I know when Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (above), died. It was on 27 March, 1968. He was one of the most recognizable human beings in the world. As a cosmonaut he was the first human to rise above the atmosphere of his home planet. But the why of his death remains shrouded in mystery.
It seems not even his widow Valentina, and nor his daughters Yelena and Galina (above) , will ever know what really happened to him. They know what they believe. But they can never be certain if what they know it the truth. Yuri was a hero of the Soviet Union, a place and a time where truth and lies were so intermingled as to make reality tissue paper thin.
In 1961 the average yearly income in America was $5,315.00 and gallon of gas cost 27 cents. The city of Seattle completed the tallest structure west of the Mississippi river, the Space Needle (above). The 200th McDonald’s restaurant had opened in Southern California. The hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls produced electricity for the first time. An X-15 rocket plane reached the edge of space at 31 miles high, and President John Kennedy asked Congress for $531 million to “…put a man on the moon in this decade.” And on 12 April, 1961, the Soviet Union launched the first man into space.
His call radio sign was “Cedar”. The 5’ 2” cosmonaut was a typical fighter jockey, self confident and cocky, described as “virtually unflappable” by his instructors. His Vostok 1 spacecraft was launched from the desert steppes of Tjuratam, Kazakhstan, just after 9AM (Moscow time). His words on liftoff were "Off we go!" On his way to a single orbit he whistled a tune; “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows, Where her son flies in the sky.”
Unlike the American astronauts who landed at sea, Yuri had to eject from his Vostok 1 spacecraft (above) at 23,000 feet. And instead of being rescued by the crew of an aircraft carrier....
...on landing Yuri was greeted by an old woman, her granddaughter and her cow - hinting that he landed far short of his target.
But once the Soviet leadership was certain he had survived, he became a prop in the propaganda wars.
The Soviet leadership (above) showered him with medals and awards. Yuri (above, center) was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, the rubber stamp legislature. But all the glittering medals soon grew dull and he was allowed to return to Star City, the home of all Cosmonauts, in the Moscow suburbs.
He worked on spacecraft design, and was eventually promoted to the rank of a full Colonel. He became deputy training director for the cosmonaut corps.
On 10 January, 1968 the U.S. lost its 10,000th military airplane over Vietnam. The average income in the U.S. was up to $7,850 a year, and gasoline was up to 34 cents a gallon. On 23 January, North Korean naval boats captured the Intelligence gathering ship, the USS Pueblo, and its 83 man crew. On 31 January, 70,000 North Vietnamese troops launched the Tet offensives by briefly capturing the U.S. embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, and during just the second week of February the United States suffered 543 dead and 2,547 wounded in Vietnam; for that week alone.
And on 27 March, at 10:17 AM Moscow time, Yuri Gagarin climbed into the front cockpit of a MIG-15UTI trainer (above).
His good friend, Colonel Vladimir Seryogin (above), was in the back seat, acting as his instructor. On takeoff Serogiin pushed the throttles to 9,000 rpm’s and headed toward the village of Kirzhach, 30 miles northwest of Moscow.
The weather was horrible, and a heavily overcast quickly enveloped the Korean War era fighter/trainer. The Mig 15 was small by modern standards, just 33 feet long, with a 35 ft. swept back wing span. It was capable of well over 600 mph and had a ceiling of over 50,000 feet.
Nicknamed the “Babouskha” (grandmother) the MIG 15 also had a tenancy to stall and go into a tight spin at anything under 160 mph. In fact, according to one pilot who recently flew a similar two seat Mig 15UTI trainer, “The Mig didn’t seem to care for doing anything under 250 knots.”
Fellow Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (above) was flying a helicopter in the area and he heard two loud booms.
The second was probably Gagarin’s Mig (above) slamming into the ground.
Two hundred officers and technicians conducted an investigation. They found the ground radar system which was supposed to provide altitude information to all pilots was out of order for the day. And Soviet fighter aircraft of that era had no cockpit radar.
Still they filed a full report. But because of the Soviet obsession with secrecy the report was never released to the public. And so rumors filled the void.
Rumor said one or both of the pilots must have been drunk. The plane must have been sabotaged by a jealous superior. The parachute cords were cut and the ejection seats were disconnected. The MIG -15 hit a weather balloon, or a bird, or someone had forgotten to close a vital air vent.
There are a hundred theories, and even an open investigation would never have refuted them all. So we will never be able to say with absolute certainty why Yuri Gagarin died. But there does seem to be a most likely sequence of events.
Information since uncovered indicates a Sukhoi 11 interceptor (above) was also flying in the overcast above Kirzhach. This Russian fighter (1962 to 1968) had been designed for high speed at high altitude, to intercept American bombers like the B-52 and the faster B-58, invading Soviet air space. Like the American F-101 Starfighters, the Soviets had replaced their machine guns for missiles, and sacrificed maneuverability for supersonic speed.
The SU-11 had been intended as an all weather interceptor, and was capable of almost twice the speed of sound. But the Soviet design bureau considered it a failure, and by 1968 it was no longer in production. Still, pilots had to maintain their skills by regular training flights in all weathers, like a heavy overcast.
The most likely assumption is that the Sukhoi pilot was disoriented by the dense overcast and lacking ground radar guidance thought he was flying at 10,000 meters when, in truth, he was at just 450 meters above the ground when he hit the big fighter's after burners and went supersonic. That accounted for the first boom which helicopter pilot Leonov heard.
So the big SU-11 might have roared past within 2 to 300 feet of the Gagarin and Seryogin's little jet - perhaps even closer - and sucked the air out from under it's wings. That would have dropped it into a flat spin. In the overcast, whoever was piloting the Mig would have unable to orient himself before impact in the trees. The Mig-15 slammed into the ground at 750 miles an hour. The jet's clock stopped at 10:31am, Moscow time. Yuri Gagarin was only 34 years old.
Gagarin's widow, Valentina, died on 17 March, 2020 at the age of 84. His eldest daughter Elena Yurienva Gargina was 10 when her father died. She is currently (2021) director of the Kremlin State Museum in Moscow. And Galina Yurievna Gargarina, born in 1961, is a professor of economics and department chair at the Plekhanov Russian Institute if Economics in Moscow.
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