Russian Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov crashed into Earth "crying in rage"
66 replies, posted
[img]http://spacefeelings.com/images/outer-space-flight-critical-situations-16.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.topfoto.co.uk/gallery/spacerace/images/prevs/1043815.jpg[/img]
[quote][b]Published: March 18, 2011
by Robert Krulwich[/b]
So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexsei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.
The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."
This extraordinarily intimate account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, to be published next month. The authors base their narrative principally on revelations from a KGB officer, Venymin Ivanovich Russayev, and previous reporting by Yaroslav Golovanov in Pravda. This version — if it's true — is beyond shocking.
Starman tells the story of a friendship between two cosmonauts, Vladimir Kamarov and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space. The two men were close; they socialized, hunted and drank together.
In 1967, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn't back out because he didn't want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.
The story begins around 1967, when Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, decided to stage a spectacular midspace rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships.
The plan was to launch a capsule, the Soyuz 1, with Komarov inside. The next day, a second vehicle would take off, with two additional cosmonauts; the two vehicles would meet, dock, Komarov would crawl from one vehicle to the other, exchanging places with a colleague, and come home in the second ship. It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen.
The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.
The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, "I'm not going to make it back from this flight."
Russayev asked, Why not refuse? According to the authors, Komarov answered: "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead." That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn't do that to his friend. "That's Yura," the book quotes him saying, "and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears.
On launch day, April 23, 1967, a Russian journalist, Yaroslav Golovanov, reported that Gagarin showed up at the launch site and demanded to be put into a spacesuit, though no one was expecting him to fly. Golovanov called this behavior "a sudden caprice," though afterward some observers thought Gagarin was trying to muscle onto the flight to save his friend. The Soyuz left Earth with Komarov on board.
Once the Soyuz began to orbit the Earth, the failures began. Antennas didn't open properly. Power was compromised. Navigation proved difficult. The next day's launch had to be canceled. And worse, Komarov's chances for a safe return to Earth were dwindling fast.
All the while, U.S. intelligence was listening in. The National Security Agency had a facility at an Air Force base near Istanbul. Previous reports said that U.S. listeners knew something was wrong but couldn't make out the words. In this account, an NSA analyst, identified in the book as Perry Fellwock, described overhearing Komarov tell ground control officials he knew he was about to die. Fellwock described how Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin called on a video phone to tell him he was a hero. Komarov's wife was also on the call to talk about what to say to their children. Kosygin was crying.
When the capsule began its descent and the parachutes failed to open, the book describes how American intelligence "picked up [Komarov's] cries of rage as he plunged to his death."
Some translators heard him say, "Heat is rising in the capsule." He also used the word "killed" — presumably to describe what the engineers had done to him.
But Vladimir Komarov's death seems to have been almost scripted. Yuri Gagarin said as much in an interview he gave to Pravda weeks after the crash. He sharply criticized the officials who had let his friend fly.
Komarov was honored with a state funeral. Only a chipped heel bone survived the crash. Three weeks later, Yuri Gagarin went to see his KGB friend. He wanted to talk about what happened. As the book describes it:
Gagarin met Russayev at his family apartment but refused to speak in any of the rooms because he was worried about bugs. The lifts and lobby areas were not safe, either, so the two men trudged up and down the apartment block's echoing stairwells.
The Gagarin of 1967 was very different from the carefree young man of 1961. Komarov's death had placed an enormous burden of guilt on his shoulders. At one point Gagarin said, "I must go to see the main man [Brezhnev] personally." He was profoundly depressed that he hadn't been able to persuade Brezhnev to cancel Komarov's launch.
Shortly before Gagarin left, the intensity of his anger became obvious. "I'll get through to him [Brezhnev] somehow, and if I ever find out he knew about the situation and still let everything happen, then I know exactly what I'm going to do." Russayev goes on, "I don't know exactly what Yuri had in mind. Maybe a good punch in the face." Russayev warned Gagarin to be cautious as far as Brezhnev was concerned. "I told him, 'Talk to me first before you do anything. I warn you, be very careful.' "
Yuri Gagarin died in a plane accident in 1968, a year before the Americans reached the moon.[/quote]
[i]"If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead." That was Yuri Gagarin. Komarov couldn't do that to his friend. "That's Yura, and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears.
On launch day, April 23, 1967, a Russian journalist, Yaroslav Golovanov, reported that Gagarin showed up at the launch site and demanded to be put into a spacesuit, though no one was expecting him to fly. Golovanov called this behavior "a sudden caprice," though afterward some observers thought Gagarin was trying to muscle onto the flight to save his friend. But the Soyuz left Earth with Komarov on board.[/i]
[img]http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/astronauts/komarov.jpg[/img]
:smith:
[url]http://m.npr.org/news/front/134597833?page=0[/url]
[editline]18 March 2011[/editline]
Little more on Soyuz 1:
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ2x0JrhRc4[/media]
At least the intense would have killed him quickly before he felt much pain.
[img]http://www.topfoto.co.uk/gallery/spacerace/images/prevs/1043815.jpg[/img]
holy fuck
is that his body after
[quote]turning molten on impact[/quote]
?
reading this: :smithicide:
What a fucking hero
Oh god that's awful :smith:
However, such was life in Soviet Russia... quite literally.
no it's a microwave brownie
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;28675072]At least the intense would have killed him quickly before he felt much pain.[/QUOTE]
I think psychological pain counts
[QUOTE=ThatHippyMan;28675048][img_thumb]http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2008/06/big-bosses-mgs3-the-fury.jpg[/img_thumb]
Eerily similar.[/QUOTE]
Damn it, and I thought I could upload the picture first.
This is sad news though. The picture speaks of his horrible death. The soviets really were bastards sometimes, especially when they couldn't take criticism within own ranks.
[QUOTE=ThatHippyMan;28675048][img_thumb]http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2008/06/big-bosses-mgs3-the-fury.jpg[/img_thumb]
Eerily similar.[/QUOTE]
The Fury is going to send a giant flaming skull at us.
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;28675072]At least the intense would have killed him quickly before he felt much pain.[/QUOTE]
He would have felt no pain. The moment the capsule hit the ground the entire thing would basically disintegrate. His body would vaporise faster than any nerve signal can move.
A moving story. :frown:
He probably burned to death in the capsule, and if not then, died on impact. At any rate, it was surely painful.
This was really sad.
[editline]18th March 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=blazingfly;28675187]He would have felt no pain. The moment the capsule hit the ground the entire thing would basically disintegrate. His body would vaporise faster than any nerve signal can move.[/QUOTE]
Except for the fact that he probably burned on the re-entry, since the craft was malfunctioning so much. He commented that "heat was rising quickly". I wouldn't be surprised if the plates that burn away failed to protect him
He's on my list of amazing heroes now.
[QUOTE=Ven Kaeo;28675193]He probably burned to death in the capsule, and if not then, died on impact. At any rate, it was surely painful.
This was really sad.
[editline]18th March 2011[/editline]
Except for the fact that he probably burned on the re-entry, since the craft was malfunctioning so much. He commented that "heat was rising quickly". I wouldn't be surprised if the plates that burn away failed to protect him[/QUOTE]
If that had happened, the craft would have exploded in mid air. You can clearly see the wreckage is more or less all together.
[QUOTE=Kalibos;28675094][img_thumb]http://www.topfoto.co.uk/gallery/spacerace/images/prevs/1043815.jpg[/img_thumb]
holy fuck
is that his body after
?[/QUOTE]
I think that may be the main capsule, as it says only a chipped heel bone remained.
Only the soviet union would be dumb enough to risk someones life like this just to show off.
[QUOTE=carcarcargo;28675396]Only the soviet union would be dumb enough to risk someones life like this just to show off.[/QUOTE]
America sent an aluminum pod full of fighter pilots into space with the computing power of an alarm clock. If it wasn't for an errant pen in the crew cabin, Armstrong and Friends would still be on the moon.
I shed a manly tear.
[QUOTE=carcarcargo;28675396]Only the soviet union would be dumb enough to risk someones life like this just to show off.[/QUOTE]
i don't know apollo 1 was a pretty big controversy
[QUOTE=ThatHippyMan;28675435]America sent an aluminum pod full of fighter pilots into space with the computing power of an alarm clock. If it wasn't for an errant pen in the crew cabin, Armstrong and Friends would still be on the moon.[/QUOTE]
These guys KNEW the ship was broken, but decided to carry it out any way.
[QUOTE=carcarcargo;28675396]Only the soviet union would be dumb enough to risk someones life like this just to show off.[/QUOTE]
Some say that it was only because of the U.S's concerns for safety that we fell behind in the space race. (And I mean that as a good thing)
[QUOTE=ThatHippyMan;28675435]America sent an aluminum pod full of fighter pilots into space with the computing power of an alarm clock. If it wasn't for an errant pen in the crew cabin, Armstrong and Friends would still be on the moon.[/QUOTE]Thing is, though, they didn't send them up knowing full well there were severe mechanical faults, then fire anyone who dared mention it. There may have been incompetence involved in that case, but certainly not complete callous disregard for human life as in this case.
[QUOTE=carcarcargo;28675510]These guys KNEW the ship was broken, but decided to carry it out any way.[/QUOTE]
They did not know that a vital part of the engine ignition system was within "Oh fuck I broke it" length.
[editline]18th March 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=Sgt Doom;28675553]Thing is, though, they didn't send them up knowing full well there were severe mechanical faults, then fire anyone who dared mention it. There may have been incompetence involved in that case, but certainly not complete callous disregard for human life as in this case.[/QUOTE]
Of course this was an extremely bad case, but both sides risked lives to prove who had the best phallic manlaunching system.
[QUOTE=ThatHippyMan;28675567]They did not know that a vital part of the engine ignition system was within "Oh fuck I broke it" length.
[editline]18th March 2011[/editline]
Of course this was an extremely bad case, but both sides risked lives to prove who had the best phallic manlaunching system.[/QUOTE]
The source says they knew of 203 structural problems, I'm pretty sure they probably knew of that as well.
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