Fellow Red Moon author David S. Michaels and I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Benjamin Grundy of Mysterious Universe yesterday evening, and only hours later — boom! — the podcast interview is available here.

Benjamin leads us through a broad spectrum of subjects — NASA secrecy, the question as to why there is this sudden deep interest in the Moon by the major powers of the world, what the Moon has to offer, the future of space flight, and, of course, Red Moon. On the premium version of the podcast, he also explores with us the subject of UFOs, and sightings of them by astronauts and cosmonauts.

The Mysterious Universe podcasts are professional efforts with excellent audio quality and an eye to keeping content fresh and compelling. I highly recommend them.

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

An article on the Telegraph news website from February of this year noted a chill in the relationship between Russia and the United States, and hinted at the possibility of a new Cold War in space. Adrian Blomfield’s piece “Russia sees moon plot in NASA plans” reports that Russian officials claim their nation’s offers the the United States to participate in a cooperative Moon effort have been rebuffed.

Why?

Because. The ice on the Moon is better.

And why is that?

Though it would be easy to imagine a customer of a Star Wars cantina making this odd comment (in subtitles), the real reason is that, assuming there is any ice there, it should be, unlike earthly ice, chock-full of an isotope of helium called helium 3.

A plentiful supply of helium 3 — rare on Earth, but abundant in space — combined with an as-yet unperfected nuclear fusion technology, could potentially provide an efficient source of power and a meaningful, clean alternative to fossil fuels for an energy-hungry Earth.

The Russian claim is that the United States wants to control it.

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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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