Lost in Space (The real Major Toms to ground control)

Surfing through the internet I came across an interesting site which is dedicated to the work of the Judica-Cordiglia brothers. In the late 50s beginning of the 60s, two young Italian students near Turin with a passion for astronomy, decide to build a space listening station to try to track down and record satellites and space exploration probes launched by the then Soviet Union or the United States.

In their own Ground Control tower called "Torre Bert" they soon achieved the technical capability to monitor and record the radio frequencies used by these orbes and therefore succeeded in predicting and following their orbits into space. One day, in 1961, quite some time before Gagarin ventured succesfully into space, instead of the blip blips that they would normally receive, they heard and recorded the beating of a human heart. It was not long after that, that they started capturing on tape the desperate communication attempts of unknown space pionneers secretely launched into space by the Soviet Union. Things went terribly wrong for most of these secret missions. Not surprisingly these lost Cosmonauts were never mentioned officially by the Soviet Union. In the middle of the space race the pride of a whole nation was at stake.

This extraordinary site contains chilling sound files of these recordings and transcripts of the dialogues or sometimes monologues of these lost Major Toms as they drifted helplessly into space.

Visit the site right here

"...Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much she knows

Ground control to major tom
Your circuits dead, theres something wrong
Can you hear me, major tom? Can you hear me, major tom?
Can you hear me, major tom? Can you....

Here am I floating round my tin can
Far above the moon
Planet earth is blue
And theres nothing I can do."

Space Oddity by David Bowie