Speaker 1: Mission Control just outside of Moscow. Picture of vast hall
Speaker 1: with rows of desks and those massive eighties computers. It's
Speaker 1: February nineteen eighty five and a few ground controllers are
Speaker 1: trawling through graphs and signals sent from a space station
Speaker 1: called Salute seven, the pride and joy of the Soviet
Speaker 1: space program. Right now, Salute seven hasn't got any cosmonauts
Speaker 1: on board. It's on autopilot, orbiting the Earth, waiting for
Speaker 1: its next crew. So the ground control's work is fairly routine.
Speaker 1: They record data, talk about their weekend plans. But then
Speaker 1: right at the end of the shift, someone notices something
Speaker 1: weird on one of the dashboards. There's a light flashing
Speaker 1: on the control panel, a warning light. Everyone's on their
Speaker 1: feet trying to fix it, but then another light goes down,
Speaker 1: and another. One by one, the whole dashboard goes dark.
Speaker 1: A horrified silence fills the room. They've just lost the
Speaker 1: space station. It's like a dead piece of thing in orbit.
Speaker 1: That's also Sadiki, our Soviet space galu heard last time.
Speaker 1: They couldn't find any kind of signal, nothing from the station.
Speaker 1: It's essentially floating, spinning, probably out of control in Earth. Orbit,
Speaker 1: and it's huge, this huge chunk of metal. If they
Speaker 1: don't control it, it might fall uncontrollably uninhabited country and
Speaker 1: it could land on a city, a village somewhere, and
Speaker 1: so they're very afraid of that. Thousands of people could die.
Speaker 1: It would be a human tragedy and a huge embarrassment
Speaker 1: for the Soviet Union, and so they need to do
Speaker 1: something that's never been done before, to land on a
Speaker 1: dead object in space and out of control chunk of
Speaker 1: metal and bring it back to life. I'm Lance Bass
Speaker 1: and from Kaleidoscope. iHeart podcast and exile content. This is
Speaker 1: the last Soviet as y'all know. I am obsessed with
Speaker 1: space and with this one particular space movie. Houston, we
Speaker 1: have a problem. Apollo thirteen. I freaking love this film.
Speaker 1: In my books, Tom Hanks can do no wrong. Power
Speaker 1: up the level three hours by the checklist. We don't
Speaker 1: have that much time. It tells the story of a
Speaker 1: space flight going seriously awry. The rescue mission became live news.
Speaker 1: All of America was watching, asking themselves with the astronauts,
Speaker 1: make it home alive. The Apoto thirteen to the Moon
Speaker 1: is in serious jeopardy. Disasters are one of the big
Speaker 1: reasons we fall in love with space. Now coming to
Speaker 1: the moment, the last moments of Apolo thirteen as it
Speaker 1: begins it's re entry. The best thing we can do
Speaker 1: now is just to listen. I'm hopeful. The stakes could
Speaker 1: not be higher, and it's all beamed into your living
Speaker 1: room twenty four seven. They hate it. All three shoots
Speaker 1: out great and extremely loud applause here in mission control.
Speaker 1: But the story I'm about to tell you now took
Speaker 1: place in complete secrecy. No one was allowed to know
Speaker 1: about it. And yet it's the Soviet Union's very own
Speaker 1: Apollo thirteen. And the man who would lead it from
Speaker 1: the ground Yep, you guessed it, Sergey Krekolev. In our
Speaker 1: last episode, we left our cosmonaut in nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: aged three, the Soviet Union was still recovering from the
Speaker 1: wreckage of World War Two, but they'd beat the Germans
Speaker 1: and now, against all the odds, they'd conquered space too. O.
Speaker 1: Space was going to be the future of the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: and that generation who grew up in the nineteen sixties
Speaker 1: were really sort of, I think, encouraged to think in
Speaker 1: utopian terms. The Soviet Union putting the first person in
Speaker 1: space was the defining moment of Saragey's childhood, and there
Speaker 1: was a sense that this was just the beginning of
Speaker 1: space exploration, of the Soviet Union's rise on the global stage.
Speaker 1: All Russia's just wild about. Jurica got in, first man,
Speaker 1: took conquer space. Please. For Sarah Gay, life's possibilities must
Speaker 1: have seemed endless. So I think it's very much part
Speaker 1: of his DNA and that generation in particular, growing up
Speaker 1: in the sixties and seventies as children and then as
Speaker 1: young teams, to be immersed in that world of future
Speaker 1: oriented thinking about the Soviet Union. Future oriented things are
Speaker 1: good and you only expect them to get better now.
Speaker 1: If you grew up in the United States during the
Speaker 1: tail end of the Cold War, like me, I know
Speaker 1: what you're thinking, you'd have been fed the same propaganda
Speaker 1: that the Soviet Union was a cold, gray place where
Speaker 1: kids go hungry. Well, in the sixties, that was more
Speaker 1: likely to be true of America. Seventy three percent of
Speaker 1: all Clay County families received less than three thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: They're very young, their mothers, the aged are the most
Speaker 1: numerous inhabitants of this permanent culture of poverty. Yep, Because
Speaker 1: in the Soviet Union, basic stuff, food, a roof over
Speaker 1: your head that was all provided for by the state.
Speaker 1: Whether in Communist headquarters in Odessa on the Black Sea
Speaker 1: or in the Hermitage art gallery in Leningrad, every activity
Speaker 1: is controlled by directives that originate under the gold domes
Speaker 1: of the Kremlin. So if you're Saragai, a young boy
Speaker 1: coming of age in Leningrad in the sixties and seventies,
Speaker 1: things would have seemed pretty good. He didn't grow up
Speaker 1: in luxury, but it was a care free environment. He
Speaker 1: knew everything was going to be just fine. He went
Speaker 1: to school, he went swimming, he joined the city's gymnastics
Speaker 1: team and the local airplane club, all for free and
Speaker 1: in a spare time. He was doing what all the
Speaker 1: other kids were doing. In the Soviet Union, he would
Speaker 1: have been leading the same kinds of exciting popular science
Speaker 1: fiction novels titles like Hard to Be a God, The
Speaker 1: Land of Crimson Clouds, The Man from Mars. It was
Speaker 1: all about space, limitless possibility, utopia, and not just in
Speaker 1: the pages of his books. He would have grown up
Speaker 1: watching these hero cosmonauts being eulogized he was proud of
Speaker 1: fellow cosmonauts and Russell and doing amazing things in outer space.
Speaker 1: After Gagarin, the USSR just kept beating the Americans to it.
Speaker 1: First probe to Mars, landing on Mars by an unmanned
Speaker 1: space probe from US. First woman in space, space girl,
Speaker 1: Valentina Tereshkova. There's one of place in history. First person
Speaker 1: to walk in open space. Man for the first time
Speaker 1: has stepped forth into the emptiness of space. Okay, the
Speaker 1: Americans got to the Moon in nineteen sixty nine, obviously
Speaker 1: a big deal, but the Soviets were working on something bigger,
Speaker 1: a permanent home in space, a space station where cosmonauts
Speaker 1: can go live and actually do some science. The Soviets
Speaker 1: wanted to spend months up there, maybe eventually forever. It
Speaker 1: looked like a weird lego tube with solar panel wings.
Speaker 1: They call it Salute one, and over the next decade
Speaker 1: they upgraded it with better and better versions, Salute two,
Speaker 1: Salute three, kind of like iPhones, until they got the
Speaker 1: best version yet, Salute seven. The Americans were jealous, they
Speaker 1: had nothing like it. Once again, the Soviets were winning,
Speaker 1: and it's in this atmosphere that Sarage finished school and
Speaker 1: decided he too wants to become a cosmonaut to go
Speaker 1: and live on a Soviet space station. And so we
Speaker 1: went to an engine a university and in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: one he graduated top of his class, and because of
Speaker 1: that he was chosen to work for a very special place,
Speaker 1: the same place that designed the first space satellite, the
Speaker 1: first spaceship carrying the first man, a place called Anarkia.
Speaker 1: Sarage starts out working on instruction manuals for cosmonauts, not
Speaker 1: the most exciting work, but it will come in handy
Speaker 1: because one day in February nineteen eighty five, Serge gets
Speaker 1: a call the space station Salume seven. It's lost power.
Speaker 1: It's dead. If we don't rescue it, the Americans will
Speaker 1: overtake us and win the space race. So here's the plan.
Speaker 1: It's kind of crazy. We're going to send two cosmonauts
Speaker 1: to this dead thing and try to turn the power
Speaker 1: back on. But we don't really know how to do
Speaker 1: it because it's never been done before. So we need
Speaker 1: someone who can figure out how to do it, someone
Speaker 1: to lead a mission from the ground, someone who knows
Speaker 1: the station back to front, and we're thinking this could
Speaker 1: be you. June sixth, nineteen eighty five, ten forty am
Speaker 1: Mission Control, a loud, ominous rumbling starts up on Sarage's radio.
Speaker 1: It's a sound of a rocket taking off. Two cosmouts
Speaker 1: are launching into space to the dead, empty station. Sarah
Speaker 1: has got a big job ahead of it in about
Speaker 1: forty eight hours, the time it'll take to reach Earth's orbit.
Speaker 1: He's gonna have to tell these two cosmonauts how they're
Speaker 1: going to do this thing no one's ever done before.
Speaker 1: How to land on a dead station. Usually landing on
Speaker 1: a working station is the easy bed. It's all done automatically.
Speaker 1: But this station is dead, and that means Sarage has
Speaker 1: to figure out how to do it manually. How to
Speaker 1: land on the station with nothing to tell you the way,
Speaker 1: the speed, the angle. It's a bit like driving a
Speaker 1: race car at night with no lights, no markers, but
Speaker 1: Saragey is on it. He goes into a simulator, a
Speaker 1: kind of fake spaceship. It's the same thing I trained on.
Speaker 1: It literally looks and feels like a real spaceship, but
Speaker 1: it's set up in a warehouse on Earth. The next
Speaker 1: best thing to being in space, so he starts practicing
Speaker 1: how to get the tiny ship to spend at the
Speaker 1: same angle as the station, how to get the right speed,
Speaker 1: and his accuracy has to be exact. If he's off
Speaker 1: by an inch millimeters, even the rocket will crash into
Speaker 1: the station and explode. The cosmonauts are dead. He tries
Speaker 1: again and again and again, failing and failing, until he's
Speaker 1: got it. He races back to mission control, calls up
Speaker 1: to the cosmonauts and tells them this is how you
Speaker 1: do it. It's now or never. Hundreds of miles away,
Speaker 1: the cosmonauts can see the looming bulk of the station
Speaker 1: through their porthole. It's spinning out of control, a twenty
Speaker 1: ton chunk of metals, and they're approaching it fast. At
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand miles an hour. Sarah Gey feels his breathing accelerate.
Speaker 1: At any moment, ground control could lose contact. You can
Speaker 1: imagine him shutting his eyes, hoping, praying, and then a
Speaker 1: juttering sound like something's wrong with the radio stating five seconds,
Speaker 1: four seconds, three seconds, two seconds, and then he hears it.
Speaker 1: The cosmonauts voices on the radio they'd made it, but
Speaker 1: Sarage knows it's just the beginning. The cosmonauts still have
Speaker 1: to enter the ship, find the root of the problem,
Speaker 1: and bring the station back to life. And they've got
Speaker 1: no idea what they're going to find inside. They didn't know,
Speaker 1: for example, if the entire station was filled with toxic gases.
Speaker 1: They didn't know if the station was frozen, they didn't
Speaker 1: know if the station was cracked. They had no idea.
Speaker 1: If you open the hatch and there's a big chunk
Speaker 1: of ice, you know, what would you do if you
Speaker 1: open the hatch and the led screens are broken, cracked,
Speaker 1: and there's glass, what do you do? They opened the
Speaker 1: hatch and very gingerly, wanting to the what's called a
Speaker 1: transfer compartment, and they slowly, gingerly again opened another hatch
Speaker 1: into the main compartment. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: I think both cosmonauts remember is that everything was just
Speaker 1: dead silence. They'd never been in space before in a
Speaker 1: completely silent environment, because when you're in a spaceship, things
Speaker 1: are worrying and clicking and moving and things like that.
Speaker 1: It's dead silence, a silence that I don't think any
Speaker 1: human being had ever really heard. It's an outer space
Speaker 1: and they're moving in this dead, dark, pitch black space
Speaker 1: station in utter silence. It's also freezing everything. The walls,
Speaker 1: the panels are covered in a sheet of ice. They
Speaker 1: move by touch. They have flashlights, of course, and they
Speaker 1: eventually figure out the lay of the lent. Through the
Speaker 1: weak beams of their torches. They can just about make
Speaker 1: out the station's long cavernous corridors, filled with lifeless equipment
Speaker 1: and reams of wires. Serage instructs them to work very carefully.
Speaker 1: All the batteries they check. They have these instruments, you know,
Speaker 1: zero volte zibol, zero volt, etc. All the batteries are dead.
Speaker 1: And remember it's really cold, so they can't spend too
Speaker 1: long on the station. And every time, you know, they
Speaker 1: go in there and they come back and they're completely
Speaker 1: freezing on the ground. And the Soviet press this mission
Speaker 1: was really downplayed. They didn't even say it was a
Speaker 1: rescue mission at all, just routine going up there and
Speaker 1: doing some science experiments. In fact, they had a press conference,
Speaker 1: a video press conference from space during their mission, these
Speaker 1: two cosmonauts, and they were told to take off their
Speaker 1: warm clothes, like their hats and gloves and whatever, because
Speaker 1: people would be wondering why they're wearing this in space.
Speaker 1: So for the duration of the conference, you know, however
Speaker 1: long twenty minutes or so, they were extremely cold, but
Speaker 1: pretending everything's fine. The idea is that nothing ever goes
Speaker 1: wrong in the Soviet space That's right, nothing ever goes
Speaker 1: wrong in the Soviet space program, or in the Soviet economy,
Speaker 1: or in Soviet society. The system was flawless, that was
Speaker 1: the party line, and the cosmonauts freezing their asses off,
Speaker 1: had to stick it out. The cosmonauts spend days working
Speaker 1: in pitch black, subzero temperatures trying to find a working
Speaker 1: power source. These kind of situations where everything has going sideways,
Speaker 1: is what they train you for as a cosmonaut. When
Speaker 1: I was training, we ran drills where things went perfectly,
Speaker 1: but I would say eighty percent of the time we
Speaker 1: were practicing for when things went wrong. But it still
Speaker 1: doesn't prepare you fully. So for a long time there's nothing.
Speaker 1: But then finally Sage sees a small number of lights
Speaker 1: begin to flicker. The crew had managed to reactivate one
Speaker 1: of the solar panels. This means the station finally has
Speaker 1: some power. It's gonna be okay. They can save the station.
Speaker 1: Mission control erupts an ecstatic applause. Saragey finds himself being
Speaker 1: wrapped into hugs, kissed on the cheeks. Mob This is
Speaker 1: a unique, unique event in the history of space exploration
Speaker 1: where the crew essentially brought their spaceship to a dead
Speaker 1: object and space and revived the whole thing within weeks.
Speaker 1: Saragey had done the near impossible. He saved the station.
Speaker 1: He wasn't going to be a national hero like a
Speaker 1: garden raiding through Red Square. The whole thing was top secret,
Speaker 1: but he was going to get a reward. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's a coincidence that very soon after the mission
Speaker 1: he gets assigned to a crew, a crew to actually
Speaker 1: go to space see the Earth from above, float around
Speaker 1: and zero gravity. His dream, the one he's had since
Speaker 1: he was a little boy, was finally about to come true.
Speaker 1: I think for Krakalio, I think it might have seemed
Speaker 1: when he's assigned to his first mission. My guess is,
Speaker 1: you know, the future is bright, and who knows what's ahead.
Speaker 1: That's the boundless future. But I think we have a
Speaker 1: better sense of it now that some of this stuff
Speaker 1: was just kind of the last gasp, the last gasp
Speaker 1: of a collapsing superpower. The Soviet Union then was frozen.
Speaker 1: The economy who was grinding to a halt. It was
Speaker 1: a time of total stagnation. Nothing was changing, and if
Speaker 1: it didn't change soon, it would come crashing down. That's Sergechmimon.
Speaker 1: He's a reporter for the New York Times. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty he was working as a journalist in South Africa
Speaker 1: when he was told by his editor, we want you
Speaker 1: to go and cover Moscow from the peak of summer
Speaker 1: to the depth of winter. Serge and his family stopped
Speaker 1: over in Helsinki and bought warm clothes, then took a
Speaker 1: slow train to Moscow on New Year's Eve. We had
Speaker 1: one kind of beer to celebrate, and if the train
Speaker 1: was empty, nobody was traveling. On New Year's night, December
Speaker 1: thirty first, early in the morning on January first, they
Speaker 1: pulled into Moscow Central Station. It was dead. Everybody was
Speaker 1: asleep after a night of revelry. Dawn was just breaking
Speaker 1: and the station clock tower was bathed in this beautiful
Speaker 1: golden light, and the square was covered in a fresh
Speaker 1: layer of untouched snow. It was like a storybook. Moscow
Speaker 1: a storybook Moscow. But soon enough reality hit. Shops were
Speaker 1: largely empty. You know, there was very little. There was
Speaker 1: you could survive. There was spread, there was me, but
Speaker 1: it was all on an elemental level, the bare minimum,
Speaker 1: because by the eighties the Soviet economy had stopped working
Speaker 1: for decades. All decisions about what to spend and how
Speaker 1: much to produce were made in a single office building
Speaker 1: in Moscow for millions of people. And while these bureaucrats
Speaker 1: in this office building put a ton of money towards
Speaker 1: flashy space projects, they didn't pay much attention to how
Speaker 1: people were going to feed themselves. And eventually, by the
Speaker 1: eighties this caught up with him. The system had become
Speaker 1: inefficient and corrupt. The Soviet Union couldn't produce enough grain
Speaker 1: to feed its own population. There were chronic shortages all around.
Speaker 1: Look look how expensive these carrots are, and there's nothing
Speaker 1: else in this stage store. But when things did occasionally appear,
Speaker 1: people went nuts. This could be toilet paper, this could
Speaker 1: be you know, toothpaste, it could be anything. News spread fast.
Speaker 1: Your neighbor would tell you, Hey, there's a cheese delivery
Speaker 1: at the store two streets over. You'd stop whatever you're
Speaker 1: doing and go. People whould rush to the store in
Speaker 1: line up. People spend up to three hours a day
Speaker 1: waiting in line. The longest lines are at the vodka shops.
Speaker 1: So there was you know, like an army of people
Speaker 1: who walked around Moscow all day trying to find things
Speaker 1: to buy and getting in line. And I would join
Speaker 1: those lines. The Soviet system was at breaking point, but
Speaker 1: people felt like they couldn't do anything about it. You
Speaker 1: had absolutely no saying politics and who ran your country
Speaker 1: and who ran your life, and to think about it,
Speaker 1: to talk about it was dangerous. Surges storybook Moscow turned
Speaker 1: into a nightmare, and this was very bad news for
Speaker 1: Serage as well, because if there was no money and
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, then there was no money for the
Speaker 1: space program, and that meant his dream of going to
Speaker 1: space might be over before it had even begun. It
Speaker 1: seemed that the country was stuck, that nothing would change,
Speaker 1: but then it did. This time, the Soviet seemed to
Speaker 1: have opted for a long term change. The man who
Speaker 1: took charge within hours of Constantine Chernienko's death, the new
Speaker 1: Soviet leader, Michael Go Mikhail Gorbach Mikhael Get used to
Speaker 1: the name Mika in the mid eighties, the gray suit
Speaker 1: of bureaucrats who had been running the country for decades
Speaker 1: began to well die off, one by one in quick succession.
Speaker 1: Andrewpov Chernenko, people you'd probably never heard of footnotes in history.
Speaker 1: Another Soviet leader who was too old and too sick
Speaker 1: when he took power to hold on to it has died.
Speaker 1: And then they chose a great and sort of fateful act.
Speaker 1: They chose a young man, well educated, well spoken, charming,
Speaker 1: smile Mikhail Gorbachev. Get used to the name Mikhail. He
Speaker 1: presented himself differently to the very formal, stuffy leaders that
Speaker 1: came before. He's got charisma, I mean, he's got charisma,
Speaker 1: Western style, much more aware of Soviet weaknesses, much more
Speaker 1: open to new ideas by Soviet standards. He was revolutionary.
Speaker 1: It was an almost immediate and Emma say, enormously exciting change.
Speaker 1: The change Gorbach would bring to the Soviet Union was seisman.
Speaker 1: This is the story of the emergence of Michael Segeevich Gorbachev,
Speaker 1: of the most sweeping changes in the Soviet Union since
Speaker 1: the Russian Revolution. In February nineteen eighty six, he delivered
Speaker 1: a speech that shook the country. Gaim was that we
Speaker 1: had to reform the way we live, to reform the
Speaker 1: way we live in order to survive, to survive as
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, and the reform had to be radical
Speaker 1: from the bottom up. Gorbachev said that the people should
Speaker 1: be able to speak their minds, that people should be
Speaker 1: able to make money. He called it pedistroica, a restructuring
Speaker 1: and Glasnos openness is something like fresh It's a great treaty.
Speaker 1: I think that Rosness is a st step to us.
Speaker 1: Site it was an earthquake, it was a daily earthquake.
Speaker 1: For the first time, you could start your own business.
Speaker 1: And so suddenly bakeries appeared in Moscow and you could
Speaker 1: go get fresh bread. Things appeared that people could sell,
Speaker 1: little shops appeared, kiosks in the street. Culture opened up. Suddenly,
Speaker 1: every TV station is being more candid, is showing more.
Speaker 1: The girl singing in Moscow and the boy singing in
Speaker 1: Minneapolis reached out, slipped just a little and seemed to
Speaker 1: hold hands while half a world apart. And you're coming
Speaker 1: out of that system where everything was controlled to an
Speaker 1: incredible degree, and especially when it's out of that period
Speaker 1: of stagnation, when there was nothing fun on TV, nothing interesting,
Speaker 1: sort of variety shows where sixty year old veterans singing
Speaker 1: some old ballad, some old patriotic ballad, and suddenly these
Speaker 1: things are happening. American movies made it to Moscow in
Speaker 1: the past. Now you Rambo Star Wars. You should not
Speaker 1: have come back, James Bond. I've looked forward to this moment,
Speaker 1: mister Bond. There was so much demand. And then to
Speaker 1: enjoy it to the full, some savvy entrepreneurs powered and
Speaker 1: copies and set up makeshift movie theaters and their apartments.
Speaker 1: You could speak, you could buy, you could think. I mean,
Speaker 1: all these things that had been under a cloud were
Speaker 1: now out in the open. There was a sense that,
Speaker 1: you know, the system was changing, and that change encompassed
Speaker 1: everything from how you did your shopping to the space program.
Speaker 1: The space program that in nineteen eighty five did still
Speaker 1: have its space station, It's crown jewel, but had no
Speaker 1: more money. The country was in such bad shape the
Speaker 1: government could no longer afford displourage on space. This was
Speaker 1: not just a practical matter, It was a question of
Speaker 1: national identity. The cosmonauts became real heroes. Utika guide in
Speaker 1: the first men in space. So there was great pride
Speaker 1: in this program. It showed that Russia, the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: that the Soviet people were ahead of the West in
Speaker 1: something that is so kind of advanced and dramatic and romantic.
Speaker 1: But now there was no more money to fund this
Speaker 1: dramatic and romantic cornerstone of Soviet identity. No breaking the
Speaker 1: next frontier, no inspiring the Soviet people, no future, and
Speaker 1: no future for the program meant no future for our man, Saragey.
Speaker 1: But Gorbachev had an idea, an idea of how to
Speaker 1: save the mighty but crumbling space program to sell Soviet
Speaker 1: space services globally on the commercial market. Yep. Gorbachev's big
Speaker 1: idea was capitalism. After decades of keeping everything under wraps,
Speaker 1: the Soviets were now going to say to the world,
Speaker 1: our space program is open for business. We'll launch your
Speaker 1: satellites for you. So you could pay X million dollars,
Speaker 1: deliver your satellite to the Soviets and they would launch
Speaker 1: it into space. We can also sell you some of
Speaker 1: our world class equipment, things no other space programs have.
Speaker 1: And this should have been an extremely attractive sales pitch
Speaker 1: for countries that don't have their own space programs. But
Speaker 1: there's one big problem. Of course, they don't understand a
Speaker 1: thing about capitalism, or markets or anything. The Soviets weren't
Speaker 1: great at making high tech stuff, but after years of
Speaker 1: living under communism, they were not so good at selling things,
Speaker 1: marketing advertising. But then they finally come up with a plan,
Speaker 1: a plan that would totally change the space program and
Speaker 1: give our man Sarage a chance to fulfill his dream.
Speaker 1: Decades before Elon Musk, the Soviets started thinking, what if
Speaker 1: we sell seats to go to space, invite people into
Speaker 1: the heart of the Soviet program, train them, fly them
Speaker 1: up there, in other words, space tourism. There was the
Speaker 1: idea that would eventually lead me Lance Bass to go
Speaker 1: to Russia and train to be a cosmo. The first
Speaker 1: country wanting to buy the Soviet services Japan. They sent
Speaker 1: a TV journalist to the Soviet Union to fly with
Speaker 1: the cosmonauts. They were so desperate for money, the Soviets
Speaker 1: agreed that the rocket could be sponsored by Japanese brands,
Speaker 1: a pharmaceutical company, a manufactor of sanitary towels, and a
Speaker 1: maker of karaoke equipment. The deal was worth twelve million
Speaker 1: dollars pretty good, but it wasn't enough, so the Soviets
Speaker 1: decided to go bigger. They were going to create a
Speaker 1: contest to try to find the best person in an
Speaker 1: entire country to go to space. I was driving my
Speaker 1: car home from work and flicking through the stations trying
Speaker 1: to find some music, and I heard an announcement as
Speaker 1: posed an advert really, and it started off with astronaut wanted,
Speaker 1: no experience necessary. In the next episode, this unassuming British
Speaker 1: woman travels to Russia like me, trained to be a
Speaker 1: cosmonaut and flies with Serge on the mission he almost
Speaker 1: didn't come home from. That's next time on The Last Soviet.
Speaker 1: The Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with
Speaker 1: iHeart Podcast and Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dad Audio
Speaker 1: and hosted by me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate
Speaker 1: Osbourne and mangesh Hada Kadoor with Oz Wallisham and Kostas
Speaker 1: Linos from iHeart Executive produced by Katrina Norvelle and Nikki
Speaker 1: Ettore from Sama's Dad Audio Our executive producers or Joe
Speaker 1: Sykes and Dasha Lisitzina. Produced by Asia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitzena,
Speaker 1: and Joe Sykes, writing by Lydia Marchant, research by Mika
Speaker 1: Golubovski and Molly Schwartz, music by Will Epstein, themed by
Speaker 1: Martin or String, sound designed by Richard Ward and special
Speaker 1: things to Nando via Lyssa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Byrne,
Speaker 1: Bob Pittman, and Isaac Lead If you want to hear
Speaker 1: more shows like this, nothing is more important to the
Speaker 1: creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews, so
Speaker 1: please spread the love wherever you listen and number