlier programs, but a lot has come out since the fall of the Soviet Union.

There is no evidence that they ever had dead cosmonauts stranded in orbit. That would have been almost impossible to hide from even our early monitoring capabilities. But it is possible that they may have lost some to launch accidents in the time before we had good satellite surveilance.

It is almost certainly true that they've lost more people in training than we have. In earlier years, their training practices crossed the line into brutal. But most of the known training accidents were like ours, jet fighter crashes.

Gary

It is almost certainly the former. According to space.com and Olberg and others who've been closely watching the Chinese space program, their total yearly space budget has been running about $1.5 billion a year, and that includes their unmanned programs.

Gary

Except for all those pesky X15 pilots. Shepard was the first "spam in a can" American in space, but several X15 flights crossed the 50 mile barrier before him.

Gary

Some has. A lot was destroyed or altered. Photos of cosmonauts were even airbrushed out of photos, evidence supports this. Even interviews, with those involved, reveals little more than we already knew. Interestingly, the Soviets also did not consider (nor publicize) missions successful until after lanuch, regardless of the landing.

True. No evidence. Although it has been speculated, to no end, that the possibility is real. They could have lost some to deep space and re-entry. Either would have been regarded as miserable failures and historically (records) deleted. With little or no evidence.

It was just such early monitoring that cases have been made for several deaths in orbit. Allegedly cries for help were heard AND dying heartbeats recorded from orbit. However, at this point it's sheer speculation and not widely believed.

And landing accidents. There have been rumors of cosmonauts, that preceded Yuri Gagarin's historic flight, landing in China and were detained. Another failure to be deleted.

I recently read an account of Valentin Bondarenko, he died in a oxygen rich chamber when he accidently ignited a alcohol soaked cotton ball, which he was cleaning off sensor glue from his skin, 3 weeks before Gagarin's flight. It was gruesome, he lived for many hours. The only part of him that did not receive 3rd degree burns were the soles of his feet (boots). They couldn't get the chamber door open because of internal pressure, and it swung in. Things that weren't supposed to burn, burned well in that environment. Horrible.

We are essentially in agreement. Most stories are baseless and rumors abound. But many have roots in reality and are in the realm of possibility.

supports your assertion and is an interesting read. I think there is a mention of a midget cosmonaut sent on a suicide mission to the moon inside a Soviet rover!

I read the figure on one of the sci.space newsgroups. It does seem high, but they've used the Soyuz as their medium booster for over 30 years. Just over a hundred of the launches have been manned.

I think it is fair to use total launches since it is essentially the same launcher whether it is coughing up a weather satellite or spam in a can. If the Shuttle were capable of flying unmanned, it'd make sense to count those launches too. Unfortunately, the Shuttle can't fly unmanned, and it costs too damn much to fly anyway, so it can't benefit from that extended flight experience.

Gary

Which means either: a) Though our intelligence efforts, we already knew most of the facts regarding their space program's sucesses and failures. or: b) The Russians interviewed knew exactly what it was that we did and didn't know. They cleverly only confirmed the information that they knew we knew, thus successfully keeping secret what they knew we didn't know.

I'll let you decide.

It has also been speculated to no end that the earth is flat.

Jeepers, you've watched one too many episodes of "The X-Files".

No more brutal or horrible than our incinerating of three astronauts (Grissom, White, Chaffee) in the oxygen-rich environment of Apollo 1. One unfortunate aspect of the cold-war space program secrecy was that, if NASA had known of Bondarenko's death (six years earlier), the loss of the three Apollo 1 astronauts may have been prevented.

One reason the Chinese are going to overtake us in the space race is that, as a nation, we have become too soft and weak. Gus Grissom was correct when he said: "If we die, we want people to accept it.... The conquest of space is worth the risk of life." But that spirit no longer dominates within our society.