Two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth, Traveling at five miles a second, a man completes a perfect circle around the globe. His name is Serge Krakov. He's a Soviet cosmonaut, and he's manning the world's only space station, the Pride and Joy of the U. S. S R. The year Sarage has been up there for three months by now on the space station. Every day starts the same way, with a call at seven a m. Moscow time from michig Control. He reports his stats, blood pressure, heart rate, and mood. Sometimes in the evening, when he feels lonely, he will tune his hand radio equipment to the right frequency and make contact with his friend in Australia, Maggie. They chat about what he's done that day, and she sends some clippings from the newspapers. That's a pleasure, pleasure. As the days bleed into one another, he's starting to feel a bit space sick. He's been counting down the weeks till he's due to come back to Earth, back to his home, his wife and their one year old daughter. But then one day, his friend, this woman in Australia, Maggie, tells him something troubling. She says, Sarage, something bad is happening in your country. After months strikes, protests, and deepening economic chaos. People are sleeping in train stations. There is no food in the shops. I gave them my money that they should old woman, we won't give you your bread. Law and order seem to be breaking down, the banding of the k President Gorbachev's grip on the country is slipping. The republics that make up the Soviet Union are starting to break away. There were wild scenes, gun fire, and three deaths. Soviet forces tried to capture the main center of opposition. Surage doesn't know what to think. He asked mischion control, what's going on? But they don't tell him anything, just parrot the party line. Nothing to be alarmed about. Everything is fine, And so Sarage is floating around the space station, struggling to believe that down there on Earth, everything he knows, everything he believes in, is falling apart. Wood rippled through the crowds that the army was about to launch a major assault. Seventy four years of communism, seventy four years of trying to create a different way of life, a different society, a different vision of the world is on the verge of collapse. It's quite time. Uh Sarah still has to do his job. The station has to have an engineer on board or it might shut down, but he's doing it on autopilot, his minds firmly on his loved ones, wondering if they're okay, if they're safe. And then one day he wakes up to a message from his handlers on the ground. They tell him, we can't keep this from you anymore. It's true. Everything is collapsing around us, including the Soviet Space Agency. We've run out of money. We can't send anyone to replace you, So we're giving you a choice. You can come back down to Earth is planned and abandon the station to an unknown fate, or you stay as long as it takes and protect the station the final outpost of a falling empire. Sarage knows. The longer you spend in space, the more your muscles start to disintegrate, your bones weaken, headaches, nausea, vomity, And then there's what might happen to your mind, something called space horror. We're being up in space so far away from home, will literally drive you insane. So what is Sarage going to do? Go back to Earth, be with his family, his newborn daughter in these truly desperate times, or stay in space, save the space station, serve his country. The very last Soviet. This is the story of one man who lived through the final days of Empire. But evening the East Germans of the Knights tarted to tear down parts of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of one dream all Russia's just wild about urga In the first man took conquer space and the birth of another future for the Russian people. Storians may have trouble describing a Davin Chile got resigned as the president of a Soviet union from a unique and perhaps ultimate advantage point space and the colors are unbelievably beautiful. This incredible bond, thin, beautiful bond an electric blue. I'm Lance Bass and from Kaleidoscope, I heard podcast and exile content. This is the last Soviet. Now you may be wondering why am I Lance Bass from in synct of all people telling this story about a Soviet cosmonaut. Well, yeah, probably won't believe this, but I am a trained Russian cosmonaut. Yeah, you heard that right. In two thousand two, I was at the end of an international in SYNCT tour that felt like it had been going on forever. I was about to have my first real break in years, six months off to do what I wanted, like sleep and see my family. And then I was sitting at home in Orlando, having a little breakfast, probably a green smoothie and pancakes, and I get this call on my phone. It's my manager, Lance. What would you say if I told you I've got you a ticket on a Russian space rocket. I almost dropped my phone, to be honest, I thought it was a prank, but pretty quickly it became clear this was real. Thank you, John six fifty seven. Now, finally, this morning, one in Sync band member is one step closer to saying bye bye bye to planet Earth. I would be going to Moscow to train for six months to go on a mission to the International Space Station. The final deal hasn't been signed yet, but the Russians have named Lance Bass as a member of the third At just twenty three years old, I was going to become the youngest person in history to go to space the Space Station in October, and he's too young for you. Now, If that sounds crazy to you, crazy that I would want to use my precious six months off to take part in one of the most intense and grueling experiences of my life, then I think there's something you need to understand. I am absolutely madly obsessed with the space. I have been ever since I was a little kid. When my family drove from Mississippi to Cape Kernaville in Florida to watch a rocket launch fourteen hours in a car, hot and humid, like someone was breathing on you. We arrived in my dad's blue station wagon, pulled up to the launch side, and that's when I saw it in front of me, a gigantic rocket and this big clock in the distance, and it starts counting down from two minutes, and then as it gets closer to zero, there is this rumbling that comes from beneath the ground, and then this burst of fire and an unbelievable noise. As the rumbling turns into a roar, and the rocket starts rising up and up. As it keeps climbing, the crowd is getting more and more excited, until finally it disappears into the atmosphere, up and away into the great Via. It was that day in Cape Carnavel when the dream of going to space took hold of me. It was just the coolest thing I've ever seen, and since then it's all I've ever wanted to do. Even when I was living this incredible life touring within sync, I still had this desire, this dream to go to space. And that's why when my manager called me that day, I jumped at the chance, and just a few months later I arrived at Sadoc Star City, the home of Russia's top secret cosmonaut training program. When I got there in two thousand two, I remember thinking this place, these people are obsessed with space, even more than we are in America. There are these statutes of cosmonauts everywhere, even the metro stations are named after them. But back then I didn't really get a chance to figure out why this was. I hardly even had time to think. I was so busy training day and night. So when I first heard the story of Saragei Krakolov, I was intrigued. We had both trained in the same place, but we had come from such different worlds. Me an American pop star, him a Soviet cosmonaut, and I wanted to know what was going through his head when he had to make this choice to go back home and protect his family or stay in space and protect the station, the crown jewel of the Soviet space program. Was it just that he loves space so much like me? Or was there something bigger driving in Because space isn't just about nerdy kids thinking it's cool and wanting to go space, it turns out is always about politics. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, three man must. Billionaire Elon Musk has sent three batches of SpaceX Starlink satellites over Ukraine. Russia's war is putting years of collaboration at risk, and we will plant our beautiful American flag very soon on the surface of Mars. Space is a battleground, a symbol of power. And that's because of this thing that happened before I was even born, when Sarage was three years old. And to me, it's the thing that can maybe best help us understand Sarage and how he could even consider staying in the space station as his country collapsed below him. It was the height of the Cold War, and my country, America, and his country, the Soviet Union, were racing to answer this one particular question, who would be the first to put a man into space. The confrontation itself would determine ultimately which ideology, which worldview, would take over the world. Stephen Walker is a journalist who wrote a book about the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The battle began in nineteen At the time, Sarage Kraklov was a toddler, and the Americans announced to the world, We're going to put the first man in space, as if it was a done deal. The Russians weren't even on their mind. Here's a nation that, as far as they were concerned, the USSR couldn't build refrigerators that work properly. It's true Soviet test flights often went wrong. One of their spacecraft blew up just seconds after taking off, killing a hundred people, But these disasters didn't matter because the Soviets were determined. They decided they were going to surprise the Americans and do it in complete secrecy. They start looking at the records of USSR Air Force pilots, most of them in the early to mid twenties. All of them are sound of limb and mind, incredibly healthy, incredibly fit and ideologically committed to the Soviet cause. And these are the guys that formed the nucleus of the top secret Soviet space program. And one of them is this guy, Yuri Gagarin. Yuri Gagarin, a man who would end up being the most famous person in Russia and Sarage Gargolov's hero at the time. He was one of twenty men chosen by the Soviet authorities to compete to be the first man in space. Twenty men chosen to be put through intense physical and psychological training. And when I say intense, I mean intense, So I mean they do these horrible heat chamber tests, for example, where they kind of baked them for hours on end. They put them into pressure changlers where they depressurized to see when they pass out. They put an into these unbelievable vibration tests where they actually anny on these stretches, and then they started to vibrate the stretcher to the point where you teeth nearly fuller. But nothing can compare to the isolation chamber. One by one, over a period of months and months, each of these twenty men would be introduced into a sealed chamber in which they were expected to function without being able to see anybody or hear anybody for what could be days and days and even weeks totally isolated cuts off. They would occasionally put horrible sounds in that shrieks or very loud music, or wake you up in the middle of the night, you know, anything, so you couldn't sleep properly. They would twist time upside down so you didn't know whether it was day or night. The test on these men were so intense because the Soviet space team had this problem. They didn't really know what's going to happen to human being up there. Up to that point, the idea of human beings in space was only something that existed in the realms of science fiction. Nothing in the station has any weight. No, wait, what a wonderful idea you mean? If I went there, I wouldn't wear anything, nothing at all. They had this term called space horror. If you're divorced from the world, traveling around the world above it not part of it the first to do so, is there a possibility that you go insane? Because of these unknowns, the Soviets knew they needed to find the perfect guy, the guy who could withstand anything, and in the end it came down to two men. Both were pretty much as good and tough as each other, but it was Gagarin that one. For one reason, he has a perfect communist biography. He's the son of a peasant from the country who was an iron foundry student who then became a serving military pilot. He was the best person to represent the Soviet Union against the United States because the Soviets knew they needed to beat the Americans to score the ultimate victory in the Cold War, and so on April twelfth nine, they pressed the gold button on Gagarin's flight is em bust out and what looks like a school bus to the rocket launch site, and then everybody says goodbye, and the goodbyes go on forever, because as far as I concerned, this guy is going to die. That's right. Odds are. Uri Gagarin is not going to survive the first few minutes of the flight. So many gruesome deaths awaitsed Euri Gagarine. It's almost like being on another planet. It just goes on forever and ever and ever, and then you reach this sort of walled city. It's in the middle of a desert, a city with guards standing around the perimeter. You know, you get these huge buildings with holes in them, and everything's rusting and it's corroded, and then you see it littered around the streets, bits of old rocket all over the place. It really looks like a disused enormous missile site, because really that's what it is. It's in Kazakhstan and it's called Biknor. It's the place that would have become the launchpad for the Soviet space program, but originally it was built a house their most advanced and deadly missiles. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. They've built the biggest rocket site in the world. I mean, the Americans didn't know about it, had no idea that the site even existed. We're talking about a site that is probably about the same size as the state of Kentucky. The secret it's a place where the conditions are extreme. It's incredibly hot in the summer and in the winter it goes down to the minus forties. I mean, it's really horrible. But every year in April, something extraordinary happens there. Out of this dead ground springs something new. Every spring. The whole of the step is covered with a compit of tulips, these incredible pink and purple and yellow tulips springing up from the dirt. And so it was in April, as the tulips started to peek their heads out from under the earth, and the desert was filled with a riot of color. Jory Gagarin stood at the base of an enormous rocket, ready to change the course of world history. And so he walks up to the steel steps and enters the elevator. Up. He goes so high up it feels like it takes minutes rather than seconds. But eventually he gets there, walks out of the elevator, and straps himself into his seat. The hatch is closed, and then he's on his own garret. Actually remains really cool through this process. In fact, he starts asking for some music from what we would now call mission control, and they start supplying him with songs and music, and there's music that's piped through into his headends and he starts singing. He starts singing Lilies of the Valley, a popular song about the first flowers coming out of the ground, a song about spring, about new horizons. And he's quite cool action in there, given what was about to happen, and then he's ready for launch. He could die in the next few seconds. Now, he could die in the next hour. God only knows the different ways he could die. Eight making stranded in space. Seven could blow up on launch pad six if he burnt to a crisp coming back to Earth. Five, four, three, So many systems not properly tested, Some wish he doesn't even know about. Two Does he know everything about what could go wrong in that rocket? One? And then he's lashed the Garin. Here is a whistling noise, then a deafening warl. The rocket and everything in it begins to tremble. Garon's stomach flips and his head feels full of pressure, like he's being slowly sucked up into the air. He tries to move his arms and legs, but nothing, like his body's not his anymore. He takes a long, deep breath, and then from nowhere he shouts, which means let's go, and off he went. Upputs and uppoints and uplots, And as the rocket heads upwards, the booster rockets fall away. The Garin keep gathering speed fifteen thousand miles an hour sixteen thousand, seventeen thousand until he reaches eighteen thousand miles an hour, the speed of rocket needs to get past the pool of Earth's gravity and out of the atmosphere and down below, the engineers are beside themselves, downing our springs like nobody's business down in the bunker. Everybody I've spoken to engineers that that talk about being drenched in sweat. There was incredible feeling of fear as well as exhilaration. This this, this excitement, fear, sense of danger, potentially disaster, all happening. But Gagarin keeps going nine minutes, ten minutes, faster and faster, higher and higher until he reaches for a bit. Yeah, something completely incredible happens. He suddenly feels himself lifting from his seat and he's just held in by the straps. He's experiencing the effects of weightlessness in orbit. And then he looks to his right and he says, I can see the Earth. I can see the Earth, and the colors are unbelievably beautiful. This incredible band, thin beautiful band, a sort of translucent and electric. I think he describes it blue. It's the Earth's atmosphere. And he is the first man ever to see it the first man to break the shackles of Earth, and it was a Soviet who had done it. As you can imagine, it's not a secret the Soviets want to keep anymore. They had a very famous announcer called Levitan who would announced all the very big moments, like the beginning of World War two, the death of Stalin, all of that he had announced. He was brought in to announce this. His voice came on the radio and all over Russia people were listening to Garin's father, who had no idea his son was in space, his wife, who also was never told about his flight, and little boys like Sarage Cracow crowded around the radio in their homes, their parents proudly telling them that the Soviet Union has put a man in space. And pretty soon the news starts to rock. It around the world and it reaches the United States, where President Kennedy is sleeping. He was working up by his butler in the White House to a battery of news. All Russia's just wild about Uri Gagarin, the first man took conquer space, modest, just a family man. It was on every television stage, it was called everywhere. It was the news, and later that afternoon he had to go before members of the press in a massive press conference where he was unable even to utter the name Uri Gagarin. Well, it is a most impressive scientific accomplishment. And also I think that we uh, all of us as members of the race, have the greatest admiration for the Russian who participated in this extraordinary feat. I have already sent to congratulations to Mr Crucial. In one hour and twenty nine minutes, Uriga Garran completes one full orbit of the planet. But now the engineers in the control room are biting their nails again because Uriga Garran has to make it home alive, and to do that he has to break back through the Earth's atmosphere. He starts his descent. Almost immediately, the porthole window fills with hot orange gas, and Gagarin suddenly feels like he's being pushed back into a seat. He tries to breathe, working hard to get the air into his lungs, his heart rates sores. To calm himself, he sings, the Motherland, here's the Motherland knows. He sits back and grips the seat. A rushing noise feels his ears, and then he's through. At twenty three feet Gagaran is ejected from the capsule. He feels the cold air on his face and a rough tug on his shoulders as the parachute is deployed, and he drifts slowly down to a field. And there he nots a hundred and six minutes after he starts, having traveled all the way around the planet, in a plowed field, and there's absolutely nobody there to greet him except a very old woman and a little five year old girl who are planting potatoes, and who both see him and start running away. But he shouts to the old lady, I'm Soviet, I'm Soviet, I'm Soviet. Comrades, and very very cautiously, the grandmother planting potatoes and her five year old daughter come back. So here's a guy has gone around the world in a hundred six minutes. He's been traveling at eighteen thousand miles an hour, you know, ten times, has been of a rifle bullet. He's seen things that no one has ever seen before. Now he's in a plowed field, and he has only a horse and cart in which to get to a telephone. Just days later, he's back in Moscow, being paraded through the streets in a convertible covered with hours. The scenes are unbelievable. People line the sidewalk, and I'm not just talking thousands or hundreds of thousands. There are millions of people out there. I've seen footage and it looks like there is not a single empty space along the whole parade route. People are clambering on top of lamp post and leaning out of balconies and screaming and waving the Soviet flags. White doves are set free, Confetti is thrown from helicopters, Women break the barriers, the hand in flowers. It's thought to have been the biggest party in Soviet history. When Gagarin's motorcade reaches the Kremlin, he's kissed on the cheek by the Premier Nikita Kushtev and awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. This was their moment. This was and it still is probably to this day. This is Russia's great moment in history, and they made the most of it. This was a real feeling of my God, We've beaten the most powerful and the most technologropy advance nation on us. We can do anything. The Soviet Union won the race to put the first man in space. It was a huge deal for everyday Russians, and it turned the cosmonaut at the center, Uriga Garon, into an icon. So I think it's important for us to understand the level which Yuriga Garden was a star, a superstar, at the level I don't think we can even imagine. This is Assif Sadiki. He's a professor of space history at Fordham University. There were posters of Yuriga Garden. There were magazines, there were postcards, there were trinkets, there were toys, there were models, there were a record albums. Agaren was like the Soviet version of Lance Bass and justin timber Lake. Okay, maybe more John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They even made Gagaran albums, although they sounded a little different to Love Me Do. The Soviet Union essentially created a cult of personality around this guy. And I can tell you this is true. And Star City and Moscow, I remember seeing statues of Gagern everywhere. He became the ideal figure in Soviet society, quiet, unassuming and totally dedicated to the cause of being a Soviet cosmonaut. They were a political and they were young and dynamic and handsome and good looking, and I think they operated on that level a kind of quasi Hollywood culture. For young Soviet people. Space was freedom, Space was success. Space became embedded in the day to day lives of Soviet citizens. It was everywhere in the kitchens and bedrooms of Soviet men, women and children. Children grew up not wanting to be pop stars or soccer players, but to be cosmonauts. Every Soviet or later Russian cosmic I've spoken to have all said the same thing. This was the enduring legend that was for them an inspiration. It was the thing that helped launch them on this unbelievable career of cosmonauts. Sarage was three years old when Gagarin went to space. His early years were filled with that astonishing success, a symbol of what his country, the Soviet Union, was capable of, and he would follow in Gagern's exact footsteps, becoming one of an elite class of Soviets to go to space. And so perhaps it's Ury Gageron who Sage Cracklf is thinking of as he floats in space, his country crumbling beneath him, his friends, his family, his fellow Soviets living through chaos, and now he has to decide what to do. Stay in space and man the station, protect what has left of the Soviet Union, or go down to a country in crisis. Now, to be upfront about this, we know a lot about Sir Game. We had it all set up. We were going to Moscow to talk to him. It was scheduled for February, and then Putin's war gotten away. Vladimir Putin has just addressed the Russian people a moment ago, announcing what Putin called the start of a military special operation. And so the Russian Space Agency, in part a military organization, shut down. The interview frustrating but fitting for a story about the way space and politics are so intertwined. Space has become a political battleground again. Russia's war is putting years of collaboration at risk, and the astronauts in the situation they did not ask for. America and Russia, once more on opposite sides. The Russia space program has cut ties with the West on almost every front. It's now unthinkable for a high profile cosmonaut like Surrogate to go on an American podcast. But we have spoken to Saragate's friends and his colleagues, to people who have worked with him, and people who have been to space with him, to try to understand how he made the decision he did to stay or to go. And so he spends hours thinking of what to do about his family, about his baby daughter, about his country falling apart, but also about the space station he is manning. It's the first and only space station orbiting the world. Without him, it will die. He looks out the window at the world two fifty miles below him, and then he's ready. He calls down to mission control and tells them I'll stay. And now, over the next seven episodes, we're going to tell the story of Sergei Krikov, of those three and thirteen days he spent circling the earth as his country collapsed. Three hundred and thirteen days that changed our world. Thanks crushed cars like flimsy toys. Soldiers used nightsticks, slope bombs. It was an earthquake. It was a daily earthquake in Moscow. The hammer and Sickle is lord for the last time, and an era comes to an end. Your pay changed, the rank, the status, everything changed. It was rather like he was a time traveler. That's coming up on the Last Soviet. Oh and by the way, we're gonna be telling my story as well. This is the pioneering stage everyone should and we'll have the opportunity to travel into space. The Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with I Heart Podcast and Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dad Audio and hosted by me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate Osbourne and Mangesh had Akador with Oz Wallashan and Kostas Linos from My Heart Executive produced by Katrina Norville and Nikki Torre from Sama's Dad Audio are executive producers or Joe Pikes and Dasha Listina. Produced by Assia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitza and Joe Pikes. Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golubovski and Molly Schwartz, music by Will Epstein, themed by Martin or Strich, Sound designed by Richard Award and special things to Nando Villa, Melissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Burne, Bob Pittman and Isaac Lee and thanks to Stephen Walker. His book is called Beyond the astonishing story of the first human to leave our planet and journey into space if you want to hear more shows like this. Nothing is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews, so please spread the love wherever you listen.

Two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth, Traveling at five miles a second, a man completes a perfect circle around the globe. His name is Serge Krakov. He's a Soviet cosmonaut, and he's manning the world's only space station, the Pride and Joy of the U. S. S R. The year Sarage has been up there for three months by now on the space station. Every day starts the same way, with a call at seven a m. Moscow time from michig Control. He reports his stats, blood pressure, heart rate, and mood. Sometimes in the evening, when he feels lonely, he will tune his hand radio equipment to the right frequency and make contact with his friend in Australia, Maggie. They chat about what he's done that day, and she sends some clippings from the newspapers. That's a pleasure, pleasure. As the days bleed into one another, he's starting to feel a bit space sick. He's been counting down the weeks till he's due to come back to Earth, back to his home, his wife and their one year old daughter. But then one day, his friend, this woman in Australia, Maggie, tells him something troubling. She says, Sarage, something bad is happening in your country. After months strikes, protests, and deepening economic chaos. People are sleeping in train stations. There is no food in the shops. I gave them my money that they should old woman, we won't give you your bread. Law and order seem to be breaking down, the banding of the k President Gorbachev's grip on the country is slipping. The republics that make up the Soviet Union are starting to break away. There were wild scenes, gun fire, and three deaths. Soviet forces tried to capture the main center of opposition. Surage doesn't know what to think. He asked mischion control, what's going on? But they don't tell him anything, just parrot the party line. Nothing to be alarmed about. Everything is fine, And so Sarage is floating around the space station, struggling to believe that down there on Earth, everything he knows, everything he believes in, is falling apart. Wood rippled through the crowds that the army was about to launch a major assault. Seventy four years of communism, seventy four years of trying to create a different way of life, a different society, a different vision of the world is on the verge of collapse. It's quite time. Uh Sarah still has to do his job. The station has to have an engineer on board or it might shut down, but he's doing it on autopilot, his minds firmly on his loved ones, wondering if they're okay, if they're safe. And then one day he wakes up to a message from his handlers on the ground. They tell him, we can't keep this from you anymore. It's true. Everything is collapsing around us, including the Soviet Space Agency. We've run out of money. We can't send anyone to replace you, So we're giving you a choice. You can come back down to Earth is planned and abandon the station to an unknown fate, or you stay as long as it takes and protect the station the final outpost of a falling empire. Sarage knows. The longer you spend in space, the more your muscles start to disintegrate, your bones weaken, headaches, nausea, vomity, And then there's what might happen to your mind, something called space horror. We're being up in space so far away from home, will literally drive you insane. So what is Sarage going to do? Go back to Earth, be with his family, his newborn daughter in these truly desperate times, or stay in space, save the space station, serve his country. The very last Soviet. This is the story of one man who lived through the final days of Empire. But evening the East Germans of the Knights tarted to tear down parts of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of one dream all Russia's just wild about urga In the first man took conquer space and the birth of another future for the Russian people. Storians may have trouble describing a Davin Chile got resigned as the president of a Soviet union from a unique and perhaps ultimate advantage point space and the colors are unbelievably beautiful. This incredible bond, thin, beautiful bond an electric blue. I'm Lance Bass and from Kaleidoscope, I heard podcast and exile content. This is the last Soviet. Now you may be wondering why am I Lance Bass from in synct of all people telling this story about a Soviet cosmonaut. Well, yeah, probably won't believe this, but I am a trained Russian cosmonaut. Yeah, you heard that right. In two thousand two, I was at the end of an international in SYNCT tour that felt like it had been going on forever. I was about to have my first real break in years, six months off to do what I wanted, like sleep and see my family. And then I was sitting at home in Orlando, having a little breakfast, probably a green smoothie and pancakes, and I get this call on my phone. It's my manager, Lance. What would you say if I told you I've got you a ticket on a Russian space rocket. I almost dropped my phone, to be honest, I thought it was a prank, but pretty quickly it became clear this was real. Thank you, John six fifty seven. Now, finally, this morning, one in Sync band member is one step closer to saying bye bye bye to planet Earth. I would be going to Moscow to train for six months to go on a mission to the International Space Station. The final deal hasn't been signed yet, but the Russians have named Lance Bass as a member of the third At just twenty three years old, I was going to become the youngest person in history to go to space the Space Station in October, and he's too young for you. Now, If that sounds crazy to you, crazy that I would want to use my precious six months off to take part in one of the most intense and grueling experiences of my life, then I think there's something you need to understand. I am absolutely madly obsessed with the space. I have been ever since I was a little kid. When my family drove from Mississippi to Cape Kernaville in Florida to watch a rocket launch fourteen hours in a car, hot and humid, like someone was breathing on you. We arrived in my dad's blue station wagon, pulled up to the launch side, and that's when I saw it in front of me, a gigantic rocket and this big clock in the distance, and it starts counting down from two minutes, and then as it gets closer to zero, there is this rumbling that comes from beneath the ground, and then this burst of fire and an unbelievable noise. As the rumbling turns into a roar, and the rocket starts rising up and up. As it keeps climbing, the crowd is getting more and more excited, until finally it disappears into the atmosphere, up and away into the great Via. It was that day in Cape Carnavel when the dream of going to space took hold of me. It was just the coolest thing I've ever seen, and since then it's all I've ever wanted to do. Even when I was living this incredible life touring within sync, I still had this desire, this dream to go to space. And that's why when my manager called me that day, I jumped at the chance, and just a few months later I arrived at Sadoc Star City, the home of Russia's top secret cosmonaut training program. When I got there in two thousand two, I remember thinking this place, these people are obsessed with space, even more than we are in America. There are these statutes of cosmonauts everywhere, even the metro stations are named after them. But back then I didn't really get a chance to figure out why this was. I hardly even had time to think. I was so busy training day and night. So when I first heard the story of Saragei Krakolov, I was intrigued. We had both trained in the same place, but we had come from such different worlds. Me an American pop star, him a Soviet cosmonaut, and I wanted to know what was going through his head when he had to make this choice to go back home and protect his family or stay in space and protect the station, the crown jewel of the Soviet space program. Was it just that he loves space so much like me? Or was there something bigger driving in Because space isn't just about nerdy kids thinking it's cool and wanting to go space, it turns out is always about politics. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, three man must. Billionaire Elon Musk has sent three batches of SpaceX Starlink satellites over Ukraine. Russia's war is putting years of collaboration at risk, and we will plant our beautiful American flag very soon on the surface of Mars. Space is a battleground, a symbol of power. And that's because of this thing that happened before I was even born, when Sarage was three years old. And to me, it's the thing that can maybe best help us understand Sarage and how he could even consider staying in the space station as his country collapsed below him. It was the height of the Cold War, and my country, America, and his country, the Soviet Union, were racing to answer this one particular question, who would be the first to put a man into space. The confrontation itself would determine ultimately which ideology, which worldview, would take over the world. Stephen Walker is a journalist who wrote a book about the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The battle began in nineteen At the time, Sarage Kraklov was a toddler, and the Americans announced to the world, We're going to put the first man in space, as if it was a done deal. The Russians weren't even on their mind. Here's a nation that, as far as they were concerned, the USSR couldn't build refrigerators that work properly. It's true Soviet test flights often went wrong. One of their spacecraft blew up just seconds after taking off, killing a hundred people, But these disasters didn't matter because the Soviets were determined. They decided they were going to surprise the Americans and do it in complete secrecy. They start looking at the records of USSR Air Force pilots, most of them in the early to mid twenties. All of them are sound of limb and mind, incredibly healthy, incredibly fit and ideologically committed to the Soviet cause. And these are the guys that formed the nucleus of the top secret Soviet space program. And one of them is this guy, Yuri Gagarin. Yuri Gagarin, a man who would end up being the most famous person in Russia and Sarage Gargolov's hero at the time. He was one of twenty men chosen by the Soviet authorities to compete to be the first man in space. Twenty men chosen to be put through intense physical and psychological training. And when I say intense, I mean intense, So I mean they do these horrible heat chamber tests, for example, where they kind of baked them for hours on end. They put them into pressure changlers where they depressurized to see when they pass out. They put an into these unbelievable vibration tests where they actually anny on these stretches, and then they started to vibrate the stretcher to the point where you teeth nearly fuller. But nothing can compare to the isolation chamber. One by one, over a period of months and months, each of these twenty men would be introduced into a sealed chamber in which they were expected to function without being able to see anybody or hear anybody for what could be days and days and even weeks totally isolated cuts off. They would occasionally put horrible sounds in that shrieks or very loud music, or wake you up in the middle of the night, you know, anything, so you couldn't sleep properly. They would twist time upside down so you didn't know whether it was day or night. The test on these men were so intense because the Soviet space team had this problem. They didn't really know what's going to happen to human being up there. Up to that point, the idea of human beings in space was only something that existed in the realms of science fiction. Nothing in the station has any weight. No, wait, what a wonderful idea you mean? If I went there, I wouldn't wear anything, nothing at all. They had this term called space horror. If you're divorced from the world, traveling around the world above it not part of it the first to do so, is there a possibility that you go insane? Because of these unknowns, the Soviets knew they needed to find the perfect guy, the guy who could withstand anything, and in the end it came down to two men. Both were pretty much as good and tough as each other, but it was Gagarin that one. For one reason, he has a perfect communist biography. He's the son of a peasant from the country who was an iron foundry student who then became a serving military pilot. He was the best person to represent the Soviet Union against the United States because the Soviets knew they needed to beat the Americans to score the ultimate victory in the Cold War, and so on April twelfth nine, they pressed the gold button on Gagarin's flight is em bust out and what looks like a school bus to the rocket launch site, and then everybody says goodbye, and the goodbyes go on forever, because as far as I concerned, this guy is going to die. That's right. Odds are. Uri Gagarin is not going to survive the first few minutes of the flight. So many gruesome deaths awaitsed Euri Gagarine. It's almost like being on another planet. It just goes on forever and ever and ever, and then you reach this sort of walled city. It's in the middle of a desert, a city with guards standing around the perimeter. You know, you get these huge buildings with holes in them, and everything's rusting and it's corroded, and then you see it littered around the streets, bits of old rocket all over the place. It really looks like a disused enormous missile site, because really that's what it is. It's in Kazakhstan and it's called Biknor. It's the place that would have become the launchpad for the Soviet space program, but originally it was built a house their most advanced and deadly missiles. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. They've built the biggest rocket site in the world. I mean, the Americans didn't know about it, had no idea that the site even existed. We're talking about a site that is probably about the same size as the state of Kentucky. The secret it's a place where the conditions are extreme. It's incredibly hot in the summer and in the winter it goes down to the minus forties. I mean, it's really horrible. But every year in April, something extraordinary happens there. Out of this dead ground springs something new. Every spring. The whole of the step is covered with a compit of tulips, these incredible pink and purple and yellow tulips springing up from the dirt. And so it was in April, as the tulips started to peek their heads out from under the earth, and the desert was filled with a riot of color. Jory Gagarin stood at the base of an enormous rocket, ready to change the course of world history. And so he walks up to the steel steps and enters the elevator. Up. He goes so high up it feels like it takes minutes rather than seconds. But eventually he gets there, walks out of the elevator, and straps himself into his seat. The hatch is closed, and then he's on his own garret. Actually remains really cool through this process. In fact, he starts asking for some music from what we would now call mission control, and they start supplying him with songs and music, and there's music that's piped through into his headends and he starts singing. He starts singing Lilies of the Valley, a popular song about the first flowers coming out of the ground, a song about spring, about new horizons. And he's quite cool action in there, given what was about to happen, and then he's ready for launch. He could die in the next few seconds. Now, he could die in the next hour. God only knows the different ways he could die. Eight making stranded in space. Seven could blow up on launch pad six if he burnt to a crisp coming back to Earth. Five, four, three, So many systems not properly tested, Some wish he doesn't even know about. Two Does he know everything about what could go wrong in that rocket? One? And then he's lashed the Garin. Here is a whistling noise, then a deafening warl. The rocket and everything in it begins to tremble. Garon's stomach flips and his head feels full of pressure, like he's being slowly sucked up into the air. He tries to move his arms and legs, but nothing, like his body's not his anymore. He takes a long, deep breath, and then from nowhere he shouts, which means let's go, and off he went. Upputs and uppoints and uplots, And as the rocket heads upwards, the booster rockets fall away. The Garin keep gathering speed fifteen thousand miles an hour sixteen thousand, seventeen thousand until he reaches eighteen thousand miles an hour, the speed of rocket needs to get past the pool of Earth's gravity and out of the atmosphere and down below, the engineers are beside themselves, downing our springs like nobody's business down in the bunker. Everybody I've spoken to engineers that that talk about being drenched in sweat. There was incredible feeling of fear as well as exhilaration. This this, this excitement, fear, sense of danger, potentially disaster, all happening. But Gagarin keeps going nine minutes, ten minutes, faster and faster, higher and higher until he reaches for a bit. Yeah, something completely incredible happens. He suddenly feels himself lifting from his seat and he's just held in by the straps. He's experiencing the effects of weightlessness in orbit. And then he looks to his right and he says, I can see the Earth. I can see the Earth, and the colors are unbelievably beautiful. This incredible band, thin beautiful band, a sort of translucent and electric. I think he describes it blue. It's the Earth's atmosphere. And he is the first man ever to see it the first man to break the shackles of Earth, and it was a Soviet who had done it. As you can imagine, it's not a secret the Soviets want to keep anymore. They had a very famous announcer called Levitan who would announced all the very big moments, like the beginning of World War two, the death of Stalin, all of that he had announced. He was brought in to announce this. His voice came on the radio and all over Russia people were listening to Garin's father, who had no idea his son was in space, his wife, who also was never told about his flight, and little boys like Sarage Cracow crowded around the radio in their homes, their parents proudly telling them that the Soviet Union has put a man in space. And pretty soon the news starts to rock. It around the world and it reaches the United States, where President Kennedy is sleeping. He was working up by his butler in the White House to a battery of news. All Russia's just wild about Uri Gagarin, the first man took conquer space, modest, just a family man. It was on every television stage, it was called everywhere. It was the news, and later that afternoon he had to go before members of the press in a massive press conference where he was unable even to utter the name Uri Gagarin. Well, it is a most impressive scientific accomplishment. And also I think that we uh, all of us as members of the race, have the greatest admiration for the Russian who participated in this extraordinary feat. I have already sent to congratulations to Mr Crucial. In one hour and twenty nine minutes, Uriga Garran completes one full orbit of the planet. But now the engineers in the control room are biting their nails again because Uriga Garran has to make it home alive, and to do that he has to break back through the Earth's atmosphere. He starts his descent. Almost immediately, the porthole window fills with hot orange gas, and Gagarin suddenly feels like he's being pushed back into a seat. He tries to breathe, working hard to get the air into his lungs, his heart rates sores. To calm himself, he sings, the Motherland, here's the Motherland knows. He sits back and grips the seat. A rushing noise feels his ears, and then he's through. At twenty three feet Gagaran is ejected from the capsule. He feels the cold air on his face and a rough tug on his shoulders as the parachute is deployed, and he drifts slowly down to a field. And there he nots a hundred and six minutes after he starts, having traveled all the way around the planet, in a plowed field, and there's absolutely nobody there to greet him except a very old woman and a little five year old girl who are planting potatoes, and who both see him and start running away. But he shouts to the old lady, I'm Soviet, I'm Soviet, I'm Soviet. Comrades, and very very cautiously, the grandmother planting potatoes and her five year old daughter come back. So here's a guy has gone around the world in a hundred six minutes. He's been traveling at eighteen thousand miles an hour, you know, ten times, has been of a rifle bullet. He's seen things that no one has ever seen before. Now he's in a plowed field, and he has only a horse and cart in which to get to a telephone. Just days later, he's back in Moscow, being paraded through the streets in a convertible covered with hours. The scenes are unbelievable. People line the sidewalk, and I'm not just talking thousands or hundreds of thousands. There are millions of people out there. I've seen footage and it looks like there is not a single empty space along the whole parade route. People are clambering on top of lamp post and leaning out of balconies and screaming and waving the Soviet flags. White doves are set free, Confetti is thrown from helicopters, Women break the barriers, the hand in flowers. It's thought to have been the biggest party in Soviet history. When Gagarin's motorcade reaches the Kremlin, he's kissed on the cheek by the Premier Nikita Kushtev and awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. This was their moment. This was and it still is probably to this day. This is Russia's great moment in history, and they made the most of it. This was a real feeling of my God, We've beaten the most powerful and the most technologropy advance nation on us. We can do anything. The Soviet Union won the race to put the first man in space. It was a huge deal for everyday Russians, and it turned the cosmonaut at the center, Uriga Garon, into an icon. So I think it's important for us to understand the level which Yuriga Garden was a star, a superstar, at the level I don't think we can even imagine. This is Assif Sadiki. He's a professor of space history at Fordham University. There were posters of Yuriga Garden. There were magazines, there were postcards, there were trinkets, there were toys, there were models, there were a record albums. Agaren was like the Soviet version of Lance Bass and justin timber Lake. Okay, maybe more John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They even made Gagaran albums, although they sounded a little different to Love Me Do. The Soviet Union essentially created a cult of personality around this guy. And I can tell you this is true. And Star City and Moscow, I remember seeing statues of Gagern everywhere. He became the ideal figure in Soviet society, quiet, unassuming and totally dedicated to the cause of being a Soviet cosmonaut. They were a political and they were young and dynamic and handsome and good looking, and I think they operated on that level a kind of quasi Hollywood culture. For young Soviet people. Space was freedom, Space was success. Space became embedded in the day to day lives of Soviet citizens. It was everywhere in the kitchens and bedrooms of Soviet men, women and children. Children grew up not wanting to be pop stars or soccer players, but to be cosmonauts. Every Soviet or later Russian cosmic I've spoken to have all said the same thing. This was the enduring legend that was for them an inspiration. It was the thing that helped launch them on this unbelievable career of cosmonauts. Sarage was three years old when Gagarin went to space. His early years were filled with that astonishing success, a symbol of what his country, the Soviet Union, was capable of, and he would follow in Gagern's exact footsteps, becoming one of an elite class of Soviets to go to space. And so perhaps it's Ury Gageron who Sage Cracklf is thinking of as he floats in space, his country crumbling beneath him, his friends, his family, his fellow Soviets living through chaos, and now he has to decide what to do. Stay in space and man the station, protect what has left of the Soviet Union, or go down to a country in crisis. Now, to be upfront about this, we know a lot about Sir Game. We had it all set up. We were going to Moscow to talk to him. It was scheduled for February, and then Putin's war gotten away. Vladimir Putin has just addressed the Russian people a moment ago, announcing what Putin called the start of a military special operation. And so the Russian Space Agency, in part a military organization, shut down. The interview frustrating but fitting for a story about the way space and politics are so intertwined. Space has become a political battleground again. Russia's war is putting years of collaboration at risk, and the astronauts in the situation they did not ask for. America and Russia, once more on opposite sides. The Russia space program has cut ties with the West on almost every front. It's now unthinkable for a high profile cosmonaut like Surrogate to go on an American podcast. But we have spoken to Saragate's friends and his colleagues, to people who have worked with him, and people who have been to space with him, to try to understand how he made the decision he did to stay or to go. And so he spends hours thinking of what to do about his family, about his baby daughter, about his country falling apart, but also about the space station he is manning. It's the first and only space station orbiting the world. Without him, it will die. He looks out the window at the world two fifty miles below him, and then he's ready. He calls down to mission control and tells them I'll stay. And now, over the next seven episodes, we're going to tell the story of Sergei Krikov, of those three and thirteen days he spent circling the earth as his country collapsed. Three hundred and thirteen days that changed our world. Thanks crushed cars like flimsy toys. Soldiers used nightsticks, slope bombs. It was an earthquake. It was a daily earthquake in Moscow. The hammer and Sickle is lord for the last time, and an era comes to an end. Your pay changed, the rank, the status, everything changed. It was rather like he was a time traveler. That's coming up on the Last Soviet. Oh and by the way, we're gonna be telling my story as well. This is the pioneering stage everyone should and we'll have the opportunity to travel into space. The Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with I Heart Podcast and Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dad Audio and hosted by me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate Osbourne and Mangesh had Akador with Oz Wallashan and Kostas Linos from My Heart Executive produced by Katrina Norville and Nikki Torre from Sama's Dad Audio are executive producers or Joe Pikes and Dasha Listina. Produced by Assia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitza and Joe Pikes. Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golubovski and Molly Schwartz, music by Will Epstein, themed by Martin or Strich, Sound designed by Richard Award and special things to Nando Villa, Melissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Burne, Bob Pittman and Isaac Lee and thanks to Stephen Walker. His book is called Beyond the astonishing story of the first human to leave our planet and journey into space if you want to hear more shows like this. 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