Larry Ketchersid, new novelist, author of Dusk before the Dawn, and fellow listee on Paul Levinson’s list of Best First SciFi Novels, opens his review of Red Moon with the following praise:

The US-USSR space race re-imagined, with historical fiction combined with a near-future earth on the brink; a great read, not just for NASA fans or sci-fi fans, but all readers.

This book combines an in-depth knowledge of the Soviet Cosmonaut program and moon exploration in general with a plausible near future environmental/ political forced need for a new fuel supply and an intertwined, well thought out face-paced read. One of the most enjoyable reads off my stack in quite some time.

Read the rest here.

And thank you Larry, and best wishes to you and toward all your endeavors.

Reposted from Daniel Brenton’s Weblog, The Odd Little Universe of Daniel Brenton

There is a bizarre story involving the Soviet space program that originally circulated in the late 1980s, and still pops up here and there on the internet. Attributed to The Washington Post, the story spoke of six Soviet cosmonauts being witness to seven giant figures hanging in space, in the form of humans, with mist-like halos and wings the size of those on jumbo jets.

In other words, the classic depiction of angels.

This reputedly was witnessed by cosmonauts Vladimir Solevev, Oleg Atkov and Leonid Kizim in July of 1985, during their 155th day aboard the Salyut 7 space station, and was later sighted again by three other Soviet cosmonaut-scientists, including woman cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya. “They were smiling,” it is claimed she said, “as though they shared in a glorious secret.”

Afterwards, Vladimir Solevev, during a 1997 tour to schools in the United Kingdom, dismissed the story, and expressed puzzlement as to why the Post would print something so obviously absurd.

(No comment.)

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Did Soviet cosmonauts die in space in the early 1960s?

Any space buff worth his or her salt is keenly aware of the tragic fate of Vladimir Komarov, who died on April 24, 1967, due to parachute failure after the reentry of Soyuz 1.

But the question really is: were there events like this (or ones even more dramatic) earlier in the Space Race that the Soviet Union chose to hide from us?

As a child I heard a number of stories of amateur radio operators intercepting signals of cosmonauts dying or otherwise meeting some dark fate in their efforts to conquer space. The most dramatic I can recall was of a cosmonaut stranded in orbit, his heartbeat failing as he dies, the cabin depressurizing, and his lifeless body taken from the cabin by unknown means.

(Of course, how an amateur radio operator would be able to tell that last part is way beyond me.)

I’m sure these kind of stories helped prime my young mind to be distrustful of the official accounts of Soviet space activities, and lead to my imagination being seized in 1969 by the speculation that Luna 15 (an ostensibly unmanned probe sent to the Moon during the same time as America’s Apollo 11) was secretly a manned space shot. This in turn lead to a short story I wrote that, many years later, became the basis of the novel Red Moon.

Other than these rumors being good creepy stories to tell the kids just before bedtime (to make sure they never sleep again) is there anything to them?

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