Dead Reckoning: The Globus and Voskhod 2

In March 1965, two Soviet cosmonauts fell out of the sky into a frozen forest in the Urals, trapped inside a cramped capsule hundreds of kilometers from rescue. Their survival, and their journey home, relied on an intricate mechanical computer made of aluminum, clockwork, and paper. 

In this Episode

• Laboratory 47: the branch of the Soviet Flight Research Institute in Zhukovsky, run by engineer Sergei Darevsky
• The Globus: the indicator of position in flight, a paper-wrapped aluminum globe run by differential gears and cams with orbital curves ground into their edges
• Dead reckoning in spaceflight: why the instrument knew nothing it wasn't told and what that meant for the cosmonauts
• Voskhod 2: Pavel Belyayev and Alexey Leonov, a spacewalk that nearly ended in catastrophe, a failed automatic descent, and the forty-six seconds that decided where they landed

Episode Music

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • Satellites and Waterfalls
  • Something Beautiful is Going to Happen
  • Always Surrounded, Never There
  • Who Will Listen on a Dying Planet

Additional Reading

Becker, J. (2026, June 7). Spaceflight mission report: Voskhod 2. Spacefacts. https://www.spacefacts.de/mission/english/voskhod-2.htm

Leonov, A. (2005, January). The nightmare of Voskhod 2. Air & Space Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-nightmare-of-voskhod-2-8655378/

Shirriff, K. (2023, January 21). Inside the Globus INK: A mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight. Ken Shirriff's Blog. https://www.righto.com/2023/01/inside-globus-ink-mechanical-navigation.html

Tiapchenko, Y. (2003). Information display systems for Russian spacecraft: An overview (S. Gerovitch, Comp. & Trans.). Computing in the Soviet Space Program, MIT. https://web.mit.edu/slava/space/essays/essay-tiapchenko1.htm

Voskhod 2. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 1, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Voskhod_2&oldid=1350315400

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