Speaker 1: It was early one morning. I was back in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one. It was January, it was hot. I left
Speaker 1: the radio on. This is Maggie Iaquinto, a Ham radio
Speaker 1: operator in the small town of Kolak, Australia. And I
Speaker 1: was up very early in the morning and having a
Speaker 1: cup of coffee and I heard this crackle. Oh this
Speaker 1: is interesting. And I heard this d heavy rushing going
Speaker 1: cq cq cq. This is you two M I R
Speaker 1: looking for contacts, you two M I R the Soviet
Speaker 1: space station. I was so happy, I was unbelievably happy.
Speaker 1: I said, well, this is it, and with great nervousness
Speaker 1: I pressed the transmit button and I said, you two
Speaker 1: M I R. This is VK three CFI. The handle
Speaker 1: is Maggie over. Maggie had been trying to make contact
Speaker 1: for years and should anyone have seen me at six
Speaker 1: in the morning out on my little street in Kolak dancing,
Speaker 1: and I wow, I've done it. She was about to
Speaker 1: start a long and pretty special relationship with the Soviet
Speaker 1: space station and with a certain cosmonaut, Sira gay K
Speaker 1: so Sia gay Let's looted that. But Maggie's connection to
Speaker 1: Saragay wouldn't just be a cool story to whip out
Speaker 1: it dinner parties. Within an hour, the crowd was heading
Speaker 1: to the seat of Soviet power as the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: unraveled in nineteen ninety one. At allmy armored personnel carriers
Speaker 1: on the streets, it was Maggie's who would tell sarage
Speaker 1: the truth about what was happening in his country. Armored
Speaker 1: personnel carriers rolled by carrying scores of truths, some of
Speaker 1: them brandishing machine guns, and Sarage and the other cosmonauts
Speaker 1: were hungry for the news, and they called it Rita Rita,
Speaker 1: which is my name in Russian. This is CNN breaking news.
Speaker 1: So Rita's information. So I was their information source. Good evening.
Speaker 1: I'm Jane Randall in Washington. The information Maggie gave Saragey
Speaker 1: proved crucial because it would help him make the choice
Speaker 1: of a lifetime to stay or to go. Historians may
Speaker 1: have trouble describing a day when Kael Garbato resigned as
Speaker 1: the president of the Soviet Union, which had already ceased
Speaker 1: to exist. I'm Lance Bass and from Kaleidoscope, iHeart podcast
Speaker 1: an exile content. This is the last Soviet Helen Charmon,
Speaker 1: becoming the first Britain in space. She blasted off with
Speaker 1: two Soviet cosmonaut repairment on a missions Design chief need
Speaker 1: to repair the eighteen Mirrors space station that has been
Speaker 1: orbiting the globe for five years now. On May eighteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, Helen Sharman, the British woman who won
Speaker 1: the TV contest, blasted off into space. Alongside her were
Speaker 1: the Soviet cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Anatoly Artabaski. They were
Speaker 1: leaving behind a country in chaos, a country literally breaking
Speaker 1: apart at the seams, the republics Estonia, a human chain
Speaker 1: of protests Lithuania. Down in the Baltic Republic of Lithuania,
Speaker 1: Latvia flag was raised and they sang the national lands.
Speaker 1: They were demanded independence. The parliament in the capital city
Speaker 1: of Bakhu voted unanimously to make ourser Bai John an
Speaker 1: independent republic. But at that particular moment, flying through space
Speaker 1: in a tiny capsule, Helen wasn't really thinking about what
Speaker 1: was happening on Earth. She was just enjoying the ride.
Speaker 1: A few hundred kilometers above the earth surface, you can
Speaker 1: see that the Earth is curved, you can see vasts
Speaker 1: sections of the Pacific Ocean, the whole of Western Europe
Speaker 1: in Mungo beautiful, inspiring. After forty eight hours, she finally
Speaker 1: arrived at the Mere space Station. As Helen Sharman Sawyer's
Speaker 1: spacecraft dot with the Mere Station last Monday, it was
Speaker 1: the realization of a dream that started more than two
Speaker 1: years ago. I remember opening the hatch I went through first.
Speaker 1: It was just so nice to float into these long,
Speaker 1: thin modules, feeling weightless. I remember being the most natural,
Speaker 1: relaxing feeling I'd ever had as she floated in zero
Speaker 1: gravity for the first time. Helen discovered her home for
Speaker 1: the next week. Tunnels with tight walls and low ceilings, wires, screens, keyboards,
Speaker 1: and transmitters stuck to every available surface. The space station
Speaker 1: Mirror was a technological marvel, humanity's only outpost in space,
Speaker 1: and the Soviets had created it. But in their rush
Speaker 1: to get it up there, comfort had to take a
Speaker 1: back seat, so the place was kind of a dump,
Speaker 1: reeking a mold, mites and body odor. And thanks to
Speaker 1: my INSYNCT tour days, I can actually imagine what that
Speaker 1: smells like like. Five sweaty teenage boys in a bus
Speaker 1: for months. Not pretty. Helen was going up there for
Speaker 1: a week, but anatole and sarage for five months. For
Speaker 1: it all to work, everything had to be super organized.
Speaker 1: Mission control planned. Certainly, my time to the nearest, five minutes,
Speaker 1: five minutes, we were told when we needed to awake
Speaker 1: around seven am Moscow time, have a space shower, meaning
Speaker 1: wipe your body down with a wet towel, and typically
Speaker 1: we would have breakfast together chicken with Brunes bread, candy, coffee.
Speaker 1: Not my usual breakfast, in fact, I'm not the biggest
Speaker 1: fan of Russian food, but I guess it's certainly feeling.
Speaker 1: And there was only one toilets in use, so we
Speaker 1: have to work around each other in that respect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in space, even something as simple as ping becomes a
Speaker 1: whole operation. Everyone gets their own custom shaped funnel which
Speaker 1: is attached to a vacuum hose. When you gotta go,
Speaker 1: you have to hold the funnel right up against you
Speaker 1: unless you want to end up surrounded by droplets of
Speaker 1: floating pea, and that as gross. After all that, the showering,
Speaker 1: the eating, the peeing, the cosmonauts are ready to get
Speaker 1: down to some actual work because the station wasn't in
Speaker 1: great shape. There were power outages, computer failures, leaks. It
Speaker 1: needed constant maintenance and that is why our guy Sarage
Speaker 1: was there. He was the engineer and his job was
Speaker 1: to fix all these problems, to keep the station running,
Speaker 1: to keep the dream of Soviet space alive. That's without Santatoli,
Speaker 1: Arts and Varsity and their Cricolo will spend five months
Speaker 1: and plan a record eight walks in space as they
Speaker 1: go about repairing the Mirror Station. Helen Charman had her
Speaker 1: own special job on Mirror Space farmer. She was growing
Speaker 1: wheat potatoes. She even planted a lemon tree, growing food
Speaker 1: in space. Been like mad Damon in the Martian the
Speaker 1: Scientific Experiment she took part and weren't going to win
Speaker 1: any Nobel prizes, but it was nevertheless of British first.
Speaker 1: And in the evenings, after they'd finished all their duties,
Speaker 1: it was finally time to chill. Sometimes we could just relax.
Speaker 1: Is usually a good hour where there's nothing scheduled, where
Speaker 1: you can just be together and look out the window,
Speaker 1: talk about families and friends that we left behind. The
Speaker 1: last couple of years had been strange for Helen she'd
Speaker 1: quit her job, broken up with her boyfriend, and let's
Speaker 1: face it, I'm going to Russia to train as a
Speaker 1: cosmonaut is a pretty good excuse. She'd left her parents
Speaker 1: behind in England and moved to the USSR. But she
Speaker 1: was twenty seven single. Her whole life was ahead of her.
Speaker 1: For Saragey, it's different. He recently got married to someone
Speaker 1: in mission control actually, though she wasn't on this mission,
Speaker 1: and now they had a baby. Sigey's daughter was born
Speaker 1: just a few months before we flew into space, and
Speaker 1: he would have missed her terribly. He knew that was
Speaker 1: what his mission was assigned to do, and he knew
Speaker 1: his wife would look after the door so beautifully. But
Speaker 1: your babies grow up very quickly, and Segay was going
Speaker 1: to miss a lot of that development. Over five months
Speaker 1: in space, sarage was going to watch his daughter Orga
Speaker 1: grow up on screen. He could only talk to his
Speaker 1: family every two weeks. He'd miss his daughter's first words,
Speaker 1: sitting up, crawling, and then her first steps. That's a
Speaker 1: big deal, really, but he knew, you know that that
Speaker 1: was his job, and he knew he was going to
Speaker 1: do that, so he'd thought it all through accepted it,
Speaker 1: that isolation from the Earth and the fact that you're
Speaker 1: not with all your friends and family anymore. Over that week,
Speaker 1: Helen listens to the usually quiet sarage began to open
Speaker 1: up about how he's missing summer and Moscow, the long
Speaker 1: warm evenings with friends and family, about how his daughter
Speaker 1: is growing up without him. Every time, Saragey tells Helen
Speaker 1: a little bit more, and Helen found herself looking forward
Speaker 1: to their evening chats. But then all too soon it's
Speaker 1: time for Helen to return to Earth. It must have
Speaker 1: felt weird after so much build up and training, knowing
Speaker 1: at twenty seven the first lining for Obit has already
Speaker 1: been written. But even stranger was having to leave Space
Speaker 1: without Saragey and Anatoly and that final goodbye. It was
Speaker 1: heart wrenching because I knew I was leaving them behind
Speaker 1: in space. Not only I enjoyed it and I didn't
Speaker 1: want to leave to return to Earth just then, but
Speaker 1: saying goodbye to what felt like then the two best
Speaker 1: friends I had ever had. This morning, it was warm
Speaker 1: farewells from the two cosmonauts staying behind, to the mere
Speaker 1: crew being relieved, and to Helen. They passed through the
Speaker 1: hatch into their Sawyer's craft, which I'm doped from MEA
Speaker 1: and just before half past ten this morning fired its
Speaker 1: retro rockets. Less than half an hour later they were
Speaker 1: parachuting to Earth. Watched firemission control and when Helen landed
Speaker 1: back in the USSR before going home to her parents,
Speaker 1: she actually visited Saragey's family. I went round to visit
Speaker 1: his wife and his baby after I returned from space
Speaker 1: while Segey was still in space. That's how close they'd become.
Speaker 1: And my hair was, you know, I'd had it cut
Speaker 1: quite short, and the baby Auga said dad. When I arrived,
Speaker 1: Baby Auga called Helen dad to her. Saragey was just
Speaker 1: some stranger with short hair, much like Helen. And that's
Speaker 1: when Helen realized exactly how much Sarahgey was missing. And
Speaker 1: now Sarah finds himself missing Helen loneliness is starting to
Speaker 1: gnaw at him. Downtime on the space station seems to
Speaker 1: drag on forever, and one evening, almost out of boredom,
Speaker 1: sarage starts flicking through the handover notes left by the
Speaker 1: previous crew, and that's when he sees something strange amongst
Speaker 1: the detailed log about technical issues and repairs. There's a
Speaker 1: series of scribbles, numbers, letters, and symbols, each with dates
Speaker 1: and times next to them. It looks like some kind
Speaker 1: of call log, but cosmonauts only get one personal call
Speaker 1: every week or so these are way more regular. It's
Speaker 1: beginning to look like the last crew weren't just using
Speaker 1: the radio to call home. They were speaking to people
Speaker 1: all over the world, to people in Taiwan or Ireland
Speaker 1: or Ohio, to people in their living room, to amateur
Speaker 1: radio operators. And there's one call sign that comes up
Speaker 1: again and again, and next to it the word Australia
Speaker 1: v K three CFI Nervous. He tunes the radio to
Speaker 1: the right frequency and waits nothing. The next day he
Speaker 1: finds himself going through the motions until he can try again.
Speaker 1: Nothing days pass. Every night he keeps coming back to
Speaker 1: the radio, listening to the same old empty cracker. But
Speaker 1: one evening, just as he's about to call it quits,
Speaker 1: a woman's voice Physics into Life. Two years earlier, nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, Australia. Kolak a small town just outside of Melbourne,
Speaker 1: twelve thousand people, best known for its dairy farm somewhere
Speaker 1: in that town. A woman is in a makeshift radio
Speaker 1: shack in her house, trying to get through to the
Speaker 1: Soviet space station. It's VK three CFI Maggie aya Quinto.
Speaker 1: I can remember her dancing around the kitchen, flinging a
Speaker 1: T twel over ahead, dancing to some type of Balkan music.
Speaker 1: That's been Maggie's son. Maggie died in twenty fourteen, but
Speaker 1: we spoke to her sons and to an Australian radio
Speaker 1: producer named Jesse Burrell, who sent us an interview she
Speaker 1: did with Maggie in twenty eleven. She had a quirky personality.
Speaker 1: She had a fun sense of humor. She liked puns.
Speaker 1: She liked bad action movies. She liked playing softball, She
Speaker 1: liked Macedonian dancing. She spoke Russian. Maggie was born in
Speaker 1: America and learned Russian at college in the early sixties,
Speaker 1: during the height of the Cold War. She was just
Speaker 1: fascinated with the USSR. Maggie followed the news of the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union anyway she could, reading the papers, listening to
Speaker 1: the radio, watching TV. She was convinced that one day
Speaker 1: she would visit, but then life guide in the way,
Speaker 1: she met a guy and moved to Australia with him.
Speaker 1: She had two sons and started working as a computer
Speaker 1: teacher at the local high school in Colac. The sides
Speaker 1: of Colac. It was a good bakery there, not exactly
Speaker 1: what Maggie's dreams were made of. Even the bakery was
Speaker 1: closed on weekends. No Balkan dancing club, definitely no Russians
Speaker 1: to talk to. But Maggie had a secret weapon cable here,
Speaker 1: all right, and so that just comes into the radio
Speaker 1: shock here Ham radio. I always wanted to be a
Speaker 1: Ham radio operator when I was fifteen or sixteen, I
Speaker 1: just wanted to do this. Ham Radio a way for
Speaker 1: people to talk to each other from home using radio waves,
Speaker 1: a more advanced version of the ten can on a string.
Speaker 1: It promised freedom, independence, adventure. There's no way that I
Speaker 1: can visit every country in the world, but I can
Speaker 1: with Ham Radio. Maggie talked to all sorts of people
Speaker 1: and even went to Ham Radio conferences on weekends. They
Speaker 1: would always be hosted at some sort of basketball court,
Speaker 1: and they'd just be tables set up along the walls
Speaker 1: stacked with different types of gear, like different types of radios,
Speaker 1: and everyone would call each other by their unique call sign.
Speaker 1: It's like code names, a jumble of letters and numbers
Speaker 1: that shows who's calling and where from. In Australia, all
Speaker 1: of the Ham radio call signs start with VK. India's
Speaker 1: vu vs Canada. You get the idea, and three represents Victoria,
Speaker 1: so I'm VK three. And then the suffix, which is
Speaker 1: two letters or three represents your unique identity, so I
Speaker 1: was VK three CFI and no one else in the
Speaker 1: world can have that call sign. And not these Ham
Speaker 1: radio conferences, people would actually address Maggie not by her name,
Speaker 1: but by her call sign. This is the level of
Speaker 1: geekiness we're talking about. And then at one of these conferences,
Speaker 1: she starts hearing a rumor, a whisper going around the
Speaker 1: community that a handful of Hams have managed to get
Speaker 1: through to space, not just any space, but space behind
Speaker 1: the Iron curtain, the space station mirror. Maggie can't get
Speaker 1: it out of her head, the idea of speaking to
Speaker 1: a real Soviet and she starts thinking, maybe this is
Speaker 1: my chance to finally visit the USSR, even if her
Speaker 1: little patch of the Soviet Union would be two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty miles up in space, and so Maggie gets
Speaker 1: to work. She had already turned her spare bedroom into
Speaker 1: a sort of radio shack, like something out of a
Speaker 1: seventy science fiction film, cables MIC's audio equipment and the
Speaker 1: radio itself. But even this gear isn't sophisticated enough to
Speaker 1: pick up the signal she's after from space. The sheer
Speaker 1: distance makes it really, really hard. So Maggie buys a
Speaker 1: second radio for her kitchen and fixes a giant antenna
Speaker 1: to the roof of her house. Then she wires it
Speaker 1: all up to an old Tashiba laptop, a real doorstopper.
Speaker 1: Everything's set up ready to go. Maggie tunes the transceiver
Speaker 1: to the right frequency for the Soviet space station you
Speaker 1: Tube M I R and nothing. She does this over
Speaker 1: and over again every day. She wakes up before five,
Speaker 1: while her sons are still sleeping. She pads into the kitchen,
Speaker 1: tunes in and listens. In the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: after she's finished work, planned lessons, marked essays, made dinner,
Speaker 1: got her sons ready for bed, she sits up in
Speaker 1: the dark listening, and usually she's got the TV news
Speaker 1: on in the background, and every night the news brings
Speaker 1: stories of chaos from the Soviet Union check points across
Speaker 1: Berlin had finally buckled. The Berlin Wall falls November nine,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine. A few weeks later in Czechoslovakia, the
Speaker 1: people overthrow the Communist governed will give offense monopoly on power.
Speaker 1: A month later, in Romania, people shoot their dictator. Chow
Speaker 1: Ku is dead, so is his wife. Two years pass.
Speaker 1: You heard that right, Two years And all this time
Speaker 1: Maggie keeps trying to reach the Soviet space station, getting
Speaker 1: up on the roof to tinker with her antenna, buying
Speaker 1: and barring every piece of equipment she can. But still
Speaker 1: her chances are slim because Mirror is in constant rotation
Speaker 1: around the Earth. It's only above Australia for ten minutes
Speaker 1: a time, a few times a day. To catch it,
Speaker 1: Maggie has to be on the right frequency at the
Speaker 1: exact right time, and she starts to feel like she's
Speaker 1: running out of options, like nothing she tries is working.
Speaker 1: Until one warm morning in January nineteen ninety one, the
Speaker 1: sun is just beginning to spread across the roofs of
Speaker 1: Colac and Maggie sits in her radio shack, sipping a
Speaker 1: warm cup of coffee, and I heard this deep hey
Speaker 1: Russian going c q c q c q. This is
Speaker 1: you too, am I r looking for contacts? Oh, I
Speaker 1: have been waiting two years to talk to you. Yahoo
Speaker 1: shoo to talk to you. So I am such a
Speaker 1: happy person. I am very very happy. And what can
Speaker 1: I tell you about us? To it over? Finally, Maggie
Speaker 1: had reached the Soviet Union, and soon the person she
Speaker 1: was speaking to almost every day was Sergei Krakov. I
Speaker 1: remember waking up one morning, There'll be this loud static
Speaker 1: it'd be five in the morning, five thirty in the morning.
Speaker 1: Are times when they're having their free time they go
Speaker 1: talk to us. See this deep, powerful Russian voice calling
Speaker 1: my mother. Rico, you just get shocked into a wiking
Speaker 1: and he hears the thick Russian accent, this guy, and
Speaker 1: so you know, you put in your class and it
Speaker 1: kind of stumble down the hall into the radio shack.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, good morning, good evening. They would speak in
Speaker 1: a mixture of English and Russian. Maggie called it runglish.
Speaker 1: I have too little, sir over Do you have a wife?
Speaker 1: Do you have any children? He even talked to the
Speaker 1: students in her computer class. The house would be packed
Speaker 1: if with students from school, and they would line up
Speaker 1: to ask questions and Maggie would translate. I can remember
Speaker 1: they were speaking in these really strong Australian accents, like
Speaker 1: Sarah Gay, what do you eat in spice? What do
Speaker 1: you do when? The communication wasn't always the smoothest, but
Speaker 1: that didn't matter. The desire to communicate, that was the
Speaker 1: truly wonderful part about being a him radio operators. Gay
Speaker 1: was really into him radio Oh my goodness. In fact,
Speaker 1: he called her more than she called him. Sire Gay
Speaker 1: and I had this relationship and he wanted to communicate
Speaker 1: with me. Sarah Gay needed Maggie because deep down he
Speaker 1: was struggling. When Sarage left the Soviet Union, the country
Speaker 1: was in turmoil, food was in short supply, millions were
Speaker 1: taking to the streets and protest. There was this tinderbox
Speaker 1: feeling like anything could happen. And now whenever he asks
Speaker 1: Mission control what's going on back home, he gets a
Speaker 1: breezy it's fine, a brush off, a change of subject.
Speaker 1: So he gets uneasy, frustrated. But then Sarage realizes there
Speaker 1: is a way he can get information, information that isn't
Speaker 1: filtered through mission control, and he can get that from
Speaker 1: his friend in Australia, from Maggie, and so he asks her,
Speaker 1: what's going on in my country? What are you hearing now?
Speaker 1: We just scour the newspapers and I'd rewrite articles in
Speaker 1: very simple English, and I would leave it in my system.
Speaker 1: She figured out a way to send the computer on
Speaker 1: her written messages, which meant she could type up news.
Speaker 1: It was easier than reading out whole articles over a
Speaker 1: bad connection. My own system was a tiny bulletin board.
Speaker 1: They would read those articles. They loved reading all that stuff.
Speaker 1: They didn't get that information from their own central so
Speaker 1: I was their information source. Moscow was losing its grip
Speaker 1: on the Soviet Union. The rebels are using every kind
Speaker 1: of weapon they can lay hands for seventy two years
Speaker 1: of foreign domination. Armenia has declared itself independent from the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. Sarage starts to feel like he's losing it,
Speaker 1: far away from home, floating in a black void, left
Speaker 1: in the dark, until finally, in July nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: mission control calls him. They say, look, there's a problem.
Speaker 1: States are breaking away and we're worried Kazakhstan will be next.
Speaker 1: If we lose Kazakhstan, we lose our launch pad bikan Nor.
Speaker 1: If we lose Biknor, we lose our access to space.
Speaker 1: But they say, we've got an idea. We want to
Speaker 1: send a Kazak cosmonaut to Mirror as an olive branch,
Speaker 1: a way to keep the Kazakhs on our side. The
Speaker 1: thing is, and here's the hitch. He's not experienced, and
Speaker 1: he's not an engineer. He definitely won't be able to
Speaker 1: take care of the station. So, Sarah game, we're giving
Speaker 1: you a choice. You can come back to Earth, back
Speaker 1: to your family as planned, and abandon the station to
Speaker 1: an unknown fate. Or you can stay as long as
Speaker 1: it takes and protect the station, our last hope. You
Speaker 1: have three hours to decide to stay or to go.
Speaker 1: That's next time on The Last Soviet. The Last Soviet
Speaker 1: is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcast and
Speaker 1: Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dat Audio and hosted by
Speaker 1: me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate Osbourne and Mangesh Hadakador,
Speaker 1: with Oz Wallisham and Kostas Linos from iHeart Executive Produced
Speaker 1: by Katrina Norvelle and Nikki E Torre from Sama's Dad Audio.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Joe Sykes and Dasha Listsina. Produced
Speaker 1: by Asia Fuchs, Dasha litz Sa and Joe Sykes. Writing
Speaker 1: by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golubovski and Molly Schwartz,
Speaker 1: Music by Will Epstein, Themed by Martin Orstring, mixing and
Speaker 1: sound designed by Richard Ward and special thanks to Nando
Speaker 1: villa We, Lissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel BYRNE, Bob Pittman
Speaker 1: and Isaac Lee. Many thanks to Ben and josh Iya
Speaker 1: Quinto for letting us use some of their mom Maggie's
Speaker 1: incredible recordings, and to Australian radio producer Jesse Barrell for
Speaker 1: the interview she did with Maggie in twenty eleven. If
Speaker 1: you want to hear more shows like this, nothing is
Speaker 1: more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers,
Speaker 1: ratings and reviews, so please spread the love wherever you listen,