February 22, 2023 • 33 mins
The world’s only space station goes dark. And now Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev has to lead one of the riskiest missions ever flown in space. He alone is tasked with saving the Soviet Space program from catastrophe.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Mission Control just outside of Moscow. Picture of vast hall
with rows of desks and those massive eighties computers. It's
February nineteen eighty five and a few ground controllers are
trawling through graphs and signals sent from a space station
called Salute seven, the pride and joy of the Soviet
space program. Right now, Salute seven hasn't got any cosmonauts
(00:41):
on board. It's on autopilot, orbiting the Earth, waiting for
its next crew. So the ground control's work is fairly routine.
They record data, talk about their weekend plans. But then
right at the end of the shift, someone notices something
(01:03):
weird on one of the dashboards. There's a light flashing
on the control panel, a warning light. Everyone's on their
feet trying to fix it, but then another light goes down,
and another. One by one, the whole dashboard goes dark.
(01:29):
A horrified silence fills the room. They've just lost the
space station. It's like a dead piece of thing in orbit.
That's also Sadiki, our Soviet space galu heard last time.
They couldn't find any kind of signal, nothing from the station.
(01:49):
It's essentially floating, spinning, probably out of control in Earth. Orbit,
and it's huge, this huge chunk of metal. If they
don't control it, it might fall uncontrollably uninhabited country and
it could land on a city, a village somewhere, and
so they're very afraid of that. Thousands of people could die.
It would be a human tragedy and a huge embarrassment
(02:12):
for the Soviet Union, and so they need to do
something that's never been done before, to land on a
dead object in space and out of control chunk of
metal and bring it back to life. I'm Lance Bass
(02:35):
and from Kaleidoscope. iHeart podcast and exile content. This is
the last Soviet as y'all know. I am obsessed with
space and with this one particular space movie. Houston, we
have a problem. Apollo thirteen. I freaking love this film.
(02:57):
In my books, Tom Hanks can do no wrong. Power
up the level three hours by the checklist. We don't
have that much time. It tells the story of a
space flight going seriously awry. The rescue mission became live news.
All of America was watching, asking themselves with the astronauts,
make it home alive. The Apoto thirteen to the Moon
(03:19):
is in serious jeopardy. Disasters are one of the big
reasons we fall in love with space. Now coming to
the moment, the last moments of Apolo thirteen as it
begins it's re entry. The best thing we can do
now is just to listen. I'm hopeful. The stakes could
not be higher, and it's all beamed into your living
room twenty four seven. They hate it. All three shoots
(03:42):
out great and extremely loud applause here in mission control.
But the story I'm about to tell you now took
place in complete secrecy. No one was allowed to know
(04:05):
about it. And yet it's the Soviet Union's very own
Apollo thirteen. And the man who would lead it from
the ground Yep, you guessed it, Sergey Krekolev. In our
last episode, we left our cosmonaut in nineteen sixty one,
aged three, the Soviet Union was still recovering from the
wreckage of World War Two, but they'd beat the Germans
(04:29):
and now, against all the odds, they'd conquered space too. O.
Space was going to be the future of the Soviet Union,
and that generation who grew up in the nineteen sixties
were really sort of, I think, encouraged to think in
(04:52):
utopian terms. The Soviet Union putting the first person in
space was the defining moment of Saragey's childhood, and there
was a sense that this was just the beginning of
space exploration, of the Soviet Union's rise on the global stage.
All Russia's just wild about. Jurica got in, first man,
took conquer space. Please. For Sarah Gay, life's possibilities must
(05:16):
have seemed endless. So I think it's very much part
of his DNA and that generation in particular, growing up
in the sixties and seventies as children and then as
young teams, to be immersed in that world of future
oriented thinking about the Soviet Union. Future oriented things are
good and you only expect them to get better now.
(05:40):
If you grew up in the United States during the
tail end of the Cold War, like me, I know
what you're thinking, you'd have been fed the same propaganda
that the Soviet Union was a cold, gray place where
kids go hungry. Well, in the sixties, that was more
likely to be true of America. Seventy three percent of
all Clay County families received less than three thousand dollars.
They're very young, their mothers, the aged are the most
(06:02):
numerous inhabitants of this permanent culture of poverty. Yep, Because
in the Soviet Union, basic stuff, food, a roof over
your head that was all provided for by the state.
Whether in Communist headquarters in Odessa on the Black Sea
or in the Hermitage art gallery in Leningrad, every activity
(06:23):
is controlled by directives that originate under the gold domes
of the Kremlin. So if you're Saragai, a young boy
coming of age in Leningrad in the sixties and seventies,
things would have seemed pretty good. He didn't grow up
in luxury, but it was a care free environment. He
knew everything was going to be just fine. He went
(06:46):
to school, he went swimming, he joined the city's gymnastics
team and the local airplane club, all for free and
in a spare time. He was doing what all the
other kids were doing. In the Soviet Union, he would
have been leading the same kinds of exciting popular science
fiction novels titles like Hard to Be a God, The
(07:08):
Land of Crimson Clouds, The Man from Mars. It was
all about space, limitless possibility, utopia, and not just in
the pages of his books. He would have grown up
watching these hero cosmonauts being eulogized he was proud of
(07:28):
fellow cosmonauts and Russell and doing amazing things in outer space.
After Gagarin, the USSR just kept beating the Americans to it.
First probe to Mars, landing on Mars by an unmanned
space probe from US. First woman in space, space girl,
Valentina Tereshkova. There's one of place in history. First person
to walk in open space. Man for the first time
(07:51):
has stepped forth into the emptiness of space. Okay, the
Americans got to the Moon in nineteen sixty nine, obviously
a big deal, but the Soviets were working on something bigger,
a permanent home in space, a space station where cosmonauts
(08:13):
can go live and actually do some science. The Soviets
wanted to spend months up there, maybe eventually forever. It
looked like a weird lego tube with solar panel wings.
They call it Salute one, and over the next decade
they upgraded it with better and better versions, Salute two,
Salute three, kind of like iPhones, until they got the
(08:36):
best version yet, Salute seven. The Americans were jealous, they
had nothing like it. Once again, the Soviets were winning,
and it's in this atmosphere that Sarage finished school and
decided he too wants to become a cosmonaut to go
and live on a Soviet space station. And so we
(08:59):
went to an engine a university and in nineteen eighty
one he graduated top of his class, and because of
that he was chosen to work for a very special place,
the same place that designed the first space satellite, the
first spaceship carrying the first man, a place called Anarkia.
(09:20):
Sarage starts out working on instruction manuals for cosmonauts, not
the most exciting work, but it will come in handy
because one day in February nineteen eighty five, Serge gets
a call the space station Salume seven. It's lost power.
(09:41):
It's dead. If we don't rescue it, the Americans will
overtake us and win the space race. So here's the plan.
It's kind of crazy. We're going to send two cosmonauts
to this dead thing and try to turn the power
back on. But we don't really know how to do
(10:01):
it because it's never been done before. So we need
someone who can figure out how to do it, someone
to lead a mission from the ground, someone who knows
the station back to front, and we're thinking this could
be you. June sixth, nineteen eighty five, ten forty am
(10:41):
Mission Control, a loud, ominous rumbling starts up on Sarage's radio.
It's a sound of a rocket taking off. Two cosmouts
are launching into space to the dead, empty station. Sarah
has got a big job ahead of it in about
forty eight hours, the time it'll take to reach Earth's orbit.
(11:02):
He's gonna have to tell these two cosmonauts how they're
going to do this thing no one's ever done before.
How to land on a dead station. Usually landing on
a working station is the easy bed. It's all done automatically.
But this station is dead, and that means Sarage has
to figure out how to do it manually. How to
(11:23):
land on the station with nothing to tell you the way,
the speed, the angle. It's a bit like driving a
race car at night with no lights, no markers, but
Saragey is on it. He goes into a simulator, a
kind of fake spaceship. It's the same thing I trained on.
It literally looks and feels like a real spaceship, but
(11:45):
it's set up in a warehouse on Earth. The next
best thing to being in space, so he starts practicing
how to get the tiny ship to spend at the
same angle as the station, how to get the right speed,
and his accuracy has to be exact. If he's off
by an inch millimeters, even the rocket will crash into
(12:05):
the station and explode. The cosmonauts are dead. He tries
again and again and again, failing and failing, until he's
got it. He races back to mission control, calls up
to the cosmonauts and tells them this is how you
do it. It's now or never. Hundreds of miles away,
(12:27):
the cosmonauts can see the looming bulk of the station
through their porthole. It's spinning out of control, a twenty
ton chunk of metals, and they're approaching it fast. At
eighteen thousand miles an hour. Sarah Gey feels his breathing accelerate.
At any moment, ground control could lose contact. You can
(12:52):
imagine him shutting his eyes, hoping, praying, and then a
juttering sound like something's wrong with the radio stating five seconds,
four seconds, three seconds, two seconds, and then he hears it.
(13:18):
The cosmonauts voices on the radio they'd made it, but
Sarage knows it's just the beginning. The cosmonauts still have
to enter the ship, find the root of the problem,
and bring the station back to life. And they've got
no idea what they're going to find inside. They didn't know,
(13:45):
for example, if the entire station was filled with toxic gases.
They didn't know if the station was frozen, they didn't
know if the station was cracked. They had no idea.
If you open the hatch and there's a big chunk
of ice, you know, what would you do if you
(14:10):
open the hatch and the led screens are broken, cracked,
and there's glass, what do you do? They opened the
hatch and very gingerly, wanting to the what's called a
transfer compartment, and they slowly, gingerly again opened another hatch
(14:34):
into the main compartment. And one of the things that
I think both cosmonauts remember is that everything was just
dead silence. They'd never been in space before in a
(14:58):
completely silent environment, because when you're in a spaceship, things
are worrying and clicking and moving and things like that.
It's dead silence, a silence that I don't think any
human being had ever really heard. It's an outer space
and they're moving in this dead, dark, pitch black space
(15:19):
station in utter silence. It's also freezing everything. The walls,
the panels are covered in a sheet of ice. They
move by touch. They have flashlights, of course, and they
(15:40):
eventually figure out the lay of the lent. Through the
weak beams of their torches. They can just about make
out the station's long cavernous corridors, filled with lifeless equipment
and reams of wires. Serage instructs them to work very carefully.
All the batteries they check. They have these instruments, you know,
(16:00):
zero volte zibol, zero volt, etc. All the batteries are dead.
And remember it's really cold, so they can't spend too
long on the station. And every time, you know, they
go in there and they come back and they're completely
freezing on the ground. And the Soviet press this mission
(16:26):
was really downplayed. They didn't even say it was a
rescue mission at all, just routine going up there and
doing some science experiments. In fact, they had a press conference,
a video press conference from space during their mission, these
two cosmonauts, and they were told to take off their
warm clothes, like their hats and gloves and whatever, because
(16:48):
people would be wondering why they're wearing this in space.
So for the duration of the conference, you know, however
long twenty minutes or so, they were extremely cold, but
pretending everything's fine. The idea is that nothing ever goes
wrong in the Soviet space That's right, nothing ever goes
wrong in the Soviet space program, or in the Soviet economy,
(17:09):
or in Soviet society. The system was flawless, that was
the party line, and the cosmonauts freezing their asses off,
had to stick it out. The cosmonauts spend days working
in pitch black, subzero temperatures trying to find a working
(17:31):
power source. These kind of situations where everything has going sideways,
is what they train you for as a cosmonaut. When
I was training, we ran drills where things went perfectly,
but I would say eighty percent of the time we
were practicing for when things went wrong. But it still
doesn't prepare you fully. So for a long time there's nothing.
(17:53):
But then finally Sage sees a small number of lights
begin to flicker. The crew had managed to reactivate one
of the solar panels. This means the station finally has
some power. It's gonna be okay. They can save the station.
Mission control erupts an ecstatic applause. Saragey finds himself being
(18:15):
wrapped into hugs, kissed on the cheeks. Mob This is
a unique, unique event in the history of space exploration
where the crew essentially brought their spaceship to a dead
object and space and revived the whole thing within weeks.
Saragey had done the near impossible. He saved the station.
He wasn't going to be a national hero like a
(18:36):
garden raiding through Red Square. The whole thing was top secret,
but he was going to get a reward. I don't
think it's a coincidence that very soon after the mission
he gets assigned to a crew, a crew to actually
go to space see the Earth from above, float around
and zero gravity. His dream, the one he's had since
(18:58):
he was a little boy, was finally about to come true.
I think for Krakalio, I think it might have seemed
when he's assigned to his first mission. My guess is,
you know, the future is bright, and who knows what's ahead.
That's the boundless future. But I think we have a
(19:18):
better sense of it now that some of this stuff
was just kind of the last gasp, the last gasp
of a collapsing superpower. The Soviet Union then was frozen.
The economy who was grinding to a halt. It was
a time of total stagnation. Nothing was changing, and if
(19:40):
it didn't change soon, it would come crashing down. That's Sergechmimon.
He's a reporter for the New York Times. In nineteen
eighty he was working as a journalist in South Africa
when he was told by his editor, we want you
to go and cover Moscow from the peak of summer
to the depth of winter. Serge and his family stopped
(20:02):
over in Helsinki and bought warm clothes, then took a
slow train to Moscow on New Year's Eve. We had
one kind of beer to celebrate, and if the train
was empty, nobody was traveling. On New Year's night, December
thirty first, early in the morning on January first, they
(20:25):
pulled into Moscow Central Station. It was dead. Everybody was
asleep after a night of revelry. Dawn was just breaking
and the station clock tower was bathed in this beautiful
golden light, and the square was covered in a fresh
layer of untouched snow. It was like a storybook. Moscow
(20:48):
a storybook Moscow. But soon enough reality hit. Shops were
largely empty. You know, there was very little. There was
you could survive. There was spread, there was me, but
it was all on an elemental level, the bare minimum,
because by the eighties the Soviet economy had stopped working
(21:09):
for decades. All decisions about what to spend and how
much to produce were made in a single office building
in Moscow for millions of people. And while these bureaucrats
in this office building put a ton of money towards
flashy space projects, they didn't pay much attention to how
people were going to feed themselves. And eventually, by the
(21:30):
eighties this caught up with him. The system had become
inefficient and corrupt. The Soviet Union couldn't produce enough grain
to feed its own population. There were chronic shortages all around.
Look look how expensive these carrots are, and there's nothing
(21:50):
else in this stage store. But when things did occasionally appear,
people went nuts. This could be toilet paper, this could
be you know, toothpaste, it could be anything. News spread fast.
Your neighbor would tell you, Hey, there's a cheese delivery
at the store two streets over. You'd stop whatever you're
(22:11):
doing and go. People whould rush to the store in
line up. People spend up to three hours a day
waiting in line. The longest lines are at the vodka shops.
So there was you know, like an army of people
who walked around Moscow all day trying to find things
to buy and getting in line. And I would join
those lines. The Soviet system was at breaking point, but
(22:35):
people felt like they couldn't do anything about it. You
had absolutely no saying politics and who ran your country
and who ran your life, and to think about it,
to talk about it was dangerous. Surges storybook Moscow turned
into a nightmare, and this was very bad news for
Serage as well, because if there was no money and
(22:59):
the Soviet Union, then there was no money for the
space program, and that meant his dream of going to
space might be over before it had even begun. It
seemed that the country was stuck, that nothing would change,
but then it did. This time, the Soviet seemed to
(23:22):
have opted for a long term change. The man who
took charge within hours of Constantine Chernienko's death, the new
Soviet leader, Michael Go Mikhail Gorbach Mikhael Get used to
the name Mika in the mid eighties, the gray suit
(23:57):
of bureaucrats who had been running the country for decades
began to well die off, one by one in quick succession.
Andrewpov Chernenko, people you'd probably never heard of footnotes in history.
Another Soviet leader who was too old and too sick
when he took power to hold on to it has died.
(24:18):
And then they chose a great and sort of fateful act.
They chose a young man, well educated, well spoken, charming,
smile Mikhail Gorbachev. Get used to the name Mikhail. He
presented himself differently to the very formal, stuffy leaders that
came before. He's got charisma, I mean, he's got charisma,
(24:40):
Western style, much more aware of Soviet weaknesses, much more
open to new ideas by Soviet standards. He was revolutionary.
It was an almost immediate and Emma say, enormously exciting change.
The change Gorbach would bring to the Soviet Union was seisman.
(25:03):
This is the story of the emergence of Michael Segeevich Gorbachev,
of the most sweeping changes in the Soviet Union since
the Russian Revolution. In February nineteen eighty six, he delivered
a speech that shook the country. Gaim was that we
had to reform the way we live, to reform the
(25:27):
way we live in order to survive, to survive as
the Soviet Union, and the reform had to be radical
from the bottom up. Gorbachev said that the people should
be able to speak their minds, that people should be
able to make money. He called it pedistroica, a restructuring
and Glasnos openness is something like fresh It's a great treaty.
(25:54):
I think that Rosness is a st step to us.
Site it was an earthquake, it was a daily earthquake.
For the first time, you could start your own business.
(26:14):
And so suddenly bakeries appeared in Moscow and you could
go get fresh bread. Things appeared that people could sell,
little shops appeared, kiosks in the street. Culture opened up. Suddenly,
every TV station is being more candid, is showing more.
The girl singing in Moscow and the boy singing in
Minneapolis reached out, slipped just a little and seemed to
(26:38):
hold hands while half a world apart. And you're coming
out of that system where everything was controlled to an
incredible degree, and especially when it's out of that period
of stagnation, when there was nothing fun on TV, nothing interesting,
sort of variety shows where sixty year old veterans singing
(27:00):
some old ballad, some old patriotic ballad, and suddenly these
things are happening. American movies made it to Moscow in
the past. Now you Rambo Star Wars. You should not
have come back, James Bond. I've looked forward to this moment,
(27:20):
mister Bond. There was so much demand. And then to
enjoy it to the full, some savvy entrepreneurs powered and
copies and set up makeshift movie theaters and their apartments.
You could speak, you could buy, you could think. I mean,
all these things that had been under a cloud were
now out in the open. There was a sense that,
you know, the system was changing, and that change encompassed
(27:44):
everything from how you did your shopping to the space program.
The space program that in nineteen eighty five did still
have its space station, It's crown jewel, but had no
more money. The country was in such bad shape the
government could no longer afford displourage on space. This was
not just a practical matter, It was a question of
(28:07):
national identity. The cosmonauts became real heroes. Utika guide in
the first men in space. So there was great pride
in this program. It showed that Russia, the Soviet Union,
that the Soviet people were ahead of the West in
something that is so kind of advanced and dramatic and romantic.
(28:30):
But now there was no more money to fund this
dramatic and romantic cornerstone of Soviet identity. No breaking the
next frontier, no inspiring the Soviet people, no future, and
no future for the program meant no future for our man, Saragey.
But Gorbachev had an idea, an idea of how to
(28:52):
save the mighty but crumbling space program to sell Soviet
space services globally on the commercial market. Yep. Gorbachev's big
idea was capitalism. After decades of keeping everything under wraps,
the Soviets were now going to say to the world,
our space program is open for business. We'll launch your
(29:15):
satellites for you. So you could pay X million dollars,
deliver your satellite to the Soviets and they would launch
it into space. We can also sell you some of
our world class equipment, things no other space programs have.
And this should have been an extremely attractive sales pitch
for countries that don't have their own space programs. But
(29:36):
there's one big problem. Of course, they don't understand a
thing about capitalism, or markets or anything. The Soviets weren't
great at making high tech stuff, but after years of
living under communism, they were not so good at selling things,
marketing advertising. But then they finally come up with a plan,
(29:58):
a plan that would totally change the space program and
give our man Sarage a chance to fulfill his dream.
Decades before Elon Musk, the Soviets started thinking, what if
we sell seats to go to space, invite people into
the heart of the Soviet program, train them, fly them
up there, in other words, space tourism. There was the
(30:24):
idea that would eventually lead me Lance Bass to go
to Russia and train to be a cosmo. The first
country wanting to buy the Soviet services Japan. They sent
a TV journalist to the Soviet Union to fly with
the cosmonauts. They were so desperate for money, the Soviets
agreed that the rocket could be sponsored by Japanese brands,
(30:44):
a pharmaceutical company, a manufactor of sanitary towels, and a
maker of karaoke equipment. The deal was worth twelve million
dollars pretty good, but it wasn't enough, so the Soviets
decided to go bigger. They were going to create a
contest to try to find the best person in an
(31:06):
entire country to go to space. I was driving my
car home from work and flicking through the stations trying
to find some music, and I heard an announcement as
posed an advert really, and it started off with astronaut wanted,
no experience necessary. In the next episode, this unassuming British
(31:27):
woman travels to Russia like me, trained to be a
cosmonaut and flies with Serge on the mission he almost
didn't come home from. That's next time on The Last Soviet.
(31:50):
The Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with
iHeart Podcast and Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dad Audio
and hosted by me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate
Osbourne and mangesh Hada Kadoor with Oz Wallisham and Kostas
Linos from iHeart Executive produced by Katrina Norvelle and Nikki
(32:13):
Ettore from Sama's Dad Audio Our executive producers or Joe
Sykes and Dasha Lisitzina. Produced by Asia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitzena,
and Joe Sykes, writing by Lydia Marchant, research by Mika
Golubovski and Molly Schwartz, music by Will Epstein, themed by
Martin or String, sound designed by Richard Ward and special
(32:37):
things to Nando via Lyssa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Byrne,
Bob Pittman, and Isaac Lead If you want to hear
more shows like this, nothing is more important to the
creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews, so
please spread the love wherever you listen and number
Mission Control just outside of Moscow. Picture of vast hall
with rows of desks and those massive eighties computers. It's
February nineteen eighty five and a few ground controllers are
trawling through graphs and signals sent from a space station
called Salute seven, the pride and joy of the Soviet
space program. Right now, Salute seven hasn't got any cosmonauts
(00:41):
on board. It's on autopilot, orbiting the Earth, waiting for
its next crew. So the ground control's work is fairly routine.
They record data, talk about their weekend plans. But then
right at the end of the shift, someone notices something
(01:03):
weird on one of the dashboards. There's a light flashing
on the control panel, a warning light. Everyone's on their
feet trying to fix it, but then another light goes down,
and another. One by one, the whole dashboard goes dark.
(01:29):
A horrified silence fills the room. They've just lost the
space station. It's like a dead piece of thing in orbit.
That's also Sadiki, our Soviet space galu heard last time.
They couldn't find any kind of signal, nothing from the station.
(01:49):
It's essentially floating, spinning, probably out of control in Earth. Orbit,
and it's huge, this huge chunk of metal. If they
don't control it, it might fall uncontrollably uninhabited country and
it could land on a city, a village somewhere, and
so they're very afraid of that. Thousands of people could die.
It would be a human tragedy and a huge embarrassment
(02:12):
for the Soviet Union, and so they need to do
something that's never been done before, to land on a
dead object in space and out of control chunk of
metal and bring it back to life. I'm Lance Bass
(02:35):
and from Kaleidoscope. iHeart podcast and exile content. This is
the last Soviet as y'all know. I am obsessed with
space and with this one particular space movie. Houston, we
have a problem. Apollo thirteen. I freaking love this film.
(02:57):
In my books, Tom Hanks can do no wrong. Power
up the level three hours by the checklist. We don't
have that much time. It tells the story of a
space flight going seriously awry. The rescue mission became live news.
All of America was watching, asking themselves with the astronauts,
make it home alive. The Apoto thirteen to the Moon
(03:19):
is in serious jeopardy. Disasters are one of the big
reasons we fall in love with space. Now coming to
the moment, the last moments of Apolo thirteen as it
begins it's re entry. The best thing we can do
now is just to listen. I'm hopeful. The stakes could
not be higher, and it's all beamed into your living
room twenty four seven. They hate it. All three shoots
(03:42):
out great and extremely loud applause here in mission control.
But the story I'm about to tell you now took
place in complete secrecy. No one was allowed to know
(04:05):
about it. And yet it's the Soviet Union's very own
Apollo thirteen. And the man who would lead it from
the ground Yep, you guessed it, Sergey Krekolev. In our
last episode, we left our cosmonaut in nineteen sixty one,
aged three, the Soviet Union was still recovering from the
wreckage of World War Two, but they'd beat the Germans
(04:29):
and now, against all the odds, they'd conquered space too. O.
Space was going to be the future of the Soviet Union,
and that generation who grew up in the nineteen sixties
were really sort of, I think, encouraged to think in
(04:52):
utopian terms. The Soviet Union putting the first person in
space was the defining moment of Saragey's childhood, and there
was a sense that this was just the beginning of
space exploration, of the Soviet Union's rise on the global stage.
All Russia's just wild about. Jurica got in, first man,
took conquer space. Please. For Sarah Gay, life's possibilities must
(05:16):
have seemed endless. So I think it's very much part
of his DNA and that generation in particular, growing up
in the sixties and seventies as children and then as
young teams, to be immersed in that world of future
oriented thinking about the Soviet Union. Future oriented things are
good and you only expect them to get better now.
(05:40):
If you grew up in the United States during the
tail end of the Cold War, like me, I know
what you're thinking, you'd have been fed the same propaganda
that the Soviet Union was a cold, gray place where
kids go hungry. Well, in the sixties, that was more
likely to be true of America. Seventy three percent of
all Clay County families received less than three thousand dollars.
They're very young, their mothers, the aged are the most
(06:02):
numerous inhabitants of this permanent culture of poverty. Yep, Because
in the Soviet Union, basic stuff, food, a roof over
your head that was all provided for by the state.
Whether in Communist headquarters in Odessa on the Black Sea
or in the Hermitage art gallery in Leningrad, every activity
(06:23):
is controlled by directives that originate under the gold domes
of the Kremlin. So if you're Saragai, a young boy
coming of age in Leningrad in the sixties and seventies,
things would have seemed pretty good. He didn't grow up
in luxury, but it was a care free environment. He
knew everything was going to be just fine. He went
(06:46):
to school, he went swimming, he joined the city's gymnastics
team and the local airplane club, all for free and
in a spare time. He was doing what all the
other kids were doing. In the Soviet Union, he would
have been leading the same kinds of exciting popular science
fiction novels titles like Hard to Be a God, The
(07:08):
Land of Crimson Clouds, The Man from Mars. It was
all about space, limitless possibility, utopia, and not just in
the pages of his books. He would have grown up
watching these hero cosmonauts being eulogized he was proud of
(07:28):
fellow cosmonauts and Russell and doing amazing things in outer space.
After Gagarin, the USSR just kept beating the Americans to it.
First probe to Mars, landing on Mars by an unmanned
space probe from US. First woman in space, space girl,
Valentina Tereshkova. There's one of place in history. First person
to walk in open space. Man for the first time
(07:51):
has stepped forth into the emptiness of space. Okay, the
Americans got to the Moon in nineteen sixty nine, obviously
a big deal, but the Soviets were working on something bigger,
a permanent home in space, a space station where cosmonauts
(08:13):
can go live and actually do some science. The Soviets
wanted to spend months up there, maybe eventually forever. It
looked like a weird lego tube with solar panel wings.
They call it Salute one, and over the next decade
they upgraded it with better and better versions, Salute two,
Salute three, kind of like iPhones, until they got the
(08:36):
best version yet, Salute seven. The Americans were jealous, they
had nothing like it. Once again, the Soviets were winning,
and it's in this atmosphere that Sarage finished school and
decided he too wants to become a cosmonaut to go
and live on a Soviet space station. And so we
(08:59):
went to an engine a university and in nineteen eighty
one he graduated top of his class, and because of
that he was chosen to work for a very special place,
the same place that designed the first space satellite, the
first spaceship carrying the first man, a place called Anarkia.
(09:20):
Sarage starts out working on instruction manuals for cosmonauts, not
the most exciting work, but it will come in handy
because one day in February nineteen eighty five, Serge gets
a call the space station Salume seven. It's lost power.
(09:41):
It's dead. If we don't rescue it, the Americans will
overtake us and win the space race. So here's the plan.
It's kind of crazy. We're going to send two cosmonauts
to this dead thing and try to turn the power
back on. But we don't really know how to do
(10:01):
it because it's never been done before. So we need
someone who can figure out how to do it, someone
to lead a mission from the ground, someone who knows
the station back to front, and we're thinking this could
be you. June sixth, nineteen eighty five, ten forty am
(10:41):
Mission Control, a loud, ominous rumbling starts up on Sarage's radio.
It's a sound of a rocket taking off. Two cosmouts
are launching into space to the dead, empty station. Sarah
has got a big job ahead of it in about
forty eight hours, the time it'll take to reach Earth's orbit.
(11:02):
He's gonna have to tell these two cosmonauts how they're
going to do this thing no one's ever done before.
How to land on a dead station. Usually landing on
a working station is the easy bed. It's all done automatically.
But this station is dead, and that means Sarage has
to figure out how to do it manually. How to
(11:23):
land on the station with nothing to tell you the way,
the speed, the angle. It's a bit like driving a
race car at night with no lights, no markers, but
Saragey is on it. He goes into a simulator, a
kind of fake spaceship. It's the same thing I trained on.
It literally looks and feels like a real spaceship, but
(11:45):
it's set up in a warehouse on Earth. The next
best thing to being in space, so he starts practicing
how to get the tiny ship to spend at the
same angle as the station, how to get the right speed,
and his accuracy has to be exact. If he's off
by an inch millimeters, even the rocket will crash into
(12:05):
the station and explode. The cosmonauts are dead. He tries
again and again and again, failing and failing, until he's
got it. He races back to mission control, calls up
to the cosmonauts and tells them this is how you
do it. It's now or never. Hundreds of miles away,
(12:27):
the cosmonauts can see the looming bulk of the station
through their porthole. It's spinning out of control, a twenty
ton chunk of metals, and they're approaching it fast. At
eighteen thousand miles an hour. Sarah Gey feels his breathing accelerate.
At any moment, ground control could lose contact. You can
(12:52):
imagine him shutting his eyes, hoping, praying, and then a
juttering sound like something's wrong with the radio stating five seconds,
four seconds, three seconds, two seconds, and then he hears it.
(13:18):
The cosmonauts voices on the radio they'd made it, but
Sarage knows it's just the beginning. The cosmonauts still have
to enter the ship, find the root of the problem,
and bring the station back to life. And they've got
no idea what they're going to find inside. They didn't know,
(13:45):
for example, if the entire station was filled with toxic gases.
They didn't know if the station was frozen, they didn't
know if the station was cracked. They had no idea.
If you open the hatch and there's a big chunk
of ice, you know, what would you do if you
(14:10):
open the hatch and the led screens are broken, cracked,
and there's glass, what do you do? They opened the
hatch and very gingerly, wanting to the what's called a
transfer compartment, and they slowly, gingerly again opened another hatch
(14:34):
into the main compartment. And one of the things that
I think both cosmonauts remember is that everything was just
dead silence. They'd never been in space before in a
(14:58):
completely silent environment, because when you're in a spaceship, things
are worrying and clicking and moving and things like that.
It's dead silence, a silence that I don't think any
human being had ever really heard. It's an outer space
and they're moving in this dead, dark, pitch black space
(15:19):
station in utter silence. It's also freezing everything. The walls,
the panels are covered in a sheet of ice. They
move by touch. They have flashlights, of course, and they
(15:40):
eventually figure out the lay of the lent. Through the
weak beams of their torches. They can just about make
out the station's long cavernous corridors, filled with lifeless equipment
and reams of wires. Serage instructs them to work very carefully.
All the batteries they check. They have these instruments, you know,
(16:00):
zero volte zibol, zero volt, etc. All the batteries are dead.
And remember it's really cold, so they can't spend too
long on the station. And every time, you know, they
go in there and they come back and they're completely
freezing on the ground. And the Soviet press this mission
(16:26):
was really downplayed. They didn't even say it was a
rescue mission at all, just routine going up there and
doing some science experiments. In fact, they had a press conference,
a video press conference from space during their mission, these
two cosmonauts, and they were told to take off their
warm clothes, like their hats and gloves and whatever, because
(16:48):
people would be wondering why they're wearing this in space.
So for the duration of the conference, you know, however
long twenty minutes or so, they were extremely cold, but
pretending everything's fine. The idea is that nothing ever goes
wrong in the Soviet space That's right, nothing ever goes
wrong in the Soviet space program, or in the Soviet economy,
(17:09):
or in Soviet society. The system was flawless, that was
the party line, and the cosmonauts freezing their asses off,
had to stick it out. The cosmonauts spend days working
in pitch black, subzero temperatures trying to find a working
(17:31):
power source. These kind of situations where everything has going sideways,
is what they train you for as a cosmonaut. When
I was training, we ran drills where things went perfectly,
but I would say eighty percent of the time we
were practicing for when things went wrong. But it still
doesn't prepare you fully. So for a long time there's nothing.
(17:53):
But then finally Sage sees a small number of lights
begin to flicker. The crew had managed to reactivate one
of the solar panels. This means the station finally has
some power. It's gonna be okay. They can save the station.
Mission control erupts an ecstatic applause. Saragey finds himself being
(18:15):
wrapped into hugs, kissed on the cheeks. Mob This is
a unique, unique event in the history of space exploration
where the crew essentially brought their spaceship to a dead
object and space and revived the whole thing within weeks.
Saragey had done the near impossible. He saved the station.
He wasn't going to be a national hero like a
(18:36):
garden raiding through Red Square. The whole thing was top secret,
but he was going to get a reward. I don't
think it's a coincidence that very soon after the mission
he gets assigned to a crew, a crew to actually
go to space see the Earth from above, float around
and zero gravity. His dream, the one he's had since
(18:58):
he was a little boy, was finally about to come true.
I think for Krakalio, I think it might have seemed
when he's assigned to his first mission. My guess is,
you know, the future is bright, and who knows what's ahead.
That's the boundless future. But I think we have a
(19:18):
better sense of it now that some of this stuff
was just kind of the last gasp, the last gasp
of a collapsing superpower. The Soviet Union then was frozen.
The economy who was grinding to a halt. It was
a time of total stagnation. Nothing was changing, and if
(19:40):
it didn't change soon, it would come crashing down. That's Sergechmimon.
He's a reporter for the New York Times. In nineteen
eighty he was working as a journalist in South Africa
when he was told by his editor, we want you
to go and cover Moscow from the peak of summer
to the depth of winter. Serge and his family stopped
(20:02):
over in Helsinki and bought warm clothes, then took a
slow train to Moscow on New Year's Eve. We had
one kind of beer to celebrate, and if the train
was empty, nobody was traveling. On New Year's night, December
thirty first, early in the morning on January first, they
(20:25):
pulled into Moscow Central Station. It was dead. Everybody was
asleep after a night of revelry. Dawn was just breaking
and the station clock tower was bathed in this beautiful
golden light, and the square was covered in a fresh
layer of untouched snow. It was like a storybook. Moscow
(20:48):
a storybook Moscow. But soon enough reality hit. Shops were
largely empty. You know, there was very little. There was
you could survive. There was spread, there was me, but
it was all on an elemental level, the bare minimum,
because by the eighties the Soviet economy had stopped working
(21:09):
for decades. All decisions about what to spend and how
much to produce were made in a single office building
in Moscow for millions of people. And while these bureaucrats
in this office building put a ton of money towards
flashy space projects, they didn't pay much attention to how
people were going to feed themselves. And eventually, by the
(21:30):
eighties this caught up with him. The system had become
inefficient and corrupt. The Soviet Union couldn't produce enough grain
to feed its own population. There were chronic shortages all around.
Look look how expensive these carrots are, and there's nothing
(21:50):
else in this stage store. But when things did occasionally appear,
people went nuts. This could be toilet paper, this could
be you know, toothpaste, it could be anything. News spread fast.
Your neighbor would tell you, Hey, there's a cheese delivery
at the store two streets over. You'd stop whatever you're
(22:11):
doing and go. People whould rush to the store in
line up. People spend up to three hours a day
waiting in line. The longest lines are at the vodka shops.
So there was you know, like an army of people
who walked around Moscow all day trying to find things
to buy and getting in line. And I would join
those lines. The Soviet system was at breaking point, but
(22:35):
people felt like they couldn't do anything about it. You
had absolutely no saying politics and who ran your country
and who ran your life, and to think about it,
to talk about it was dangerous. Surges storybook Moscow turned
into a nightmare, and this was very bad news for
Serage as well, because if there was no money and
(22:59):
the Soviet Union, then there was no money for the
space program, and that meant his dream of going to
space might be over before it had even begun. It
seemed that the country was stuck, that nothing would change,
but then it did. This time, the Soviet seemed to
(23:22):
have opted for a long term change. The man who
took charge within hours of Constantine Chernienko's death, the new
Soviet leader, Michael Go Mikhail Gorbach Mikhael Get used to
the name Mika in the mid eighties, the gray suit
(23:57):
of bureaucrats who had been running the country for decades
began to well die off, one by one in quick succession.
Andrewpov Chernenko, people you'd probably never heard of footnotes in history.
Another Soviet leader who was too old and too sick
when he took power to hold on to it has died.
(24:18):
And then they chose a great and sort of fateful act.
They chose a young man, well educated, well spoken, charming,
smile Mikhail Gorbachev. Get used to the name Mikhail. He
presented himself differently to the very formal, stuffy leaders that
came before. He's got charisma, I mean, he's got charisma,
(24:40):
Western style, much more aware of Soviet weaknesses, much more
open to new ideas by Soviet standards. He was revolutionary.
It was an almost immediate and Emma say, enormously exciting change.
The change Gorbach would bring to the Soviet Union was seisman.
(25:03):
This is the story of the emergence of Michael Segeevich Gorbachev,
of the most sweeping changes in the Soviet Union since
the Russian Revolution. In February nineteen eighty six, he delivered
a speech that shook the country. Gaim was that we
had to reform the way we live, to reform the
(25:27):
way we live in order to survive, to survive as
the Soviet Union, and the reform had to be radical
from the bottom up. Gorbachev said that the people should
be able to speak their minds, that people should be
able to make money. He called it pedistroica, a restructuring
and Glasnos openness is something like fresh It's a great treaty.
(25:54):
I think that Rosness is a st step to us.
Site it was an earthquake, it was a daily earthquake.
For the first time, you could start your own business.
(26:14):
And so suddenly bakeries appeared in Moscow and you could
go get fresh bread. Things appeared that people could sell,
little shops appeared, kiosks in the street. Culture opened up. Suddenly,
every TV station is being more candid, is showing more.
The girl singing in Moscow and the boy singing in
Minneapolis reached out, slipped just a little and seemed to
(26:38):
hold hands while half a world apart. And you're coming
out of that system where everything was controlled to an
incredible degree, and especially when it's out of that period
of stagnation, when there was nothing fun on TV, nothing interesting,
sort of variety shows where sixty year old veterans singing
(27:00):
some old ballad, some old patriotic ballad, and suddenly these
things are happening. American movies made it to Moscow in
the past. Now you Rambo Star Wars. You should not
have come back, James Bond. I've looked forward to this moment,
(27:20):
mister Bond. There was so much demand. And then to
enjoy it to the full, some savvy entrepreneurs powered and
copies and set up makeshift movie theaters and their apartments.
You could speak, you could buy, you could think. I mean,
all these things that had been under a cloud were
now out in the open. There was a sense that,
you know, the system was changing, and that change encompassed
(27:44):
everything from how you did your shopping to the space program.
The space program that in nineteen eighty five did still
have its space station, It's crown jewel, but had no
more money. The country was in such bad shape the
government could no longer afford displourage on space. This was
not just a practical matter, It was a question of
(28:07):
national identity. The cosmonauts became real heroes. Utika guide in
the first men in space. So there was great pride
in this program. It showed that Russia, the Soviet Union,
that the Soviet people were ahead of the West in
something that is so kind of advanced and dramatic and romantic.
(28:30):
But now there was no more money to fund this
dramatic and romantic cornerstone of Soviet identity. No breaking the
next frontier, no inspiring the Soviet people, no future, and
no future for the program meant no future for our man, Saragey.
But Gorbachev had an idea, an idea of how to
(28:52):
save the mighty but crumbling space program to sell Soviet
space services globally on the commercial market. Yep. Gorbachev's big
idea was capitalism. After decades of keeping everything under wraps,
the Soviets were now going to say to the world,
our space program is open for business. We'll launch your
(29:15):
satellites for you. So you could pay X million dollars,
deliver your satellite to the Soviets and they would launch
it into space. We can also sell you some of
our world class equipment, things no other space programs have.
And this should have been an extremely attractive sales pitch
for countries that don't have their own space programs. But
(29:36):
there's one big problem. Of course, they don't understand a
thing about capitalism, or markets or anything. The Soviets weren't
great at making high tech stuff, but after years of
living under communism, they were not so good at selling things,
marketing advertising. But then they finally come up with a plan,
(29:58):
a plan that would totally change the space program and
give our man Sarage a chance to fulfill his dream.
Decades before Elon Musk, the Soviets started thinking, what if
we sell seats to go to space, invite people into
the heart of the Soviet program, train them, fly them
up there, in other words, space tourism. There was the
(30:24):
idea that would eventually lead me Lance Bass to go
to Russia and train to be a cosmo. The first
country wanting to buy the Soviet services Japan. They sent
a TV journalist to the Soviet Union to fly with
the cosmonauts. They were so desperate for money, the Soviets
agreed that the rocket could be sponsored by Japanese brands,
(30:44):
a pharmaceutical company, a manufactor of sanitary towels, and a
maker of karaoke equipment. The deal was worth twelve million
dollars pretty good, but it wasn't enough, so the Soviets
decided to go bigger. They were going to create a
contest to try to find the best person in an
(31:06):
entire country to go to space. I was driving my
car home from work and flicking through the stations trying
to find some music, and I heard an announcement as
posed an advert really, and it started off with astronaut wanted,
no experience necessary. In the next episode, this unassuming British
(31:27):
woman travels to Russia like me, trained to be a
cosmonaut and flies with Serge on the mission he almost
didn't come home from. That's next time on The Last Soviet.
(31:50):
The Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with
iHeart Podcast and Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dad Audio
and hosted by me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate
Osbourne and mangesh Hada Kadoor with Oz Wallisham and Kostas
Linos from iHeart Executive produced by Katrina Norvelle and Nikki
(32:13):
Ettore from Sama's Dad Audio Our executive producers or Joe
Sykes and Dasha Lisitzina. Produced by Asia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitzena,
and Joe Sykes, writing by Lydia Marchant, research by Mika
Golubovski and Molly Schwartz, music by Will Epstein, themed by
Martin or String, sound designed by Richard Ward and special
(32:37):
things to Nando via Lyssa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Byrne,
Bob Pittman, and Isaac Lead If you want to hear
more shows like this, nothing is more important to the
creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews, so
please spread the love wherever you listen and number
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