Jul 7, 2026 · 35 min · 17 segments
On a winter night in 1961, in a stone bunker on a hilltop outside Turin, two young Italian brothers sat in front of a wall of homemade radio equipment and heard something they would spend the rest of…
To understand the story of the lost cosmonauts, we have to step back into the strange, secretive years of the early space race.
In the 1950s and into the 60s, two superpowers were racing each other into orbit.
They each decided that whoever reached space first would have demonstrated something fundamental about the supremacy of their political system.
Whoever landed a man on the moon or returned a man safely from beyond the atmosphere would have won something that could not easily be argued with.
Rockets that exploded on launch pads were reported in newspapers from Florida to California.
Astronauts who died in training accidents were named, mourned and given funerals with military honors.
Those who didn't, or failed in their training, were quietly removed from the historical records.
their names left off official rosters.
They knew that for every success the Soviet space program announced, there were almost certainly failures that the program was not.
The question was, how many? And what was happening? Into that question, on the hilltop outside Turin, walked two amateur radio operators with chicken wire antennas and a willingness to listen to anything that came from above.
To understand the story of the lost cosmonauts, we have to step back into the strange, secretive years of the early space race.
In the 1950s and into the 60s, two superpowers were racing each other into orbit.
They each decided that whoever reached space first would have demonstrated something fundamental about the supremacy of their political system.
Whoever landed a man on the moon or returned a man safely from beyond the atmosphere would have won something that could not easily be argued with.
Rockets that exploded on launch pads were reported in newspapers from Florida to California.
Astronauts who died in training accidents were named, mourned and given funerals with military honors.
Those who didn't, or failed in their training, were quietly removed from the historical records.
their names left off official rosters.
They knew that for every success the Soviet space program announced, there were almost certainly failures that the program was not.
The question was, how many? And what was happening? Into that question, on the hilltop outside Turin, walked two amateur radio operators with chicken wire antennas and a willingness to listen to anything that came from above.
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