Komarove (right) and Gagarin
In 1967, Soviet cosmonaut
Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov volunteered for what he knew was a doomed space
mission to save the life of his friend who would have been sent on the mission
if Komarov had refused to go.
Komarov was selected to
command the Soyuz 1, with Yuri Gagarin as his backup cosmonaut. The cosmonauts
knew that the spacecraft had major safety problems, but Komarov stated that if
he were to refuse to fly, Gagarin would be forced to go instead.
Gagarin, along with
senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 serious
structural problems, and he recommended that the mission be postponed. When no
one listened, Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo to the Russian leader Alexei Kosygin
and gave it to a high placed KGB officer to give to Kosygin. In turn, Kosygin
not only refused to end the flight, he punished all involved with writing the
letter. (The Soviet system blamed and punish the messenger)
Days before the launch,
Venyamin Russayev, the KGB official who delivered the letter to Kosygin, had
dinner with Komarov and his wife. At the end of the evening Komarov said
plainly "I'm not going to make it back from this flight" and went on
to explain that if he refused the flight, the politburo would strip him of his
military honors and send Gagarin in his place. He couldn't send a close friend
and national hero to his death. Komarov insisted that his funeral be
open-casket so that the Soviet leadership could see what they had done.
On the morning of April
23, 1967, launch day, Gagarin showed very early at the flight center and
demanded to be placed in the capsule instead of Komarov, but it was Komarov who
flew out on the doomed capsule that morning.
Once the Soyuz began its
orbit, failures began. Only one of the two solar panels deployed, leaving the
lopsided spacecraft at half power and as soon as it reentered the atmosphere,
the spacecraft was unbalanced and started spinning. Soviet premier Alexei
Kosygin called on a video phone with Komarov's wife. Kosygin was crying.
Komarov was overheard by US Intelligence telling Russian ground control that he
was going to die. As the capsule crash the US “"picked up [Komarov's]
cries of rage as he plunged to his death."
The capsule crashed so
hard into the earth…… with the force of a 2.8 ton meteorite…. that the remains
of Komarov's body were smashed a molten pile almost into a box shape of about
three feet by two feet. Komarov's charred remains were uncovered and displayed
during his funeral. The largest recognizable part of his body was his heel
bone. Yuri Gagarin died in a plane accident in 1968, a year before the
Americans reached the moon.
