Interesting article here from Space.com about whether or not there’s a few corpses of Soviet cosmonauts orbiting up there, their names and deaths carefully hidden by a regime with no interest in revealing its failures. …Which was pretty much the assumption that I made as a teenager, back in the Eighties. The Soviets were Commies, which meant they were natural-born liars; and they were absolutely secretive about what they did, so it didn’t seem particularly surprising to consider that they might cover up crashes, mid-air explosions, and/or unsuccessful missions (these were ALL nigh-infinitely easier to hide in the late Fifties).

Then the Iron Curtain came crashing down, and we had a few years where we could get our hands on the good secret files, and – as far as I know – nothing came out that said that they had killed a bunch of cosmonauts before Yuri Gagarin went up there, and came back alive*. So now I’m officially dubious on the subject. It’s hard for governments to cover things up, because they literally can’t do it without generating a ridiculous amount of paperwork in the process. Especially totalitarian governments.

I’m a big believer in ‘if I can’t come up with a way to falsify the hypothesis, then it’s really a conspiracy theory.’ At the moment, I think the lack of paperwork falsifies the hypothesis enough for basic skepticism, so I’m skeptical. I’ll revisit my views if actual evidence ever shows up.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

*I mean nothing bad about Colonel Gagarin here. It takes a certain amount of nerve to climb to the top of a pile of explosives, and wait patiently while somebody lights a match. It takes still more if you know that you’re not the first one to have tried that. Fighter pilots are just built different, you know what I mean?