Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:48:45 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [WSFA] Ivan Ivanovitch, cosmonot
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Excerpt:
On March 25, 1961, a group of peasants in Izhevsk, a village near the
Ural Mountains in the center of the Soviet Union, watched a man fall
from the sky. He wore a bright-orange jumpsuit attached to a blooming
parachute. His arms shook. His legs flailed. When he succumbed, finally,
to gravity, he crumpled onto the snow-covered ground. He made no noise.
The Izhevsk villagers, Deborah Cadbury writes in her book Space Race,
were baffled by the sight of this fallen flier and "his lumpy body."
They ran to him, opened his helmet's visor -- and were even more
bewildered by the new sight that greeted them.

The gaping helmet revealed, Cadbury notes, not a face, but a sign,
printed with stark capital letters: MAKET, or "mock-up." (Less
technically: "dummy.") The figure they'd just seen hurled from the
heavens wasn't a man so much as a mannequin -- a space-traveling doll.
He was an early cosmonaut, or rather a cosmonot: a sailor of the stars
in every sense but the human one.

The Doll It All Hinged On

His nickname was Ivan Ivanovich -- "John Doe" -- and he was, in his way,
the first person in space. (He beat Yuri Gagarin to that honor,
technically, by four weeks.)
--- end excerpt ---

<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/the-doll-that-helped-the-soviets-beat-the-us-to-space/274400/>

        mark