But then again, that’s exactly what THEY want us to think…

Edit: It must be late, somehow I wrote that Gagarin offed himself in the conspiracy theory. Derp.

(One of the real prizes for model rocket collectors is a scale kit of the “Little Joe II,” a stubby little rocket that was used in the mid 60s to test the Apollo escape tower system. If the tower could peel the capsule off of the accelerating Little Joe, it could get it off of Saturn V on its ascent.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyFF4cpMVag

But it seems to me that this is just a case of “rules” not keeping up with reality at the time – can you really say someone has not been in space for four days (the longest Vostok mission)  just because he ejected? Armstrong & Aldrin could have been thought not to have landed on the moon according to the same rules as they apply to aeroplanes – after all, they landed in a completely different vehicle – a “lunar module” – which they entered in mid-flight,  not the spacecraft they took off and splashed down back on Earth in. I guess at the time of Gagarin’s flight all the FAI rules applied to aeroplanes; there was no space component.

See http://www.fai.org/ : FAI Sporting Code – Section 2- Aeroplanes
2.2.28 UNCOMPLETED FLIGHT
A flight is deemed to be uncompleted if; EITHER, an accident occurs during the flight resulting in the death of any member of the crew within 48 hours; or, any person leaves the aircraft during the flight; or, any part of the aircraft, its equipment, or payload is jettisoned during the flight performance.

If that rule applied to spaceflights, then no flight with a moonwalk or spacewalk would count towards a record… kind of “while his capsule was still falling round Earth, he opened the door to his
capsule *in mid-flight*, and jumped out”.

All the six Vostok pilots ejected; only Gagarin was forced to claim he had landed in the spacecraft to satisfy the FAI (you’d think the Russians would just say – look, we went into space, we don’t care for your silly froggy so-called FAI rules about coconuts and sparrows). Gherman Titov, who orbited for a day in 1961, describes his ejection in his book I Am Eagle! (Gherman Titov and Martin Caidin, based on interviews with Wilfred Burchett and Anthony Purdy, Bobbs-Merrill, 1962 – so before all the Vostok programme was even finished). In the book his landing is uneventful and rather beautiful; but much later, including when I met him in 1998 in his home in Moscow while researching a project, he said it was harder; my notes at the time say “first he seemed to be headed right for a railway line, on which a train was passing – would he be the first to go 16 times round the world and then get ignominiously run over? Then the wind changed and he landed going backwards and was tripped up; he couldn’t release his parachute instantly and was dragged along the ground, scooping up soil in his open helmet.”

Another FAI rule is that a new record has to exceed a previous one by some specified percentage; you can’t beat a 2000mph record by going at 2001mph. This makes sense in the case of limited-accuracy measurement devices; however, I think an issue turned up with long-duration flights on space stations where someone who had been in orbit for eg (I forget the exact numbers) 200 days held the record even if someone later had been in space 201 days.

(edited for layout)

“Hats off” to Yuri!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/8543547566/in/photostream

Oh, maybe this will work better: http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/hat_rocket.mpg

“It was 280 km to the west of the planned landing site (near Baikonur).

A farmer and her daughter observed the strange scene of a figure in a bright orange suit with a large white helmet landing near them by parachute. Gagarin later recalled, “When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!” “