The Soviet Cosmonaut Who Knew the Spacecraft Was Defective and Flew It Anyway in 1967 to Save His Backup Yuri Gagarin and Was Killed When the Parachute Failed

Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov (1927–1967) was one of the senior members of the original Soviet cosmonaut corps, the 20-man Vanguard Six selected in March 1960. He had been the commander of Voskhod 1 in October 1964 — the first multi-cosmonaut spaceflight — and was, by 1967, the only Soviet cosmonaut with previous spaceflight experience available for the planned April 1967 inaugural mission of the new Soyuz spacecraft.

Soyuz had been intended as the spacecraft that would carry Soviet cosmonauts to the Moon. The development programme had been begun in 1962 under the lead Soviet space-programme administrator Sergei Korolev. Korolev had died in January 1966 (of complications from cancer surgery). His successor Vasily Mishin had inherited a partially-developed spacecraft and a substantial political schedule pressure from the Politburo, which wanted Soyuz 1 to launch on the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1967.

By spring 1967 the Soyuz spacecraft had completed three unmanned test flights (Cosmos 133, 140, and 154). All three had experienced multiple system failures. The available engineering reports identified an estimated 203 individual design or quality-control faults in the Soyuz 1 spacecraft that had been assembled for the April crewed launch. The lead engineering review document was approximately 200 pages long.

What Komarov knew

The KGB officer Venyamin Russayev — who had been assigned in the early 1960s as the cosmonaut corps liaison — has confirmed in post-Soviet memoirs (published 1997 and reaffirmed 2011) that Komarov and his backup pilot Yuri Gagarin had both reviewed the engineering fault report in March 1967. Both had submitted a joint memo to Brezhnev’s personal staff that recommended postponing the mission. The memo was passed up the political chain to the relevant Politburo members. It was suppressed.

The cosmonaut corps’s political situation in March-April 1967 was that the Politburo wanted the launch. Brezhnev had personally committed to a 1967 “joint Soviet space achievement” that would establish a working Soyuz-to-Soyuz docking — a substantial public demonstration of Soviet spaceflight superiority in the year of the October-Revolution anniversary. The political commitment was inflexible.

Komarov decided in early April 1967 — according to multiple post-Soviet sources, principally Russayev’s account — that he would fly the mission himself even though he believed the spacecraft would kill him. The decision was specifically motivated by the fact that the backup pilot was Gagarin. If Komarov refused, Gagarin — the first man in space, the Soviet Union’s most visible international symbol of technological achievement — would have to fly instead. Komarov was unwilling to send Gagarin to a death he believed unavoidable.

Komarov reportedly told Russayev: “I’m not going to make it back from this flight. If I refuse to make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead. That’s Yuri, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.”

The flight

Soyuz 1 launched from Baikonur on the morning of 23 April 1967. The launch was successful. The orbital insertion was nominal.

The first failures appeared within hours. One of the two solar panels on the Soyuz Service Module did not deploy. The 50 percent reduction in available electrical power crippled most of the planned mission profile — the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna would not deploy, the orientation thrusters were drawing more power than the single panel could supply, and the substantially attitude-control system was operating intermittently.

The planned Soyuz 1-Soyuz 2 docking — Soyuz 2 was scheduled to launch on 24 April with a relief crew that would dock with Komarov’s spacecraft, swap two cosmonauts across, and bring the substantially crippled Soyuz 1 home with the redesigned crew — was cancelled in mid-flight when Soyuz 2’s launch was scrubbed by ground weather.

The Politburo decision to bring Komarov down was made on the night of 23-24 April. The substantially planned mission was abandoned. The priority objective became the recovery of Komarov alive.

The deorbit burn was executed on the 18th orbit at approximately 5:24 a.m. Moscow time on 24 April 1967. The failing attitude-control system made the burn slightly off-axis. The Soyuz 1 descent module separated from the Service Module and Orbital Module as planned and entered the atmosphere on a correct ballistic trajectory.

The parachute

The Soyuz descent module’s recovery system was a two-stage parachute. The drogue parachute was to deploy at approximately 9.5 km altitude, slowing the capsule from supersonic to subsonic. The main parachute was to deploy at approximately 7 km altitude, slowing the capsule to approximately 7 m/s — the velocity at which the small final-impact retrorockets would fire just before ground contact.

The drogue parachute deployed correctly at 9.5 km. The main parachute did not deploy.

The reconstruction (made in subsequent weeks by the Soviet accident investigation and confirmed in 1990s post-Soviet engineering reviews) is that the Soyuz 1 main parachute compartment had been built with an improperly applied substantially-thicker-than-specified heat-resistant sealing varnish on the inner compartment walls. The varnish had been applied during ground assembly to protect the parachute from the high temperatures of atmospheric reentry. The varnish was thicker than the specification and had effectively glued the folded parachute fabric to the compartment walls. The deployment mortar fired correctly but the parachute did not pull free.

The Soyuz 1 descent module’s reserve parachute deployed approximately three seconds later. The reserve had been packed without the heat-resistant varnish — but the reserve had not been designed to operate without the primary main parachute being deployed first. The reserve parachute became tangled with the drogue parachute lines that were still attached to the descent module.

The descent module hit the Orenburg Steppe at approximately 140 km/h.

Komarov was killed instantly. The landing site reportedly burned for two hours after impact from the residual hypergolic propellant in the descent module’s attitude-control jets.

Recovery

The Soviet recovery party reached the crash site within thirty minutes. The descent module was crushed and burning. The recovery team excavated Komarov’s remains over the next several hours.

The photograph that was published in the Soviet press several weeks later — of a open coffin showing the recovered remains next to a gilt portrait of Komarov — is one of the most-circulated photographs in Soviet space-programme history. The open-coffin display was a deliberate political decision by the Soviet leadership to demonstrate the gravity of the loss. The remains were almost unrecognisable.

Komarov was 40 years old. He was buried with full honours in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Red Square in Moscow.

Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin never forgave Mishin and the Politburo for having allowed the Soyuz 1 launch to proceed in its known condition. He became publicly hostile to the space-programme administration through 1967 and privately hostile to Brezhnev personally. He was grounded from active flight assignments through autumn 1967.

He was killed in a MiG-15 training accident at Kirzhach on 27 March 1968, aged 34. The official cause was loss of attitude control in the wake of a passing Su-15 fighter. Several alternative explanations have been proposed; none has been conclusively confirmed.

The Soyuz programme was suspended after the 1967 disaster for 18 months. The first successful crewed Soyuz flight was Soyuz 3 on 26 October 1968. The Soyuz spacecraft, with progressive modifications, remained in continuous Soviet and Russian crewed-spaceflight service from 1968 to the present — the longest operational lifetime of any human-rated launch vehicle in history. Approximately 150 Soyuz crewed missions have flown.

Komarov’s medal and several personal items were carried to the Moon on Apollo 15 in August 1971 by the US crew, who left a small plaque on the lunar surface listing the names of the American and Soviet cosmonauts and astronauts who had died in the space programmes to that date. The plaque is still there.