"Up to the Cosmos" by Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Russia: 1962. Autographed by Gagarin on the title page. His first book.
Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (1934-1968) was a Russian Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961.
Yuri Gagarin died just shy of his Vostok 1 mission's seventh anniversary, on March 27, 1968, when the MiG-15 fighter jet that he and instructor Vladimir Seryogin were piloting on a routine training flight went down outside a small town near Moscow. Alexei Leonov, who in 1965 became the first man to leave a spacecraft and float in the open vacuum of space, has worked for years to learn what led to Gagarin's death. He finally gained permission and spoke about the details in an interview released on Friday, June 14, 2013, by the state-funded Russia Today (RT) television network.
"We knew that a Su-15 [fighter jet] was scheduled to be tested that day, but it was supposed to be flying at the altitude of 10,000 meters [33,000 feet] or higher, not 450-500 meters [1,480-1,640 feet]," Leonov told RT. "It was a violation of the flight procedure."
A new declassified report confirmed that an unauthorized Sukhoi (Su-15) supersonic jet flew dangerously close to Gagarin's MiG-15. “The two jets must have been no less than 50 kilometers apart." Leonov said.
"While afterburning the aircraft reduced its echelon at a distance of 10-15 meters [30-50 ft] in the clouds, passing close to Gagarin, turning his plane and thus sending it into a tailspin — a deep spiral, to be precise — at a speed of 750 kilometers per hour [470 miles per hour]," Leonov said in the television interview. “Now, a jet can sink into a deep spiral if a larger, heavier aircraft passes by too close and flips [the jet] over with its backwash. And that is exactly what happened to Gagarin. That trajectory was the only one that corresponded with all our input parameters," Leonov told RT.
"Up to the Cosmos" by Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Russia: 1962. Autographed by Gagarin on the title page. His first book.
Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (1934-1968) was a Russian Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961.
Yuri Gagarin died just shy of his Vostok 1 mission's seventh anniversary, on March 27, 1968, when the MiG-15 fighter jet that he and instructor Vladimir Seryogin were piloting on a routine training flight went down outside a small town near Moscow. Alexei Leonov, who in 1965 became the first man to leave a spacecraft and float in the open vacuum of space, has worked for years to learn what led to Gagarin's death. He finally gained permission and spoke about the details in an interview released on Friday, June 14, 2013, by the state-funded Russia Today (RT) television network.
"We knew that a Su-15 [fighter jet] was scheduled to be tested that day, but it was supposed to be flying at the altitude of 10,000 meters [33,000 feet] or higher, not 450-500 meters [1,480-1,640 feet]," Leonov told RT. "It was a violation of the flight procedure."
A new declassified report confirmed that an unauthorized Sukhoi (Su-15) supersonic jet flew dangerously close to Gagarin's MiG-15. “The two jets must have been no less than 50 kilometers apart." Leonov said.
"While afterburning the aircraft reduced its echelon at a distance of 10-15 meters [30-50 ft] in the clouds, passing close to Gagarin, turning his plane and thus sending it into a tailspin — a deep spiral, to be precise — at a speed of 750 kilometers per hour [470 miles per hour]," Leonov said in the television interview. “Now, a jet can sink into a deep spiral if a larger, heavier aircraft passes by too close and flips [the jet] over with its backwash. And that is exactly what happened to Gagarin. That trajectory was the only one that corresponded with all our input parameters," Leonov told RT.