Begin of Space Era

• During the late 1950's and early 1960's, the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union was hot. 
• Both sides built and tested rockets as quickly as they could, trying to be the first to launch an artificial satellite into orbit, often with explosive results.
• some, most notably amateur radio operators, listened more closely than others
• And of they were young brothers from Italy, Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia

Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia

• Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia were two AMATEUR radio opmators who established a SOVIET listening station in the 1960s
• Located in an abandoned bunker called Torre bert in Italy, claim to have recorded secret soviet missions that ended in mystery.
• As evidence, the brothers realeased recordings of what they claimed were intercepted soviet and american satellite communications

KORABI-Sputnik

• When the Soviets announced the successful launch of Sputnik I on October 4, 1957 and published the radio frequency for everyone to hear
• Soviets launched Sputnik 2 only a month after Sputnik 1
• the Achille and Giovanni discovered something new: a heartbeat.
• It was the heartbeat of Laika, a small dog. Sadly for Laika, Sputnik 2 was a one-way trip; there was no provision for re-entry or recovery.
• About two months later in February 1961, variously reported as the 2nd or the 4th of the month, they picked up another transmission from space, which experts interpreted at the time as the dying breaths of an unconscious man from space, which experts interpreted at the time as the dying breaths of an unconscious man

The Recordings

• Sputnik 1
• unconscious man DIEING

Memories

• Yuri Gagarin wasn’t really the first man in space in 1961 he was just the first to come back alive.
• One supposed lost cosmonaut, Gennady Zavadovsky, was seen in a 1959 photo in "Ogoniok," Russia's oldest weekly magazine.