Lost Cosmonauts

The Lost Cosmonauts or Phantom Cosmonauts are subjects of a conspiracy theory alleging that Soviet cosmonauts went to outer space before Yuri Gagarin, but their existence has never been publicly acknowledged by either the Soviet or Russian space authorities. Proponents of the Lost Cosmonauts theory argue that the Soviet Union attempted to launch two or more human spaceflights before Gagarin's, and that at least two cosmonauts died in those attempts. Another cosmonaut, Vladimir Ilyushin, is believed to have landed off course and been held by the Chinese government. The Government of the Soviet Union supposedly suppressed this information, to prevent bad publicity during the height of the Cold War.

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 an adventurous attempt to beat the Americans. Despite the unsuccessful first test launch of the new Soviet N1 rocket on 20 January 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. However, 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 2 km (1.2 mi) from the pad. One mission in the Soyuz program, Soyuz T-10-1, did see the spacecraft and cosmonauts rescued safely from a failed booster rocket by its launch escape system; it was the only documented case of such a system in use with a crewed spacecraft, until the 11 October 2018 Soyuz launch mishap.

There are also rumors, which appeared later in Omon Ra, a novel by Russian fiction writer Pelevin, that the Soviet automatic sample-return craft Luna and remote-controlled automatic Moon rover Lunokhod, were, due to failures in automation, crewed by cosmonauts who had agreed to take part in suicide missions. However, there is not enough space in either the Luna or Lunokhod for a single cosmonaut, even excluding any life support systems. There had been a plan to develop modified Lunokhods with additional controls for use as a transport in crewed Moon-landing missions but this plan ended with the Soviet crewed lunar programs.

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Source: www.wikipedia.com