Lost Cosmonauts - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The lost cosmonauts are referred to in popular culture including art, science fiction and film.

  • The 2011 science fiction horror film Apollo 18 depicts NASA astronauts landing on the moon in 1974 and finding a dead cosmonaut along with a wrecked Soviet landing module.
  • A 2005 Russian mockumentary movie First on the Moon (Первые на Луне) features the fictional story of a 1938 Soviet landing on the Moon.
  • In the 2002 movie K-19: The Widowmaker while enjoying some vodka an officer relates a tale of a Lost Cosmonaut before Gagarin who died when his life support system failed.
  • A 1989 installment of Philip Bond's "Wired World", published in the UK comics anthology Deadline magazine, features a cosmonaut who crash lands in a London park where the main characters are picnicking.
  • The upcoming Spanish science fiction feature film The Cosmonaut is inspired by accounts of lost cosmonauts.
  • Victor Pelevin's anti-soviet novel "Omon Ra" is based on depiction of Soviet space flights as a planned homicide. Some of these "flights" are also not really flights, but fakes in the sake of Soviet propaganda.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3 one of the game's bosses, The Fury, is a lost cosmonaut who was badly burned upon re-entry and served as a secret elite combat operative in Soviet jungles.
  • Wolf Parade's song "Yulia" is about a Soviet cosmonaut's fate, drifting in space, never to return home to his love.
  • The Jed Mercurio novel Ascent features a cosmonaut who makes a successful - albeit suicidal - moon landing ahead of the Apollo landings.

Read more about this topic:  Lost Cosmonauts

Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:

    “Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
    —Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    “Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.”
    —Gerald W. Johnson (1890–1980)

    “Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
    —C. John Sommerville (20th century)