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At the height of the Cold War, two superpowers competed to have one of their men be the first to set foot on the moon.
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- Author, Jono Namara
- Scroll BBC News World
4 hours ago
At the height of the Cold War, two superpowers competed to have one of their men be the first to set foot on the moon.
But to arrive at Neil Armstrong’s historic “one small step for man” required a giant leap in space travel.
It was a daring mission that would end in disaster for a brave cosmonaut.
It’s the story of Vladimir Komarov, the man who fell to earth.
The son of a factory worker, Komarov was born in 1927 in Moscow the capital of the Soviet Union at the time. As a young man he showed a natural talent for mathematics and a keen interest in aviation.
After graduating from the flight school, he became one of the best test pilots in the Soviet Union.
“For the Soviets, Komarov was perfect,” said Richard Hollingham, science writer and cohost of the Space Boffins podcast. “He was a great driver and very patriotic; That’s probably why it was chosen for two really important space missions.”
the first flight
In the 1960s hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union were at a boiling point. As technology advanced during the socalled space race, the two superpowers battled to get to the moon first.
“From the beginning, the Soviets were first in almost everything,” explains Hollingham. “The Soviet Union put Sputnik, the first satellite, into orbit; launch a bitch into orbit, Laika; and the United States seemed to be lagging behind on everything.”
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The dog Laika was the first creature to go into space and she didn’t come back
Cosmonauts like Komarov and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, received extremely intensive training.
“They put them in isolation chambers. They rotated them at very high forces,” says Hollingham. “They even left them in the woods with just an ax and some matches to see how they would survive in the desert if their spaceship went off course.”
In 1964, Komarov successfully completed his first space flight, the Voskhod 1. “It was the first threeman spacecraft [a bordo].”
“The apocryphal story of Voskhod 1 states that the engineer who worked on it was also deployed as a member of the crew to solve any problem as his life would depend on it if done right,” explains the author.
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Soviet commemorative stamp of Voskhod 1 depicting cosmonauts Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov, Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov and Boris Borisovich Yegorov
Soyuz and Apollo
The day after Komarov’s historic flight, Leonid Brezhnev was elected General Secretary of the USSR Communist Party. He launched an ambitious new plan: the Soyuz space program.
“It was a bold mission,” says Hollingham. “They wanted to launch a spacecraft to put Komarov into orbit, and then another with two crew members on board. They would come together and dock in orbit. Komarov would transfer to the other ship that would take them back to Earth.”
But as the launch date neared, it became clear that Soyuz 1 was riddled with bugs.
“In 1967 the program was a disaster and there was no way to fly these spacecraft, but on the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution there was tremendous political pressure for the spacecraft to take off,” Hollingham continues.
And at the same time “in the United States this was exactly the case with [o programa] Apollo”.
“I spoke to many engineers who worked on Apollo and they told me they knew the Apollo 1 spacecraft wasn’t ready yet. But they put three astronauts on the Apollo 1 launch pad, the spacecraft caught fire and they died.”
Despite growing concerns, Soyuz 1 was successfully launched on April 23, 1967.
Credit, HERITAGE PICTURES
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American astronauts Edward H. White II, Virgil I. ‘Gus’ Grissom, and Roger B. Chaffee died in January 1967 during a routine simulated launch test aboard the Apollo Saturn 5 lunar rocket when a short circuit ignited the pure oxygen environment
We have a problem
“Komarov knew as soon as he took off that the spacecraft was in trouble,” says Hollingham. “Things started to fail upon entry into orbit.”
“One of the solar panels that powered the spacecraft did not open, severely limiting the instrumentation.”
Due to numerous problems on board Soyuz 1, the launch plan for Soyuz 2 was canceled and Komarov was ordered to attempt to return to Earth’s atmosphere.
“It looked like he would make it back after that disastrous mission, but the parachutes failed and he fell on the way back to Earth,” explains the author. “He probably died from gravity alone on the way back. When it hit the ground, the spacecraft caught fire due to retrorocket failure.”
myths
It is often claimed that Komarov was in touch with ground control during the return and delivered very harsh criticism, but Hollingham doubts that possibility.
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The plan was that Vladimir Komarov would move from one ship to another in space.
“This version that he cursed the Soviet Union, that lessons can be learned from it, is very unlikely to me,” he said.
“Firstly, it would not have been possible to hear it, mainly because it was traversing the atmosphere. And second, when it realized something was wrong, it sped toward Earth too fast.”
Komarov’s remains are also disputed.
“There are several versions of what happened to Komarov’s remains. For one, her body was put on display so everyone could see what happened. There are photos to prove it,” says Hollingham.
It was claimed at the time that Komarov probably knew he would not return alive and requested that if he died his body be displayed in an open coffin to shame Soviet leaders.
“There is no evidence that he thought of it. Komarov was a patriotic Soviet citizen. I don’t think he wanted his death to be a propaganda victory for the other side.”
On April 26, 1967, after a state funeral in Moscow’s Red Square, Komarov’s remains were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
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Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov has died at the age of 40
“For me, 1967 was really a pivotal year in the space race,” Hollingham said. “In January, three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 fire, and then there was the fall of Komarov on Soyuz 1, the first human to lose his life in space.”
“Both parties had to stop, think and get back to where they started.”
Vladimir Komarov is one of six Soviet cosmonauts whose names were engraved along with eight American astronauts on the plaque accompanying Belgian artist Paul van Hoeydonck’s sculpture The Fallen Astronaut, left on the moon by the crew of Apollo 15 in 1971 became .
A tribute under the stars to the man who fell to earth.