Chace Randolph

Blog Post Number 63

Written: 07-27-2023 Uploaded: 07-28-2023

I have an idea here, a topic for discussion. I am, like many other readers and writers, a nerd. Though what I read tends to be non-fiction. There’s plenty of good stories with real people, and I don’t feel the need to read much fiction while seeking entertainment. But I am a sci-fi fan, so one of the historical topics I like the most, is space history. Sputnik, Gemini, Soyuz 11, the whole nine yards, everything. The N1, the Nova rockets, the V2s, the shuttle missions all of it. I recently finished a 40-ish hour podcast “The History of the Space Race” and it did a fair job, or at least better than most, talking of both the Soviet and American accomplishments and failures during the late 1950’s throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s.

It really highlighted, how the lack of a single concentrated effort on the soviets part, and choosing instead to fund and research multiple parallel projects like both the N1 and the R700 moon rockets for example, was really what prevented them from perfecting any one thing, and falling behind the United states space capabilities in the mid 60s and loosing the race to the moon in 1969. (though they still had many 1sts on their way to Venus, but that’s a topic for a different blog post.)

As I finished this podcast, and spent a few minutes to ruminate on the subject more broadly, an idea cropped up, and I figured I could share it here. What if… and hear me out on this, because I have two good reasons for this thought, even if they are a little hair splitting… What if none of the Soviet flights counted, and they Technically didn’t have space ships until Voskhod on October 12^th 1964 and all the previous flights of the Vostok spacecraft don’t count.

Now, before you flip a table, and throw my baby out with your bathwater, let me explain. I make this heretical claim, to invalidate the 6 flights of Vostok, not in a serious manner, but for the purposes of academic discussion. A discussion centered around two points. Firstly, the original Vostok Space, was not operated by the person onboard the spacecraft. It was automated. The cosmonaut was merely cargo for an autonomous satellite. The big bulky computer the soviets had (even bigger and bulkier then what IBM was building in the united states at the time, wasn’t onboard the spacecraft, but was instead on the ground, and command signals were radioed up to the space craft, which then did its thing. (mainly fire the retro rocket to decelerate and force re-entry) per the computer’s direction, without any direct input from the person on board. They were just along for the ride.

Secondly, I saw it doesn’t count as a flight, because the occupant of the automated spacecraft, did not land with the vessel. They were kicked out on an ejection seat and landed on their own parachute, separately from the space craft. A jet pilot, does not make a landing, if they eject from their F-16 and let the plane plow into the runway. A ship captain, does not land his ship at port, if he scuttles it in the harbor and swim’s ashore after the fact. So by that logic, the ‘crew’ of the Vostok never completed their flights, because they never landed the space craft, that they never had control of in the first place.

Let me know what you think of these idea. I would love to have a discussion in the comments beneath this post.