Strange but True Stories from Space

by Brian Dunning
July 23, 2024

This week, we're celebrating Space Exploration Day, which comes each year on July 20, the anniversary of Neil Armstrong's historic first steps on the Moon. How should we commemorate that day at Skeptoid? Why, with a special episode, of course. Today we've got a collection of stories and anecdotes from the annals of crewed spaceflight: stories that are weird, creepy, funny, mysterious, and in one case just plain gross. Some of you have probably heard some of these before, but my bet is that nobody will have heard all of them. So I now present to you, in honor of Space Exploration Day, strange but true stories from space.

We'll get started with:

Apollo Space Music

In 1969, Apollo 10 did an orbit around the back side of the moon, on their mission to test every single component of a full moon landing mission except the actual landing. While astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan were back there, they heard a strange sound they described as "space music" coming over their radio, which lasted for nearly a full hour:

OK it's not great music, more like just a tone. But it was a real mystery for a long time, until it was eventually proven to have been interference from the VHF radios aboard the Command & Service Module and the Landing Module both being on at the same time.

The Aborted Shuttle Launch

Did you know that only one shuttle launch was ever aborted after it took off? Fortunately it resulted in the least dramatic type of abort, but due only to the quick action of the engineers. The space shuttle Challenger on flight STS-51F was about three and a half minutes after it jettisoned the two solid rocket boosters, and was continuing on the shuttle's three main engines, still connected to the large external fuel tank. One of the engines shut down due to faulty sensors. When the same sensor failed in one of the two remaining engines, ground engineer Jenny Howard quickly instructed the crew to block any more automatic engine shutdowns. They still had to abort the launch, but with two engines they were able to do an ATO (Abort to Orbit) which means they only had to give up making it to their preferred orbit, and had to make do with a lower one. It was the only time a shuttle main engine ever shut down in flight.

The Ghost Knocking on the Spacecraft Door

In 2003, Chinese taikonaut Yang Liwei reported strange knocks on the side of his Shenzhou 5 spacecraft, China's first crewed spaceflight. He had an eerie time trying to figure out what it was, but it definitely seemed to be coming from outside. He never saw any ghost aliens outside his little porthole. It's never been definitively solved, but most are satisfied that it was probably just noises from expansion and contraction as he went in and out of sunlight.

The Squeaky Astronaut

In 1964, Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter spoke on the phone with President Lyndon B. Johnson. The only problem was that at the time, he was in a decompression chamber 200 feet underwater as part of the SeaLab II project, and was breathing a mixture of oxygen and helium:

The First Woman Solves the First Problem

In 1963, the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, discovered a major malfunction in her Vostok 6 spacecraft. It was supposed to have been completely pre-programmed so that she wouldn't have to do anything manually. But in going over the program – while already in space – she discovered that the re-entry program would have fired the rockets to raise her into a higher orbit rather than to slow her into a descent! She alerted Mission Control, whose engineers hurriedly devised a new program, which Tereshkova input manually according to radio instructions. As a result, she returned to Earth safely.

She had been perhaps better qualified than they had given her credit for. The Soviets kept the embarrassing episode secret for more than 20 years, until the 1980s when Tereshkova began talking about it in her public lectures.

Why the Locks on the Hatches?

Over the years of the shuttle program, stories began to emerge that on many of the flights, padlocks were found on the exterior hatch, preventing anyone from opening the hatch from inside without a key or combination. It would seem an odd practice, as well as a potential safety issue. What's the deal?

In 2006, NASA's Chief Safety and Mission Assurance Officer, astronaut Bryan O'Connor, explained. Mission commanders don't always know the payload specialists very well, as they are always the newest members of the crew; and there's no harm in having a little extra safety measure when all someone has to do is turn a crank and it's bye-bye to everyone on board. The potential need for this became clear a year later when former shuttle astronaut Lisa Nowak went off her rocker and assaulted a romantic rival, resulting in her being fired by NASA and discharged by the US Navy.

Skylab's Mystery Crew

In 1973, the crew for Skylab 4 arrived aboard the space station, which had previously been vacated by the Skylab 3 crew. They were surprised to find the station already inhabited – by themselves. Makeshift mannequins, wearing the Skylab 4 crew's clothes, were already hard at work. One on the exercise bicycle, one on the toilet, and the third trying out the station's Lower Body Negative Pressure Device, which simulates gravity's effect on the blood flow. Never let it be said astronauts don't have a sense of humor.

The Floating Turd Incident

Apollo 10 was not known only for its mysterious space music. It also suffered through the most brutal campaign of the space program, the infamous floating turd incident:

A Fully Backed-Up Record

It was because of the threat of such incidents that astronaut Bill Anders, who took the famous Earthrise photograph on Apollo 8 in 1968, set an unofficial record for the longest distance traveled by a human being without having a poo – some three quarters of a million miles. He said the procedure was just too primitive and uncomfortable, so he ate as little as possible in order to avoid having to go. But after 6 days and 3 hours, he definitely was feeling the need. Reportedly, Anders spoke with President Lyndon Johnson by telephone while sitting on a toilet aboard the USS Yorktown.

John Glenn's Fireflies

In John Glenn's 1962 orbital flight aboard Friendship 7, he famously saw a cloud of bright particles swirling about outside his spacecraft. He described "a whole shower" of them, keeping pace with his capsule, and "brilliantly lit up like they're luminescent." Mission Control feared the worst, that the specks were remnants of his heat shield, indicating that it was disintegrating. But Glenn himself had no idea what the "fireflies" could be.

When Scott Carpenter took the next flight a few months later, he saw them too, but quickly figured out what they were. He found that banging on the side of the capsule dislodged and produced many more illuminated particles. They were simply bits of frost that would form on the side of the capsule turned away from the sun, and would then come loose when the capsule rotated around into the sunlight. With the bright sun reflecting off the frost particles, they looked just like brilliantly lit snowflakes.

Long Live Laika

Most of us have heard the story of how Sputnik 2 carried a dog into space in 1957, a very good girl named Laika, which means Barker. Sputnik 2 was a one-way trip; there were no provisions made for returning the craft to Earth. The very good girl Laika was provided oxygen plus gelatinized food and water, with a last serving of food laced with poison to humanely euthanize her after one week. However, her vital signs ceased after only a few hours, due to the unexpectedly high temperature inside the capsule. Sputnik 2 remained in orbit for about five months, and ended its trip with a fiery reentry that scattered the very good girl's ashes in the sky.

The scientists who devised Laika's mission are universally reported to have regretted it. "Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us," said one. "We treat them like babies who cannot speak."

Another said "The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog."

Edgar Mitchell's Psychic Experiments

Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell had long been a deep believer in the power of the paranormal – unusual for an astronaut, perhaps, but astronauts are people like anyone else. He planned a grand unofficial experiment. At predetermined times during his Apollo mission, Mitchell would look through a set of 25 Zener cards and attempt to mentally transmit the cards to a group of recipients waiting back on Earth.

Upon Mitchell's return, the results were statistically tabulated, and Mitchell announced success and proof of the power of psi: Chances were 3000:1 against his results being pure chance. But his phrasing was careful. Skeptical analysts agreed with that number, but what Mitchell hadn't told us was that his experiment had failed so magnificently that 3000:1 was the chance of doing that badly!

Beginner's Bad Luck

I think the very best way to recognize Space Exploration Day is with a nod to the crew who probably had it the very worst – and no, it's not Apollo 13. I'm talking about Voskhod 2, in which cosmonaut Alexei Leonov performed the first EVA. The entire mission was plagued with a comedy of errors.

The spacecraft was fitted with a clever inflatable airlock, a tube attached outside the hatch. When Leonov came out to do his spacewalk, his suit (the first time such a suit had been tried in space) overinflated so comically that he became a stiff, immobile Michelin Man. In the sunlight it quickly got so hot that his body temperature rose by 19ºC/35ºF, a medical emergency. But he had inflated so large that he could not fit back into the airlock. Leonov opened a valve to let the air out of his suit, and was nearly dead from hypoxia by the time his crewmate pulled him back inside. But then the hatch would not properly seal, as it had been open too long during Leonov's difficulties and had thermally distorted.

When it was time to return to Earth, they weren't able to fit back into their seats and so they initiated without being properly strapped in. The orbital module would not detach, and the jettisoning of the inflatable airlock sent them spinning out of control. Finally the orbital module broke loose from the spinning, and the men miraculously managed to manually regain control. But by then they were so far off course that it took two days to find them. They had survived, but were crouching in the snow armed, defending themselves from marauding bears and wolves. Warm clothes were dropped, but the capsule's heater did not work and its fans were stuck on full blast. When crews finally reached them, they had to build a fire and freeze one more night before they could ski several kilometers to a waiting helicopter.

By that point, they probably wished they had selected any other profession. Leonov, however, continued on other space flights and became a great national hero. Perhaps it is that ability to remain undaunted by even the worst possible experience that makes our space travelers worthy of a Space Exploration Day. However you choose to celebrate, do it with gusto and courage, and the unflagging spirit of adventure.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning