Soviet Coverup- The Most Disastrous Space Mission in History

On July 20, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon and uttered the immortal words “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” bringing to a close the decade-long Space Race between the US and USSR. While the Americans beating the Soviets to the moon might seem inevitable in hindsight, this was not always the case. Indeed, the early days of the Space Race were marked by a seemingly endless string of spectacular Soviet achievements, including the first earth-orbiting satellite, the first animal in space, the first spacecraft to reach the moon, the first spacecraft to photograph the far side of the moon, the first man in space, the first woman in space, and the first “space walk.” Meanwhile, the American space program struggled to keep pace, resulting in a series of embarrassing, high-profile failures - and for more on that, please check out our previous video ‘Kaputnik’: America’s Largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite. But this seemingly unstoppable Soviet success hid a dark reality. While NASA operated in the full light of public scrutiny, the Soviet space program was cloaked in military secrecy, concealing a deeply flawed system rife with corruption, incompetence, and government officials more than willing to place political and ideological goals above the safety of cosmonauts. And never did these fatal flaws become more apparent than on April 24, 1967 when cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die on a space mission. This is the story of the ill-fated flight of Soyuz 1. This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout