The Mysterious Death of Yuri Gagarin

Explore the life and tragic death of Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, and uncover the mysteries that still surround his fatal crash in 1968. A hero lost too soon.

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[Ridthetigr]

Gagarin used to travel to the launch site to see the rockets being tested. They fell apart, fell over, blew up etc. but he still climbed into one and launched. Heart of a lion.

[eriggle]

Wouldn't it be more accurate to title this video "The Entire Life of Yuri Gagarin"?

[strummy]

I saw Yuri Gagarin in Old Trafford Manchester when his open top car pulled up outside our school on the way to Trafford Park. The whole school lined the road and he stayed with us for about 10 minutes he actually gave me the thumbs up. One of my biggest claims to fame. What a hero…no not me, Yuri.

[jordanpeters]

A friend of mine was walking through London when he saw some men standing in a line ... so he stood at the end of the line. Gagarin appeared and walked along the line shaking hands with everybody ... including him.

[ClappOnUpp]

It's sad to know he died before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969. I think he would have been in awe....
If he had lived, I like to think they would have met in their 70s, shook one another's hand, sat down together on a park bench in new york or Moscow, and reminisced about their accomplishments; each complimenting the other on their impact upon our world.. both feeling that the other man was more influential than themself🥲

[FliesFLL]

OK, I can tell you what happened. "The rain turned to sleet and conditions were so bad that I canceled the session and requested permission to return to base". Gagarin flew into icing conditions and wound up stall/spinning this airplane. MIG-15's are scary airplanes to fly, with terrible stall characteristics and since the pitch trim did not alter the position of the horizontal stabilizer the way it does every jet produced since, this airplane was a death trap in a high speed dive! A transonic shock wave would form over the elevator hinge line and you simply could not pull out of a dive. Damned if you do, damned if you do not....

[Silentgrace]

I honestly assumed this was a Decoding the Unknown until I realized Simon lasted a solid two minutes into a script without going on a tangent 😂 fabulous content as always!

[mpersad]

A superbly produced and presented video, a fitting biography to Yuri Gagarin the first man in space. Thank you, the channel's quality work continues.

[lestranged]

I think the early cosmonauts, like the early astronauts, had no preparation for fame. They had so much training for the mission but had no way to expect and cope with the life afterwards. For an ordinary person to be thrust into worldwide fame like that, must have been overwhelming.

[robertw.anderson]

I had passed on his video several times mostly because of the length. But I also doubted that much real information could be found.
This guy was a strangely appealing young man. And I had no idea there was any controversy about his death. Flying in the USSR was risky business in this era.
I’m very glad I made the time for this presentation. Lots of details!

[kevinfoster]

It completely freaked the Soviets out after this happened they no longer let their heroes do anything dangerous!

[christopherreed]

Based on USAF General Yaeger's evaluation of a MiG-15 during the Korean War, I'd say (as a non-pilot) that the wake-turbulence theory has some merit. Yaeger and the test crew were warned by the North Korean pilot who'd defected with the MiG-15 that the planes had a bad tendency not to recover from spins (the recovery procedure he described was to push the stick forward to the white line painted on the instrument panel and, if the plane had not recovered in three revolutions, to eject immediately). Yaeger did not spin-test the MiG, as such tests had been prohibited in order to prevent the only MiG-15 the USAF had from being destroyed. He did, however, intentionally stall the MiG with the gear down just after lifting off. He wrote in his autobiography that there was no shake or slop in the stick as the stall initiated. The MiG "just quit flying" and slammed back onto the runway.
The weather conditions described by Leonov are also significant, IMO. Low cloud, low temperatures at or near freezing, and rain are likely to create dangerous ice buildup on the wibg surfaces, changing their aerodynamics and rendering an aircraft unflyable.
Ultimately the MiG-15 was, in its own way, as flawed a vehicle as the early Soyuz spacecraft. The same NK pilot whose MiG Yaeger test flew also warned him not under any circumstances to turn on the auxiliary fuel pump, since doing so had a tendency to blow the tail off the airplane. And we have the cockpit vents mentioned in this documentary that weren't standard on Russian MiG-15s, and apparently only poorly understood (or not at all) by Russian ground crews.
Ultimately, it's a matter of "too many suspects". Icing, the MiG-15s already iffy stability (made worse by the wing tanks), or any one of a number of other issues present in the design could easily have killed the two pilots. And one or another of them probably did.

[jasonmansfieldsr]

I worked with a guy who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1989. He was of the opinion, after living through Soviet media control and all the rest, that Yuri Gagarin was not the first man in space. He was the first to come back ALIVE. of course, we may never know for sure.

[thsealord]

Bad weather, limited visibility and an aircraft design with some especially dangerous tendencies. It really didn't need much else for an accident to happen.

[Dee-xf]

Great piece! I was born in the US in 1963 and have heard about Gagarin my whole life, mostly as a kind of vaguely caricatured figure of the Cold War. This video really humanized him for me.

[larrybremer]

The KGB investigated itself and found no wrongdoing.

[Kataton]

Learning something new never stops! Loving the channel

[markfinlay]

Yuri Aleksyevich was a true hero of the Soviet Union. He was the one who had the "right stuff".

[sarahcoleman]

When you know you have no chance, you might as well make the boss laugh.
"I should be sent because my name is Cosmic, and it'll sound good." 😂

[dark-lovesoni]

Those "harvester operators" are also collectively immortalized, and got 1 of the best bar-stories to ever exist. They got to say they personally welcomed the first space-man home. It's a truly unique honor. Aside from the mission staff, they were the closest any other earth-dwelling human will ever have come to the first cosmic homecoming celebration.