SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
I was bored, so I watched the movie that astronauts must view before launch:
Sometime Wednesday, perhaps around the time this article is published, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and his two Russian crew mates—Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner—will repair to their quarantine crew quarters for movie night in the Cosmonaut Hotel.
[...] The Russians have the oldest space program in the world and by far the most traditions and superstitions related to launch, including peeing on the wheel of the bus that takes the crew to the launch pad—a tradition that dates back to Yuri Gagarin's first human spaceflight in 1961.
Among those traditions is watching a movie[*] the day before launch in the Cosmonaut Hotel. It's always the same movie, White Sun of the Desert. No one is quite sure why this Soviet-era film, which came out in 1970, is always watched (yes, it's mandatory). But it likely dates to Soyuz 12, in 1973, when cosmonauts Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov watched the movie before their mission. This return-to-flight mission followed the disastrous Soyuz 11 flight two years earlier, when the spacecraft depressurized as the crew prepared to reenter Earth's atmosphere, killing all three men. Soyuz 12 proved a success, and the movie came to be seen as a good luck charm. Since then, over the course of five decades, the Soyuz has never lost a crew.
[...] The film has nothing to do with space. However, I do think the symbolism of [the main character] Sukhov being far from home and his wife might hold parallels for astronauts about to fly into space, far from their loved ones back on Earth. They will be in the vast expanses of space rather than the empty dunes of the desert, but they will be lonely all the same.
[*] Available on YouTube.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday April 09 2020, @05:06PM (6 children)
So do the Astronauts of NASA watch it or is it a Cosmonaut (russians) thing? From the article it appears that this is a Cosmonaut thing and not something that the Americans (and friends) do. So the headline should be fixed.
That said perhaps they should, it might be a good movie -- I have never seen it. I'm not sure if any Soyuz crews have perished since but there sure have been crashes and such even after S12, Foton-M (a Soyuz-U rocket) exploded with fatalities, non-cosmonauts, in 2002 as an example which is a long time after S12 in 1973.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 09 2020, @06:42PM (3 children)
From the article:
I'm pretty sure the Russians don't need subtitles to underatand movies in Russian language.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @06:45PM (1 child)
How very ablist of you. Deaf people need subtitles too.
Anonymous Coward: How very ablist of you.
Anonymous Coward: Deaf people need subtitles too.
(Audience clapping sounds)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday April 10 2020, @04:17AM
But here in Quebec I've discovered that French movies don't have French subtitles.
Presumably there are no French deaf people.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 09 2020, @07:35PM
Seriously? They don't mentally translate it into English, so they can understand it?
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Thursday April 09 2020, @06:53PM
So ... I'm guessing Spaceballs is SpaceX's official prelaunch movie? I think every country's space program should have an official unofficial movie.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday April 10 2020, @02:23AM
The movie is great. It's a rare example of Russian western or should I say eastern? It's about one Russian guy fighting a vicious gang of Muslim terrorists.
Cosmonauts as well as all the people who participate in the launch have a long standing tradition to watch it before every flight. It is a mascot of Russian space program.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.