Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth 'Crying In Rage'

[Requiem]

This, above all else, is really the story of friendship and honor.

Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth 'Crying In Rage'
by Robert Krulwich

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.

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 hear him say, "Heat is rising in the capsule." He also uses the word "killed" — presumably to describe what the engineers had done to him.

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.' "

The authors then mention a rumor, never proven (and to my mind, most unlikely), that one day Gagarin did have a moment with Brezhnev and he threw a drink in Brezhnev's face.

I hope so.

Yuri Gagarin died in a plane accident in 1968, a year before the Americans reached the moon.

Source

[1stindoor]

Thanks for that post.

[Dusty]

I think most people in his situation prolly would have been ultra-pissed, as well.

[mark46th]

It reinforces our feelings about the Soviet lack of regard for a life. Not exactly Slim Pickens riding the A-Bomb down, waving his cowboy hat....

[Requiem]

Originally Posted by mark46th

It reinforces our feelings about the Soviet lack of regard for a life. Not exactly Slim Pickens riding the A-Bomb down, waving his cowboy hat....

Agree. But it's baffling to me that they would put the space race above the safety their own men, if not for humane reasons, then for pragmatic reasons. It costs a lot of time and money to train a man for a space mission. They didn't even consider him a valuable asset to be used better.

Thank God for men who stood, fought and died against communism.

v/r
Susan

[mark46th]

Look at how the Russians fought WWII. Sending minimally trained troops into battle minimally armed, some not armed but told to pick up a dead comrade's weapon, then have your own troops shoot them when they break in panic...

[ES 96]

Originally Posted by Broadsword2004

Part of it was just probably the problems inherent with a centrally-planned economy. Everything was made half-assed. Even if the engineers who designed the spacecraft itself designed it very good, the actually build-quality of all the individual parts for it from the various areas of the economy they were produced in would've been of extremely crappy quality.

And to think we use Russian built RD-180s now, granted not for human flight, but still.

pwr_RD-180.pdf

Yuri Gagarin died in a plane accident in 1968, a year before the Americans reached the moon.

Curious timing that. Sounds like a great way to off someone of "hero of the people" stature there, without scandal, who actually did get in an up close and personal run in with Brezhnev.

[ES 96]

Originally Posted by Broadsword2004

We are not using Soviet-era designed-and-built rockets, these are modern Russian-built rocket engines provided in partnership with Pratt & Whitney. P&R is not going to do a partnership with a Russian company unless it has some good stuff. Russia is not a centrally-planned economy in the way it was in the Soviet era.

To clarify, my statement was to illustrate how much things have changed over the decades. Sort of a "who would have thought way back then that now" type.

The attachment in that post is a sourced/produced P&WR sheet talking about just that so I had that covered too