Purported Czechoslovak information leak In December 1959, an alleged high-ranking Czechoslovak Communist leaked information about many purported unofficial space shots. Alexei Ledovsky was mentioned as being launched inside a converted
R-5A rocket. Three more names of alleged cosmonauts claimed to have perished under similar circumstances were Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin and Maria Gromova. In December 1959, the Italian news agency Continentale repeated the claims that a series of cosmonaut deaths on suborbital flights had been revealed by a high-ranking Czechoslovak communist. Continentale identified the cosmonauts as Alexei Ledowsky, Serenty Schriborin, Andrei Mitkow, and Maria Gromova. Kachur is known to have disappeared around this time; his name has become linked to this equipment. According to Gagarin's biography, these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions equipped with dummies (including a mannequin known as
Ivan Ivanovich) and human voice tape recordings (to test if the radio worked) that were made just prior to Gagarin's flight. In a U.S. press conference on February 23, 1962, Colonel Barney Oldfield revealed that an uncrewed space capsule had indeed been orbiting the Earth since 1960, as it had become jammed into its booster rocket. According to the
NASA NSSDC Master Catalog,
Korabl Sputnik 1, designated at the time 1KP or Vostok 1P, did launch on May 15, 1960 (one year before Gagarin). It was a prototype of the later
Zenit and
Vostok launch vehicles. The onboard TDU (Braking Engine Unit) had ordered the
retrorockets to fire to recover, but due to a malfunction of the
attitude control system, the spacecraft was oriented upside-down, and the firing put the craft into a higher orbit. The
re-entry capsule lacked a heat shield as there were no plans to recover it. Engineers had planned to use the vessel's telemetry data to determine if the guidance system had functioned correctly, so recovery was unnecessary.
The Torre Bert recordings Vladimir Ilyushin Moon-shot allegations The Soviet Union lost the crewed Moon-landing phase of the
Space Race to the United States. However, some sources claim that just before the historic
Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, the Soviets undertook a hasty attempt to beat the Americans. Despite the unsuccessful first test launch of the new Soviet
N1 rocket on 21 February 1969, it is alleged that a decision was made to send a crewed
Soyuz 7K-L3 craft to the Moon using an N1. This attempt is alleged to have occurred on 3 July 1969, when it ended in an explosion, destroying the launch pad and killing the cosmonauts on board. Official sources state that the L3 was not ready for crewed missions. Its lunar lander, the
LK, had been tested a few times but its orbiter, the
7K-LOK, had not been successfully tested by the closing of the Moon-landing program at the end of 1974. The closing of the program was officially denied and maintained top secret until 1990 when the government allowed them to be published under the policy of
glasnost. This claim correlates with the late hoax about the unsuccessful Moon-shot flight of Andrei Mikoyan. In reality, the second launch, like the first, was a test of the booster and was therefore uncrewed. Even if cosmonauts had been on board, they would have been rescued by its
launch escape system, which carried the dummy payload to safety from the pad.
Other allegations In 1959, pioneering space theoretician
Hermann Oberth claimed a pilot had been killed on a
sub-orbital ballistic flight from
Kapustin Yar in early 1958. He cited Italian media reports. ==Confirmed hoaxes==