Of course, the crews of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 were killed on re-entry, but we’ve already mentioned this upthread. I remember the headlines for Soyuz 11; they certainly didn’t cover that up, in the East or in the West.
I realize now this isn’t an appropriate response for a General Questions thread. Can a mod delete?
Moderating
We don’t delete posts, but you are correct, it wasn’t appropriate. I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or not. If it was sincere, don’t do it again. If it was a joke, also don’t do it again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I won’t; my apologies. I shouldn’t have been multitasking at my advanced age.
There are rumors that there was another cosmonaut who went up before Gagarin, but died and was therefore erased from the accounts. It’s not entirely implausible, but even if it happened, his craft would have re-entered the atmosphere not long afterwards, with his remains inside.
It takes a lot of effort to get a payload as big as a human and the corresponding life support system up high enough that the orbit won’t decay in a few years. It’s certainly possible, as evidenced by Apollo, but it wouldn’t have been in the Gagarin era of spaceflight, and it wouldn’t go unnoticed.
This is not true! There are 26 posts in the thread. Somebody is rewriting history. Do you understand what this means?
Soon I’ll write post #4 and really blow the doubter’s minds. Even with footnotes referring to future posts!
The Master speaks:
It is interesting to note that there are at least three satellites still in orbit that were launched well before Gagarin’s trip; the Vanguard satellites are about as big as a large grapefruit, but they have been up there since 1959.
Here’s a slightly related tidbit about a putative asteroid that is now thought to be a 50 year old booster. Some stuff from the early days can stay up there a long time.
What about all those people who got abducted for zoos on alien planets back in the 50s? Surely some of them have kicked off by now, and I doubt the Alpha Centaurians shipped the remains back home.
Well, the atoms we are made of are in the picture right? What are the chances someone born since then is made of star stuff that wasn’t in the photo?
Better than I expected. People in Chelyabinsk could actually smell the explosion of the meteor of 2013, so some of the constituent atoms/molecules of the meteoroid presumably were in their noses at that time and are possibly hanging around somewhere.
Was the meteoroid in Collins’ picture, though? I can’t prove it wasn’t, but the Wikipedia article on the meteor says that the meteoroid was in an eccentric orbit stretching from Earth to the asteroid belt. In that case, I’d guess it’s much more likely than not that the meteoroid wasn’t in the picture.
(Space dust and other small meteoroids add about 40,000 tonnes of mass to Earth each year – more than three times as much as the Chelyabinsk meteoroid – but I don’t know how easily their components make it down to ground level.)
Good point! Is that sort of like your grandfather’s axe? If I’ve got some chunks of my great^4 granddad in me, does that make me a cannibal? A familial cannibal? An inbred moron?
You have to suppose that in cultures and eras where related tribes / groups / etc., lived in the same location for decades or centuries there’d be lots of opportunity for the chunks or juices of the dear departed to be incorporated into the local dirt, dust, flora, and fauna and then back into their human descendants.
As MAD Magazine had it all those years ago: Death is nature’s way of recycling human beings.
A very small fraction of the electrons currently on Earth were created as the result of beta decay of primordial nuclides, such as potassium-40 and uranium-238. So strictly speaking, not all of the matter on the Earth today was “in the picture” in 1969.