Specifically, this 3 seconds of video, which I believe was also used in The Right Stuff, complete with digital “snow.”
Of course, knowing the Soviet space program, this might not be Gagarin—it could be from virtually any of the 60s Russian space missions, or video taken during a ground test or training, or even just staged for publicity’s sake.
So…would anyone here who happens to have information on 50 year old Soviet space footage be kind enough to enlighten me? Please?
Just my wild ass guess, but I’d say it has to be footage taken while in the capsule but still on the ground. Considering that even we (the US) never had live video from spacecraft until the Apollo missions I seriously doubt the Russians could have managed it. Plus, given their penchant for absolute secrecy, it’s not something they *would *have done even if they could. The couldn’t even encrypt their audio transmissions, ham operators famously listened in on the communications of the disastrous Soyuz 1 mission, letting the doomed cosmonaut speak to his wife. Encrypting video would have been out of the question technologically, so using it at all would have been out of the question politically.