That milestone happened on Friday, when the Soyuz program celebrated the 40th anniversary of an historic event: The first orbital docking between two craft where human beings left Earth in one craft, and returned in another.

To say the event went smoothly would be, well, a total frickin' lie, as cosmonaut Boris Volynov would experience one of space flight's most harrowing reentries on this most historic trip.

After his craft, the Soyuz 5, failed to separate from its service module, it began the descent facing the wrong way. As the heat shield got an unparalleled view of the cosmos, the flimsy entry hatch, with its one-inch of insulation and a window, received the brunt of reentry. Things began to melt and stink and smoke, and the hatch itself bulged inwards from the stress of reentry. If the craft had not miraculously righted itself, poor Volynov would have cooked to death in temperatures reaching 5,000 degrees.

But that wasn't the end—the parachute still had to partially fail, and there was the missed landing spot to worry about too. The former only resulted in broken teeth and a mouthful of blood (phew!). The latter almost killed him for a third time in 30 minutes, as the Ural Mountains were -40 degrees when he landed there, some 2,000 kilometers short of the LZ.

Lucky for Volynov, some nearby peasants kept him warm in their hut until help arrived. As a token of their appreciation, the Soviet government then forbade him from talking about the incident because of the ongoing space race with the U.S. News of the event only surfaced relatively recently in 1997.

Seven years after the "landing," Volynov was the commander of the Soyuz 21 mission, which saw him back in orbit aboard the Salyut space station. And to think, I actually had the audacity to complain about my snowy ride to work the other day. [James O Berg via Wired]

Update: It also looks like Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid.

Yes, lyrics. I know. Weird. We didn't know ourselves that the classic John Williams Indy theme song had lyrics, until we learned about it a few days ago in Alex's Tumblr page. According to Alex, Williams confessed in an Q&A with Radar Magazine that before he "composes a score he comes up with lyrics in his head first and then writes the music to them, even though he knows no one will ever hear the words." The iconic composer then went on to reveal the secret lyrics to Raiders of the Lost Ark to el Sr. Balk.

When asked about the veracity of this story, Alex declined to comment. The lyrics he posted sounded about right, but just a little bit off-beat at the end. I then chased the story like a fake LEGO boulder rolling behind an archeologist with a dog's name, and managed to get John Williams' assistant Alan Smithee to fax me the secret lyrics under condition of anonymity.

The lyrics are very similar, but the last verse of the first strophe is actually the real one. This updated version also includes more verses, as well as new references to the Soviets in the movie, and beloved teen star Shia LaBeouf.

We debated internally about publishing the story, and we finally decided to share them with you in this video, as a sing-a-long. I hope you sing them today in the theaters, and they stay in your mind for the next five days—at least, that's what happened with me.

Enjoy.

[NOTE: needless to say, we made this thing up so you can sing along in the movie theaters (in your mind, that is. Whoever sings this next to me in the theater today gets smacked. Hey, we named our dog Jones after Indy.]

[Siberian Light]