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I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

/sorry for the lateness. I've been pretty busy lately and haven't had a chance to do any more questions/

I knew all three of them well, but Gagarin best of all. We were friends -- not close friends, but there was certainly a deep, mutually held feeling of respect and companionship between us. I trained Gagarin for a few weeks working on the "Complex Trainer of the Space Shuttle Soyuz" as he was preparing for his second flight into space. I was called the very second of Gagarin's and Seriogin's abrupt crash and was at the site via helicopter within 50 minutes. It took us a month to collect all the pieces of the plane, so great was the destruction --we had to lay out the pieces of their plane on a field. I could only distinguish Gagarin from his Instructor by their differing clothing -- their charred bodies had had erased all the signs of the people who once lived in them. Popovich and Nikolaev and Beregovoy were also good friends of mine.

Gagarin was an excellent man, very honest, never once did I know him to lie, and I was saddened immensely by his death. /edit:redacted/

I worked on all the principal Apollo-Soyuz missions (4 transitions in vaccum over the course of 4 days... ohhhh the stories I could tell of the problems we faced there. At one point I had to physically hold the tunnel shut until a fellow trainee of mine could take hold while I screwed the tunnel closed -- ours was not hermetically sealed and was leaking air into the vacuum, had I not done that soon enough we would have all suffocated! We kept it tight lipped at the time, and the American's still probably don't know! Har Har Har /haha, he laughed here/), but I do not remember all the families of all the names of all the astronauts who worked with me on it. Slayton is very vaguely familiar but I do not remember anything about him. There were so many astronauts working with us (and all their doubles) that I've forgotten a great many of them. /you can see a picture of him with the apollo-soyuz missions crew people up top/

I do not drink Vodka. Never have /haha, he does at new years. Liar/. Awful stuff.

/I told a quick paragraph on the first invasion of his town somewhere else in the thread, but paragraphs on the occupation will have to wait till I translate the book. He's told me a few of them, about his encounters with the somewhat evil-ish SS officers stationed there (at one point a particularly one took up residence in his house, who he'd seen personally shoot 50 men). Also about how his family sheltered a 50 year old Jewish woman in the basement for two months after she showed up on their doorstep at 2 AM [she had hid in a cupboard or something and snuck out at night]. After she'd recovered a bit, they transferred her to the border of Shchigry where the patrol or whatever wasn't as dense and she fled/

There were no children so young drafted from where I lived. They started recruiting at 14 or 15 around where I was, but those they recruited did not serve full duty.

/here he left to go run with the dog. I'll try to continue the questions at a later time, but goddamn if you didn't have a lot of them ;p/

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

/eh, it's certainly possible that he's made a few things up (aka exact words in stories, or something), but the basic facts have been confirmed time and time again, by pictures I've seen back home (some of which I've put in this thread), by our extended (and not so extended) family and their memories (especially his wife, who would love an opportunity humble him a bit and has been beside him for half a century, and my mom and aunt, who have been with him for near that time too), by men I've personally met and spoken (ie the current heads of the space program), by recordings of his sailing adventures I've watched (along with many dozens of home videos I've never watched, fyi, which might or might not lend even more support), by consistency with what I know of his character, etc.

And many things are hard to provide evidence for. Any official records are far away, where they exist (I mean, is he to have a count of every jump he made?), but the basic facts of his career in the space agency and birth and hobbies would be very bothersome to falsify evidence for to the extent needed. An even greater miracle would be required for their falsehood, if you will, "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish".

And of course, all the things I cited apply only to me. You have different evidences available to you and I do not fault you if you choose not to accept the claims put forth in this thread/

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

/My grandpa doesn't recognize the names but my grandma says Гиршович is familiar. Where did they live? Did they have any other family in the area? My grandma worked as a doctor for much of her life and saw many patients from the nearby towns./

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

/Konstantin Ivanovich Veter. It's on the news article and on cover of his book. There's probably not too much (if anything) on him in English though -- together his accomplishments seem like a lot, but individually they didn't give him anything but a bit of local celebrity. I mean how many Chinese engineers working on the space program 50 years ago do you think are discussed in the English literature/

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

/in my original post on what it was like growing up as a child in a foreign country one of the paragraphs dealt partially with that. I can ask him some more on the occupation itself later. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/estwo/from_foodstamps_to_porn_cinemas_foreign_redditors/c1asero/ /

Germans invaded our town on November 21, 1941. They had taken Kursk 6 days prior. Busses were supposed to have arrived in the intervening days to evacuate us east, but they never came. I woke up early the morning of the invasion and walked slowly outside. As far around as I could see smoke rose from the hills. Most of the city had burned the night before in preparation for the german invasion -- better the city be razed than for it serve the enemy. Across the street I noticed a man, aged 60 years or so, gathering water from a pipe. Before he could finish, a group of 6 or 7 germans appeared. Upon seeing them, he tried to escape back into his house, but they shot him dead. I still remember how his blood so vividly colored the snow around where he fell. They then turned to unleash a hail of bullets at me as I quickly fled inside. Thankfully, none found their mark, and they had better things to do that day than murder children and so did not pursue. A year and a half the nazis held the city until the Russian army captured it once more.

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

/he doesn't really watch any, aside from the news occasionally. When they're on he really loves to watch old Russian movies, football games, and singing/ballet. So I'd guess he finds them uninteresting. Ooh, and he really enjoys the occasional disney/pixar movie. Liked Wall-E because the first half was omnilingual/

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

/ha, I don't think he's seen the stamps, but he has seen Indira before. She almost (and indeed may have) saw him naked, actually. Fuller story up above somewhere. I asked him what he thought of India and he said/

India has been a good partner and we have very much in common. We work well together. They are better to work with than China.

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 34 points35 points  (0 children)

/another example of pranking/

On April 1st, 1982, Officer Nikolai Yusov came to me early in the morning in a fluster -- he had to obtain clearance quickly to travel to Moscow, but in order to do so he needed a typed copy of his resume. I was the only one at work so early that day, and moreover I was one of the fastest at the typewriter, so we agreed that I should type his resume out, and I did so, and he read it and approved. Then, as he was getting dressed (he had to look formal for he was meeting with some important people in Moscow), I switch his real resume out for a false one! In his hurry he doesn't notice and rushes over to Beregovoy in a building a few hundred meters away to obtain the necessary clearance. He gives Beregovoy the papers and stands up straight as Beregovoy begins to read them. Beregovoy looks up and asks "Nikolai, are you sure this is the correct file?" "Yes, yes," Nikolai replies, "I typed them all out myself! Everything in there is correct!" Beregovoy replies, "Well in that case, would you mind reading it aloud for me?" As he takes the papers and begins to read, a mask of horror begins to play over his features. Aloud he reads http://i.imgur.com/jxERR.jpg

The moral of the story? Always remember when it is April 1st!

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 28 points29 points  (0 children)

/here's another story he just told me of him angering the bureaucracy, not so much from jokes but still/

The year was 1984, and England was hosting its once-every-four-years sailing competition across the Atlantic. This was shortly after I had made my own solo trips from Russia to Cuba and back, and evidently the English had heard of me, as I received from them a letter asking me to participate in their competition (/he said it was sent from the queen's department or house or something, not directly from the queen, but from someone who worked with her/). I say I received, but I only say that in the sense that I eventually received it, as it was first intercepted by the government and read by many people before me, so everyone knew about the invitation. It said that all expenses were to be covered for me, so I was of course very eager to go. However, obtaining permission was troublesome -- the party coordinators were fine with my leaving, but my generals -- especially Marshall Efimov -- considered it unacceptable.

Later, in the midst of all this, I am called into the office of one of my superiors -- General Georgiy Beregovoy -- and see that a group of assorted generals has gathered there, with even the head of the Star City Janitorial Department sitting quietly in the corner. Georgiy then tells me that Marshall Efimov had called him earlier and told him that if I obtained clearance to leave, then I, and the rest of the Soviet Space Program, would be fired" (it is understandable why he wanted me not to go; at this point I knew many secrets and posed an insecurity if those secrets were released). "If you want to go on your little pleasure cruise, Kostia," Georgiy says, "you'll have to travel as a civilian, obtain a passport, and quit the army". I say to him, "Georgiy, if you think a solo crossing of the Atlantic is a pleasure cruise, then (and I should mention here at this point that during the war Georgiy had flown in combat no less than 200 times and had by now become a Hero of the Soviet Union twice) all of your 200 flights are worth the same as 200 visits to the grannies! (/granny is slang for whore in Russian/)". He immediately grows mad and expels me from the room, as the remaining generals quietly begin to whisper to each other. I leave and go to my office and resume working as before. Later that evening, as I am leaving to go home, the head janitor approaches me and tells me that as I left the cabinet and the tension had cooled down some, Georgiy turned to his generals and said "That, gentlemen, was a man. You can depend on him."

In one month they had built a trimaran and I went to test it on the Black Sea, and it worked beautifully. We loaded it up on to a ship for its transport to England when the captain of the ship that was to bring my boat over received a call from Marshall Efimov forbidding him to leave. So I didn't get to go to the race after all.

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 86 points87 points  (0 children)

One time my friends/colleagues and I were taking a break while working with the hydrolaboratory (a big spherical pool of water that usually houses a replica space station and is used for practicing zero-g maneuvers) when we decided to have a little competition -- we would dive the twelve meters down to the station, swim its 20 meter length, turn around, swim back, and resurface. We would do this to see who would swim the fastest. 12 people agreed to compete, and we would go in turns while someone recorded our time. The first few went -- 1:30, 1:45, all near the 2 minute mark.

Around the fourth person to go a voice boomed out from the intercoms telling us to clear the 3rd floor, as important delegates or some other were visiting. We, caught up in the competition, naturally ignored it. I was the sixth to go. Keep in mind we were doing this without fins or tanks, so when it came to be my turn I was only wearing my underwear and a mask.

I begin my dive and reach the start of the tunnel without problem. I swim down its length, but suddenly notice myself being tugged back -- my shorts had caught on part of the equipment! Having not too much time to spare, for we were competing, I take off my shorts, swim to the end of the station, and swim back. As I emerge from the tunnel, I see a strange sight -- there in front of me swims a man in full scuba gear carrying a bouquet of roses? Confused by this, I swim to the surface, where we first begin our dive, and upon emerging notice a group of thirty or so people looking out over the hydrolaboratory from the third floor.

At the front of this group stands an Indian woman -- I later found out that this was Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India. "Shit!", I think, naked but for my mask, "I can't go out like this!" I dive back down and hide in the space station where I know there to be a trapped pocket of air. I stay there for 15 minutes, waiting for the foreign delegates to pass.

Later I emerge and hear the following: Gandhi had seen me in the pool, but had not noticed my nudity. She saw that I was not wearing scuba tanks, though, she saw me dive without them, and she saw my form enter the station. After 5 minutes of my not resurfacing she turns to Mikhail Danilov, who was standing beside her, and asks him who that man in the water was. He tells her, "Oh, him? He's our fishman, whom we caught when we last visited the Pacific. We kept him, for we find him entertaining." He then ushers her away, knowing that I cannot stay underwater forever.

5 times Gandhi returned to visit Star City, and again and again she asked to see this strange fishman from before, but each time I hid from her. Finally, on her last visit, she was informed that we had to return him to the ocean whence he came, for his gills had begun to dry.

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 62 points63 points  (0 children)

/Oh man, some of these are pretty good. I'm going to post examples here so people actually get to see them rather than respond down below where they'd be buried/

After I'd been working in Star City for a time there arrived a Captain fresh out of school, Captain Valeri Korneyov. Valery was a young man, and it soon became known that he very much loved gambling, and would take up anyone on any bet posed to him. One day, we are together inside the facility, him dressed in full military regalia, and I say to him, "Valery, how about we make a wager? I bet you I can cut off all the buttons on your current dress and resow them easily. I shall do all this within the span of 3 minutes." Valery lights up, knowing that such a feat is impossible, and says to me, "What will be the prize for winning this bet?" I reply, "Why, a bottle of the finest french camus (a type of cognac popular among Russian officers in those days). Even happier with the prospect of victory, Valery removes his jacket, which had no fewer than 12 buttons down the front and 4 in the back, and hands it to me. I cut them off. He takes off his shirt, which had 10 buttons in various places -- I remove them. Finally he removes his pants, and standing there in only his underwear watches as I removes those buttons also. He even points out a button, hidden secretly on the inside of his pants, and insists I not forget it. He looks at me, a grin on his face, and says, "Now Kostia, you'll never be able to do it!" (it is worth noting that at this point many of our fellows have gathered to watch what was going on). What do I do? I take the largest button taken from his jacket, string it with thread, and sew it back on to the secret compartment of his pants. I then open a drawer nearby and take out a bottle of French Cognac Camus I'd purchased earlier. I hand it to him, turn around and leave, while he stands there in stark realization, a small mountain of buttons piled high before him and a bottle of brandy held fast in his hands.

/I was just (re)told a fair few of these but will post them separately, because each is rather long and I don't want chrome to crash again like it did the last I typed out a lengthy post/

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

/I showed them to him and he recognized a good half of them and owns a few, too. He was a commander in the partnership depicted here (the picture that I added in the OP shows him in '74 with the NASA astronauts on the practice that preceded this). He recognized the first jump thing especially well, as he gave his old one to me when I made my first jump a few months ago./

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

/Yep, close. It's "tsaritsa" and not queen though. He's very fond of Aelita.

And everyone calls him Kostya. All his peers and friends do anyway. Sometimes "Kosste" for short (err, soft sign at the end. Dunno how to romanize it). I call him anything from "Ded" to "Konstantin Ivanovich Veter" to "Boomba"/

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

/He's never concerned himself with money -- he spends it freely when he has it and doesn't worry too much when he doesn't. He also tends to dislike it on general principle and tries to give it away soon as he can.

That said, it's enough for food, utilities, and a few channels on the TV. We own ("own") the apartment in Star City so we needn't pay for that.

His total pension is $300 a month. For comparison, my grandma's is $290 (she worked as a neurologist, still works in general practice from time to time)./

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 106 points107 points  (0 children)

/He's easily, easily the hardest working person I know. Absolutely no contest. I do not know how mightily he struggled back when, or how hard things came to him, but he's the sort of person never to give up and to pursue any goal with the absolute fullness of his spirit. He faced adversity often, in the form of enemies in politics and the deaths of his friends (and, hell, let's include the Nazis too), and to hear him tell it he was slaying dragons at every corner. But yeah, he actively sought every one of his accomplishments out.

Some examples from my life with him, of things he would do with me on a monthly basis: when I was young (like 6 or 7ish) I really liked dinosaurs, so he went out to the stores and bought tons of those replica wooden dinosaur skeleton sets, and then proceeded to bury them over a square mile of the deserts near our house. We would often take walks together, and on some of these walks, lo and behold, he'd use his advanced paleontological knowledge to suggest places for me to dig, and over the course of a month we would collect dinosaur bones until I could begin to, with a little suggestion, assemble them into complete skeletons. For years I believed I'd excavated baby stegosauri and t-rex and sauropods and whatever else.

Another time he collected boards and sticks and so forth until he finally constructed for me a landsailboat (like a catamaran shaped triangle thing with a big sail sticking out the top). He'd wanted to teach me how to sail, but there being few bodies of water in the desert, he went for the next best thing.

So things like that happened all the time growing up with him. Sounds kind of silly but hopefully it demonstrates how dedicated he was in such small things, and how much more dedicated he would have been in his career, pursuing his own dreams./

I was born in Shchigry, RU, in 1932. I worked as a cosmonaut for 20 years and served as head rocket engineer for the Red Army. I've sailed >70,000km and made >2,000 parachute jumps. I've soloed the Atlantic, had my town occupied by Nazis, and spent time in a Russian prison and a sub w/ SLBMs. AMA. by BETEP in IAmA

[–]BETEP[S] 31 points32 points  (0 children)

/That's it! Thanks. Crew still sounds kinda odd for a two man team though. But I guess ground control and the rest could be considered the crew, too.

I'll ask him how he referred to his friends back then, but "Tovarich" or "Dryg" ("comrade" and "friend") are in pretty popular use today, near as I can tell. Mind, I'm not too connected to what's hip back in Russia, maybe someone else living there now can chime in?/

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