 Soyuz is the longest running human spaceflight program. Variations of that spacecraft have been flying since 1967. It was so successful early in its lifetime that it became the Soviet's workhorse in getting crews to orbit and remains Russia's human spaceflight system today. But the program got off to a very rocky start. The first ever Soyuz mission, Soyuz 1, launched a spacecraft engineers and cosmonauts knew it was plagued with issues and it ended with the death of its pilot, Vladimir Komarov, marking the first time in history that a crew was killed on a mission. Hello everyone, I'm Amy and welcome back to The Vintage Space, my little corner of the internet where we talk about all things mid-century with an emphasis on spaceflight, aviation and technology. I usually do a lot of US-based history here but today we're jumping to the other side of the world to talk about the Soviet space program and in particular, the fatal flight of Soyuz 1. In the 1950s, experimental test flying was among the most dangerous jobs on the planet. Pilots were testing new and unproven aircraft and their laboratory was in effect the sky. With the dawn of the space age towards the end of the decade, their laboratory expanded out of the atmosphere. This was true in both the United States and the Soviet Union. The earliest days of space exploration were marked with uncertainty and best guesses for how to keep a crew alive while also learning about this wholly new business of human spaceflight. In America, the first experimental program to test the proverbial waters was Mercury. In the Soviet Union, it was Vostok. The Soviet Union had a very different arrangement for its space program than did the United States. I'm going to do a good look at this down the line but in short, well, the United States had a civilian space agency wholly separate from its military but with the military supplying elements like early launch vehicles. The first Soviet satellites were an offshoot of its military missile programs. The lack of duplicating efforts gave the Soviets an advantage over the US and was among the factors that enabled the USSR to launch history's first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4th of 1957. Like in the United States, the first satellites were the first steps towards the real goal of launching humans and the Soviets took steps first. Sputnik II launched just a month after Sputnik I and it had a rudimentary life support system to keep the dog Leica alive. The system was badly flawed and Leica didn't survive even ascent into orbit but engineers were nevertheless working on it. As the new decade dawned, the Soviets forged ahead with robotic launches towards the moon, Mars and Venus with a mix of successes and failures. It also began developing the first manned spacecraft called Vostok, which means East. Vostok was as simple as its American Mercury complement. It was designed to launch on a Carrable rocket with four smaller staging rockets strapped around the sides for added thrust. The launch vehicle would get the spacecraft into orbit where it would stay for 90 minutes on that first flight. Later missions would extend to multi-orbit missions. All the while, the cosmonaut on board would be a little more than an occupant. Like the Mercury astronauts, the cosmonaut's training for Vostok missions didn't like their passive role. They were military pilots who could fly anything in the air and they wanted to be in command of their craft. The cosmonaut's chief physician agreed, arguing that each and every one of them was bright and expertly trained specifically for this mission. They could certainly handle a few simple procedures. Engineers with the Design, Research and Development Office known as OKB1 prepared a list outlining the cosmonaut's in-flight duties during every stage of the mission as well as in emergency situations. It was a simple list of procedures to automate. The Soviet's chief designer, Sergei Korolev, along with other chiefs in the program, preferred automation. Their argument was that with so many unknowns about spaceflight, it was best to take the potential for human error out of the equation. In the end, the engineers won. The spacecraft would be automated but with potential for manual override in an emergency. To do this, the cosmonaut would have to unlock the onboard computer. This was done by a six-digit code. The cosmonaut would know three digits and the other three would be in a sealed envelope. He could only open if ordered to do so. The mission would end with a simple deorbit burn to begin Vostok's fall to Earth. At an altitude of 10,000 feet, the cosmonaut would eject as per mission procedure. He would land by personal parachute since Vostok's couldn't slow the spacecraft enough to protect a human inside. The Soviets had to use this workaround for Earth landings because there just wasn't a good option for splashdowns in Soviet accessible waters. The first man to sit inside the Vostok was Yuri Gagarin who launched on April 12th, 1961. He was chosen as much for his pedigree as his skill set. He came from a humble, working-class background and had moved through the Soviet system to achieve esteemed positions within the military as a test and fighter pilot. He stood as a model for the triumph of the Soviet system over Western democracy. The space age matured rather quickly after Gagarin's inaugural flight but somewhat unevenly between superpowers. While the United States committed to the moon and developed a whole new sophisticated spacecraft with its second program, Gemini, the Soviets made some adjustments to Vostok and renamed it Vostgod, which means sunrise. Vostgod was essentially a Vostok with elements removed to allow for a bigger crew. It was a bit of a brute force approach to achieving new goals in space, but it worked. This program, which only saw two missions fly, achieved both publicity and technological goals. The crew of Vostgod 1, Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Fyotistov and Boris Yegorov flew without spacesuits so they could all fit. This was a direct response to public coverage of the three-man Apollo spacecraft under development with NASA and it marked another Soviet first in space. This was the first multi-man crew. Vostgod 2 saw Pavel Beliyaev and Alexei Leonov launch into orbit. Only two cosmonauts could fit this time because Leonov wore a bulky spacesuit and an airlock was added to the spacecraft. There wasn't room for a third man. And it was a remarkable mission. On that flight in March of 1965, Alexei Leonov became the first person to perform a spacewalk, a feat that nearly killed him. His suit expanded once in the vacuum of space and he was forced to bleed out some of his oxygen to shrink it down enough to fit back into the airlock. If that wasn't enough, the crew landed off target in a densely-forced area rather than a clear plane. They had to spend the night in the woods with wolves prowling around. Recovery crews crossed countries skied to their landing site the following day, but they were still unable to be recovered. At least that second night in the woods, they had food, a fire, a whiskey, and some company. They were finally able to make a clearing for a helicopter the next day. It is a wild story. There were four additional Vostgod missions planned, but none flew. By then, the Soviets' attention was firmly on the new spacecraft under development, Soyuz, which means Union. Soyuz was, similarly to the modifications made to Vostdoc, a direct response to Apollo, but this spacecraft had technological changes to keep pace with the American developments. Soyuz, designed by chief designer Sergei Korolev, was designed as the spacecraft that would eventually take cosmonauts to the moon. As such, it was able to maneuver in orbit to perform rendezvous and docking. Early mission plans had the Soyuz rendezvous and dock with lunar stages waiting in Earth orbit from previous launches. Not unlike the Earth orbit rendezvous mode NASA briefly considered for Apollo. Later plans called for an Apollo-like lunar orbit rendezvous profile. Either way, maneuverability in orbit was a necessity. Soyuz also debuted a new landing system for the Soviets. Like the previous programs and similar to Apollo, the Soyuz descent module would separate from the instrument module and return alone. This one, though, had a flat bottom unlike the spherical Vostdoc and Vosgod vehicles, giving it a slight amount of lift during its fall to Earth. A small breaking parachute would deploy first, pulling out the large main chute that would slow its descent. Final cushioning on impact would come from retro rockets firing right before touchdown. It was the first time that the cosmonauts would stay inside the spacecraft during landing. Because Soyuz was designed to support the Soviet lunar program, it had versions to work out all the elements like rendezvous and docking in Earth orbit before going to the moon. It developed in the background while Vostdoc and Vosgod missions flew, meaning a lot of things changed in the Soviet space program before it was ready to launch. And a lot of things changed in the Soviet Union as a whole, too. In 1964, Leonod Brezhnev mounted a successful coup over Premier Nikita Khrushchev. For the crew of Vosgod 1, they got a phone call in orbit from one leader and landed a day later to find a new one heading the country. Where space was concerned, Brezhnev was as demanding as Khrushchev, pushing for launches to coincide with important dates and national events. But the fast-paced Soviet space program had enjoyed since its inception, stalled with the death of Sergei Korolev in 1966 after complications from surgery. His successor, Vasily Mishin, assumed the pressure of meeting the new Premier's deadlines, and it started with the first Soyuz mission. Details of the inaugural launch of this new program were kept tightly under wraps. Then on April 20th, 1967, the prime and backup pilots were confirmed, Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin, respectively. The launch was set for April 23rd. It was celebrated with a simple press release saying that Soyuz 1 was the first mission in the new program. But shrewd observers noticed that the mission had a numeric designation, which was uncommon for Soviet flights. In both the Vostok and Vosgod programs, the first mission only got a numeric designation after later ones had flown. It was the same with satellite launches. Sputnik didn't have a numeric designator, but Sputnik 2 did. Speculation swirled of a secret plan to launch a second Soyuz mission at the same time, and that suspicion wasn't too far off. The flight plan for Soyuz 1 was complicated and risky. After Komarov launched on April 23rd, Valerie Bikovsky, Alexei Yeliseev, and Evgeny Khrunov would follow the next morning in Soyuz 2. Komarov's was the more sophisticated spacecraft, so it would be his job to maneuver Soyuz 1 to a rendezvous and docking with Soyuz 2. Once docked, two cosmonauts would don spacesuits and transfer from Soyuz 2 to Soyuz 1 via spacewalk. Soyuz 2 would land with one cosmonaut on board, and Komarov, now with a full crew, would land in Soyuz 1. This plan wasn't just audacious. Many thought it was foolhardy and more than Soyuz could really handle on a first flight. Engineers and cosmonauts alike had doubts about safety, not just of the transfer plan, but the spacecraft itself. Unmanned test flights had revealed serious problems and experienced failures that would have killed a human pilot. Some engineers voiced their concerns. They wanted to play it safe and continue with unmanned testing until all the bugs were worked out. But of course, more unmanned tests would push back the inaugural launch, and Bresnev wanted to get the new program flying sooner rather than later. Ideally, he wanted the flight before or on May 1st so the mission could coincide with the national day of worker solidarity. The first manned mission with a new spacecraft, he felt, would reinforce to the Soviet people just what the socialist system was capable of. Komarov was also wary of the flight assignment, but he didn't have much of a choice. Dmitry Ustanov, a member of the Politburo, set the final launch date and pressured mission to launch on time and Komarov to accept his role as pilot. The Soviet government wanted this spaceflight and military veteran to make the inaugural launch, and Ustanov threatened to strip Komarov of all his military honors if he refused. But losing his status and career wasn't the only pressure on Komarov. He knew that his refusal would mean Gagarin would go in his place and he couldn't knowingly send a close friend and national hero up on a risky flight. With the flight drawing nearer, Victor Yesykov, an engineer on the Soyuz team, knew the spacecraft wasn't completely ready. Mission did too. He refused to sign off on the descent module's flight worthiness. In total, there were 203 known flaws in the spacecraft, and a group of cosmonauts and engineers put together a 10-page report outlining all of them. But getting the report into the right hands was a separate issue. The Soviet system had a tendency to blame and occasionally even punish the messenger when it came to bad news. Yuri Gagarin's KGB escort and close friend, Venya Minrusaev, ultimately accepted this daunting task. After dining with Komarov and his wife one night, he learned just how serious the situation was. Ruseyev passed along the report, but nothing came of it, except that Ruseyev was banned from interacting with the cosmonauts or anyone affiliated with the space program ever again. He hadn't even read the report himself. Political pressures weighed heaviest, and the spacecraft was cleared to fly. Things were tense in the early morning hours of April 23rd. Members of the press recalled that Yuri Gagarin seemed particularly agitated. He wasn't supposed to suit up and go to the launch pad with Komarov, but he demanded to be put in a pressure suit regardless. This was a strange request since the nature of Komarov's mission was such that he wasn't required to wear a pressure suit at all. The transferring cosmonauts would be using the airlock. Speculation was that Gagarin was either attempting to elbow his way into the cockpit in an attempt to save his friend's life, or he was hoping that by donning his own suit, officials would put Komarov in one as well. Some even wondered if Gagarin wasn't trying to disrupt launch procedures enough to cancel the mission. Whatever Gagarin's motives, it didn't work. Komarov launched at 3.35 on the morning of April 23rd, 1967. Soyuz stood ready to launch the next day. Soyuz 1 ran into problems almost immediately when one of the solar panels failed to deploy. The spacecraft was crippled, limping along with half the necessary power supply. Komarov tried to manually deploy the panels. He even tried kicking the spacecraft with a panel connected on the outside, but his attempts to dislodge it were fruitless. To make matters worse, the stuck panel affected his guidance system. It blocked the stellar and solar instruments, stopping the cover from coming off at all. By his second orbit, Komarov was having trouble with his attitude control, spin stabilization, and engine firing. Boris Chertok and his team, who had taken control of the mission after launch, tried to find a solution to Komarov's mounting problems, desperate to get him a solution before his batteries ran out of power. By 10 a.m., the situation aboard Soyuz 1 was so bad that the launch of Soyuz 2 was canceled, though some accounts say that Soyuz 2 was ready to mount a rescue mission to manually fix the solar panel, but was scrubbed because of adverse weather. Engineers on the ground developed a plan to bring Komarov down on his 17th orbit, with backup options on orbits 18 and 19, well before the batteries would die. The procedure had Komarov manually align his spacecraft for retrofire, burn his engine for 150 seconds, then tried to hold his attitude during reentry. It wasn't something he was trained for, but he was an excellent pilot, and more than competent enough to pull it off. A little before 6.20 in the morning of April 24th, Komarov burned his retrofire engine. He briefly got his spacecraft oriented, but couldn't hold his attitude. He reported a retrofire burn, but a failed command in the computer shut the engines off prematurely. From the ground, telemetry confirmed that the descent module had separated from the instrument module, and that he was going to land off target. But a long landing wasn't Komarov's only problem. With only one solar panel deployed, the spacecraft was unbalanced. As he entered the atmosphere, the Soyuz started spinning, and it only got worse as the atmosphere thickened. Since he couldn't control his orientation, he couldn't negate the spin, which meant he couldn't take advantage of the spacecraft's aerodynamic capability. Soyuz-1 wasn't generating any lift. It was falling like a stone. Soyuz-1 hit the ground at full speed with the force of a 2.8 ton meteorite, flattening the capsule. The force of the impact triggered the retro rockets that were supposed to fire before landing, and they lit the remains of the spacecraft on fire. Recovery forces and a helicopter sent a flare into the air above the crash site to signal the location to any nearby crews. The flares they used were color-coded, but without a flare to signify a dead cosmonaut, they launched one that met, cosmonaut needs urgent medical attention. It was only when ground crews arrived that they realized there was almost no chance of saving the pilot. They shoveled dirt over the fire to suffocate the flames when the fire extinguishers failed to help, but the charred spacecraft collapsed under the weight to become little more than a mound of earth with a hatch sticking out the top of it. They quickly changed tactics, uncovering the spacecraft in an attempt to reach the man they thought was trapped inside. When they cleared enough earth to open the hatch, they found Comerove's remains still in Soyuz's central seat, with his headset snugly over his ears. One item obviously missing from the crash site was a fully-deployed parachute. Comerove's death was formally attributed to multiple injuries sustained by the skull, spinal cord, and bones. The press release announcing his death made no mention of the crash landing that had led to those injuries, nor did public announcements mention that the parachute had failed to deploy, but the parachute was the focus of the post-flight investigations. Of the Soyuz's two parachutes, the smaller breaking parachute that deployed first and pulled the larger main chute out of its casing, the main chute had never deployed. The system had worked perfectly in testing with both full-scale drop tests and static tests of the release mechanism. There was no indication why it failed in flight. Soon, speculative rumors started circulating. Some believed it was improperly packed, that the parachute was too big for the canister that held it, so it had been hammered too tightly into place and was unable to release. Boris Chertok offered another possibility in his memoirs. He explained that the Soyuz was covered in a thermal protectant polymer, a glue-like substance that was sealed onto the vehicle in an autoclave. When Comerove's spacecraft was put in the autoclave, the parachute pack was uncovered, leaving this one piece of the assembly unfinished. The polymer could have easily seeped into the open parachute pack, gluing the chute closed. Since test versions of the spacecraft didn't go into the autoclave, this wouldn't have been seen in a failed test. The formal recommendations after the mission were to change the shape of the parachute pack from a cylinder to a cone to increase its volume, to polish the internal walls for less friction when it deployed, and to take step-by-step photos of the chute installation to verify it was packed correctly. Development of a better emergency separation mechanism for the backup chute was also on the list of improvements. The modern Soyuz reflects decades of improvement over this original model, but problems with the landing system aren't entirely a thing of the past. The landing rockets have failed, subjecting crews to harder than normal landings, but parachute deployment has become incredibly reliable since Comerove's fateful flight. Whether a functioning parachute would have saved Comerove's life is unclear. The Soviet space program was shrouded in secrecy for years, and a lot of details have only emerged recently and not without conflict. Chertok's version of events has been contested by his fellow engineers, mainly because of the known flaws. There were plenty of other elements that could have significantly contributed to the accident, but most don't believe that the mission would have been survivable even with a perfectly packed parachute. Another thing that must be said about this story, there are differing accounts and historians can't agree on all the details, in part because Soviet sources are hard to come by. It's possible there are sources unavailable to Western researchers, and also because interviewees can either inflate a story or forget details. There's speculation that Ruseyev wasn't as integral to the story as he claimed, and even questions whether this report or memo about the known flaws exists. There's an account of the mission where an American observer's listening to Comerove on an unguarded radio frequency heard his last tearful conversation with leaders before cursing the spacecraft he knew was about to kill him. Disagreements like this are part of why getting into the weeds on Soviet topics is so hard, but it's also why digging into the Soviet space program story is so fun and fascinating. I have a couple of big things in the works right now, but a good look at the Soviet program in the Apollo era is coming up. I wanna look at it from different angles than I have in the past, so it'll take some time. But if you don't wanna miss that video when it goes live, definitely subscribe right now. See how good that segue was? And friendly reminder that I have two books out. Fighting for Space is a very narrative-heavy dual biography of Jackie Cochran and Jerry Cobb, following both women as their paths cross over the issue of whether women should join the astronaut corps in 1962. And Breaking the Chains of Gravity is all about NASA's prehistory, how the elements of the space agency existed in parts before they were brought together in 1958. Special shout out to all my Patreons and YouTube members, you guys truly make it so that these videos are possible with all of your support. If you'd like to help the vintage space stay alive and also get access to my Discord so we can chat, I have a couple of links below to help you out. And of course, links to all my socials and my books as well. That's going to do it from me for today. Thank you guys so much for hanging out and I'll see you next time.