The Last Soviet — podcast tells the fascinating story of a lone cosmonaut

Pop fans of a certain vintage may remember Lance Bass, singer with NSYNC, the 1990s boyband famed for the hit “I Want You Back” and for their copious use of hair gel (and also for launching the career of Justin Timberlake). What they may not recall is that Bass is also a Russian-trained cosmonaut, having gone through training in Star City outside Moscow during a break from the band. In the end, Bass never got to go into space, but his obsession with the stories of those who have remains undimmed.

All of which explains how Bass comes to be hosting The Last Soviet, a new podcast telling the story of Sergei Krikalev, a flight engineer from Leningrad who, in 1991, was stationed alone on Mir, the Soviet space station, just as his country was collapsing. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, the space programme was left in disarray, with no funding for further missions. Krikalev wasn’t initially told what was going on; the first he heard of it was from an associate in Australia with whom he had occasional radio contact. When mission control finally brought him up to speed, he was given a choice: he could return home in his re-entry capsule, reunite with his wife and one-year-old child and leave the space station to circle the Earth without a crew, or he could stay there until events on the ground stabilised. Krikalev chose to stay and was alone in space for a total of 313 days.

It’s a remarkable story, expertly narrated by Bass, whose celebrity presence is not the distraction it might have been. The sound design is also excellent, with the (presumably imagined) sounds of the Mir space station interspersed with archive audio of news reports and crackling transmissions from mission control, all set against a tinkling otherworldly soundtrack. The series draws on the testimony of historians, space experts and Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space, who trained with Russian cosmonauts for 18 months before visiting Mir in 1991. Sharman’s tales of training regimes, space travel rituals and the hospitality extended by her fellow cosmonauts are wonderful.

If there is one voice missing here, it’s Krikalev’s. It turns out the series had lined up an interview with the retired cosmonaut, who is now 64, to be done in Moscow last spring but, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the trip was called off. While it would have been good to hear how it felt for him to be marooned in space while his country imploded, the series successfully plugs the gaps with geopolitical context and how the Soviet space missions, beginning with Yuri Gagarin’s, captured the nation’s imagination. The Last Soviet delivers a vivid slice of sociopolitical history while allowing us to bask in the wonder of human beings climbing aboard space rockets and blasting off into the unknown.

podcasts.apple.com