The Terrible Fate of Vladimir Komarov and the Lost Cosmonauts (1)
Campfire Stories: Astonishing History Apr 8, 2021
This article is a transcript of Campfire Stories: Astonishing History podcast Episode 10. You can listen to it on Buzzsprout, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Soviet space propaganda poster that reads: “From student models- to space ships!”**This article contains graphic descriptions and images of deadly accidents that some readers may find disturbing. View/read at your own discretion.**
Introduction
Welcome! Come gather around the campfire and let me tell you a story. Today we’re going to be talking about Vladimir Komarov and the lost cosmonauts.
Human beings have always had an unbreakable desire to explore. We’ve traveled to the far corners of the map, dived deep below the waves, and figured out how to fly. None of these adventures have been without danger. In fact, that’s part of the reason they seem to thrill us. And there’s one frontier that has been hanging over us for millennia. Literally. Look up and you’ll see it. Even though the freezing, icy, endless void of outer space is clearly inhospitable to the fragile human body, we just can’t seem to help ourselves from trying to launch ourselves out of Earth’s atmosphere.
Vladimir Komarov and Yuri GagarinThere were two major players in the early scramble for the stars: The United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them reached incredible milestones in human history but both of them suffered terrible losses along the way. Next episode, we’ll talk about the early American space program, with some stories you may be more familiar with, but today we’ll discuss the fates of some of the early Soviet space pioneers, including the first death in any space program, Valentin Bondarenko, the failed mission of Soyuz 1, the chilling death of Vladimir Komarov, and the conspiracy theory about the lost cosmonauts.
Background
Let’s start with a little background. In 1926, Robert Goddard, known as the “Father of Modern Rocketry,” launched the first liquid-fueled rocket. In 1942, Germany terrifyingly launched the first successful ballistic missile, called V-2, but luckily only used them during the very end of the war. The Soviet space agency, which didn’t really have a snappy acronym like NASA, was created in the 1950s. Scientists in the Russian Empire had been researching and experimenting with rocketry as early as the 1930s but had been set back a bit because Stalin exiled, murdered, and imprisoned many of the new country’s scientists and intellectuals.
But after World War II, the Soviet Union forcibly moved thousands of German scientists inside the country, put them together with their own engineers, and re-started the space program. The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 into orbit in 1957, the first man-made satellite in space in human history, was a massive achievement and the United States freaked out about the sudden potential for space warfare, and of course, a brand new kind of competition. This was the start of the space race. Strapping a human being into a metal contraption and launching them into the stars has been dangerous from the start, but the space race added pressure, time constraints, and rapid changes.
Star City, also known as Zvyozdny GorodokIn the 1960s, the Soviet Union established Star City near Moscow, a top-secret, military-run, training center where cosmonauts (which is just the term for Russian astronauts) and researchers lived with their families, although the U.S. definitely knew where it was. Well they didn’t call it Star City, they actually called it “closed military townlet №1”, a nice, homey name, but this wasn’t just a military base. It was a fully functional home to thousands of people with schools, a post office, a movie theater, a train station, stores, homes, and a museum. Today it has a population of about 6,300. The Soviet Union actually had about fifty of these so-called “closed cities” that worked on secret research projects on everything from nuclear weapons to submarines, but Star City was for the space race.
Over 3,000 Soviet air force pilots applied for the cosmonaut training program after medical screenings at military bases. 102 made the second round of cuts and went through more physical and mental tests. Twenty made it into Air Force Group One and were brought to the brand new Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City on March 13th, 1960. The men who were chosen were all young, most under 30 years old. This was different from the American program, which chose older, more experienced pilots.
(Front left to right): Popovich, Gorbatko, Khrunov, Chief Designer Korolev, Gagarin, Director Karpov, parachute instructor Nikitin and physician Fyodorov;
(Second row): Leonov, Nikolayev, Rafikov, Zaikin, Volynov, Titov, Nelyubov, Bykovsky and Shonin;
(Third row): Filatyev, Anikeyev and Belyayev.These twenty men were Ivan Anikeyev, Pavel Belyayev, Valery Bykovsky, Valentin Filatyev, Viktor Gorbatko, Anatoli Kartashov, Yevgeni Khrunov, Aleksei Leonov, Grigori Nelyubov, Andriyan Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich, Mars Rafikov, Georgi Shonin, Gherman Titov, Valentin Varlamov, Boris Volynov, Dmitry Zaikin and three that we’ll talk about today: Valentin Bondarenko, Yuri Gagarin, and Vladimir Komarov.
Twelve would actually fly into space. Four were fired after conflicts with the leadership. Three had medical issues. One, we’ll talk about in a sec.
I don’t have time to give you the entire history of the Soviet space program today. We’re going to focus on it’s martyrs. And unfortunately for him, the first of those martyrs was the youngest of the group, Valentin Bondarenko.
Valentin Bondarenko (colorized by me, so probably not 100% accurate)Valentin Bondarenko
Valentin Vasiliyevich Bondarenko was born in Kharkov, modern-day Ukraine. During World War II, Bondarenko’s father went off to fight and Bondarenko and his mother struggled throughout the war.
Bondarenko loved aviation for his entire childhood, growing up in a time where military heroes were idolized. He attended the Kharkov Higher Air Force School and joined the aviation club. In 1954, he graduated and went to an aviation military academy. While in school, he met and married Galina Semenovna Rykova, who worked in the medical field and they had a son named Alexandre that same year. Bondarenko graduated in 1957, the same year the Sputnik 1, was launched into orbit, so it was easy to see how he would be swept up in the national dreams of reaching the stars. After graduation, Bondarenko joined the Soviet Air Force and became a Senior Lieutenant.
In 1960, Bondarenko joined the first group of twenty cosmonauts at Star City. The cosmonauts became close with each other during their off-time. They skied, hunted, played hockey, and helped each other study. Bondarenko was the youngest member at twenty-three, and earned the affectionate nicknames “Valentin Junior” and “Tinkerbell”. He was a well-liked member of the team, a good singer, described as “mild-mannered”, and a good tennis player.
On May 31st of that year, he started training to be part of the Vostok program, which would launch the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, in April of 1961.
Bondarenko, his wife Galina “Hanna”, and their son AlexandreThe Chamber of Silence
The cosmonauts went through hundreds of tests to see how they would react to what space would be like, although of course, no one had been there yet. On March 13th, 1961, the cosmonauts began an experiment in what the cosmonauts called “The Chamber of Silence” and it was exactly as fun as it sounds.
The Chamber of Silence was a bare room with only a metal bed, a chair, a table, a hot plate and saucepan, a toilet, and sometimes some paper and pens, books, some wood and knives for whittling, or logic puzzles. Sometimes random classical music would play to test brain response. It was soundproof. Scientists would turn on a light to tell the man inside to stick sensors on his body or take them off for four hours of tests a day. The rest of the time was empty. The men didn’t know when they went in how long they would be in there for. They just had to wait and see.
Bondarenko was the 17th out of the twenty men to enter the chamber. A few days before, he took his formal cosmonaut portrait, one of the only surviving pictures of him. Ten days into the 15-day experiment, something went terribly wrong. The air was over 50% oxygen to mimic the conditions inside the spaceship, much higher than average air, which is about 21% oxygen.
Bondarenko was taking off his biosensors with cotton balls covered in rubbing alcohol. He tossed the ball towards the trash without looking, but missed, and the soaked cotton hit a hot plate where he was heating tea. A fire quickly erupted. If you know anything about fire, it loves oxygen. The sealed chamber was its perfect environment and it made everything in the room more flammable. Bondarenko, who had never experienced a high-oxygen fire, tried to put it out with the wool sleeves of his jumpsuit, which also caught fire.
The chamber was pressurized, which meant it took half an hour for the horrified doctor outside and the team that rushed over to open it, by painstakingly releasing air through valves in the door, which was sixteen inches of solid lead. By the time they reached him, he was alive but in rough condition, curled up in a ball on the floor. He had third-degree burns over almost his entire body, his jumpsuit melted, his hair burned, his eyes destroyed. He gathered whatever strength he had left to repeat over and over again,“It’s my fault… I’m so sorry… no one else is to blame.”The scientists wrapped him in a blanket and rushed him to Botkin Hospital, under the fake name “Sergeyev Ivanov”. The doctor who treated him eventually spoke about it in a 1984 book. He said that a man described to him as “Sergeyev, a 24-year-old Air Force Lieutenant” was brought into the emergency room. He said,
“I couldn’t help shuddering. The whole of him was burnt. The body was totally denuded of skin, the head of hair; there were no eyes in the face. … It was a total burn of the severest degree. But the patient was alive…. Unfortunately, Sergeyev was doomed. And yet, all of us were eager to do something, anything, to alleviate his terrible suffering.”
He heard Bondarenko whispering through burned lips,“Too much pain… do something please… to kill the pain.”When they tried to give him an IV, the only undamaged skin was on the soles of his feet, where the fire had been blocked by his boots, but they succeeded in giving him pain medication, which was really all they could do.
The doctor described how another young Air Force officer came to the hospital to stay with Bondarenko and report his condition and who told the doctor some basic details about the experiment gone wrong. Later, the doctor saw that man’s face in the paper and realized that it had been Yuri Gagarin who was Bondarnenko’s final companion.
Aftermath
Bondarenko died sixteen hours after the explosion from shock. Nikolai Kamanin, the director of the cosmonaut program and a name you might want to remember for the episode, criticized the experiment, saying it was poorly organized. Bondarenko was buried in Kharkov, where his parents were living. A crater on the moon is named in his honor. Bondarenko was given the heroic award the Order of the Red Star and his family was “given all that is necessary, as befits the family of a cosmonaut.”
His widow continued working in Star City and his son, five at the time of the accident, joined the Air Force like his father.
The Soviet leadership did not want to announce this massive failure, but Bondarenko had already been photographed and filmed as part of the first twenty men chosen for the program. They couldn’t just pretend he didn’t exist, right? Actually, that’s exactly what they did.
The story of his life and death, his very existence at all, was only admitted to the public in the mid-1980s.The Soviet government only came fully clean about the death in 1986, twenty-five years after the tragedy.
When Bondarenko was buried, it was as an air force pilot who died working for the air force, not as a cosmonaut. His grave read:“With fond memories from your pilot friends.”There was a debate over the idea that if the Soviets had released details of the accident earlier, it could have prevented the Apollo 1 accident, which also involved a high-oxygen fire. Later on, the Soviet prime minister Nikita Krushev was talking about another accident and said,
“I believe the cause of the accident should be announced for two reasons: first, so that people who still have no idea what happened may be consoled; second, so that scientists might be able to take the necessary precautions to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. On top of that, I believe the United States should be informed of what went wrong. After all, Americans, too, are engaged in the exploration of space.”
Valentin Bondarenko’s headstone. The new inscription is a different color.I guess this idea hit him later, because they didn’t share anything about Bondarenko at the time. But it seems pretty clear that the Americans were well aware of these dangers without the information about Bondarenko, although I’m sure they would have appreciated hearing about it.
But the world finally found out about the youngest cosmonaut and the world’s first space program fatality. His headstone was rightfully changed. The inscription now reads,“With fond memories from your pilot and cosmonaut friends.”Valentin Bondarenko was the first known cosmonaut or astronaut to die during the space race, and his death and what followed has fed the “lost cosmonaut” mythos for decades, which we’ll get back to at the end of the episode. But let’s move on for now.
Yuri Gagrin
The top six men in the program, known as the Vanguard six, were picked out to be the possible first men in space in 1961. Kamanin put them through extensive training and then they were evaluated by a committee to determine who would be the first man in space. Yuri Gagarin was first, then Titov, Nelyubov, Nikolayev, Bykovsky, and Popovich, in that order.
Yuri Gagarin and his winning smileYuri Gagarin’s path to space had also been interrupted by World War II. His family had to move out of Moscow. He also worked on a collective farm and had to leave school for a time. But he made his way back to school and joined an aviation club and then went to Air Force school. Gagarin impressed and delighted almost everyone who met him with his honesty, humility, calm, intelligence, and his “open, smiling face.” Korolev, the chief designer, invited the cosmonauts to sit inside a spacecraft when they arrived and Gagrin took off his shoes to be respectful, and from then on, he had endeared himself to the heads of the program.
On April 12th, 1961, three weeks after Bondarenko’s death, the Soviets succeeded in launching Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the Earth and making him the first man in space. The flight was only one orbit long, 108 minutes from liftoff to landing. Gagarin successfully ejected from the spacecraft 23,000 feet in the air, and parachuted down to the ground and straight into international fame and a world press tour, where he charmed world leaders and cheering crowds alike.
The rest of the cosmonauts at Star City, still grieving the death of the group’s baby, Bondarenko, were likely thrilled by this accomplishment, although probably a little jealous as well. One of them was Yuri Gagarin’s best friend, Vladimir Komarov.
Vladimir Komarov
Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov was born on March 16th, 1927 in Moscow. He had one older half-sister, Matilda, and his father was a laborer. Komarov began elementary school in 1935, when he was 8 years old and was noticed almost immediately for his skills in mathematics. His childhood was abruptly shifted in 1941, when he was 14 years old, when World War II arrived. He began working on a collective farm to support the war effort.
But Komarov didn’t let the war stop him from dreaming of the stars. Since he was a child, he had been cutting photos of planes from magazines, putting together model airplanes, and cutting propellers out of tin can lids. He spent hours in his attic, watching the planes over the city from the window, and could even tell them apart just by sound. Komarov was not meant for a life as a farmer or a laborer like his father. Something always kept his eyes looking up instead of down at the plow.
Vladimir “Volodya” KomarovIn 1942, at age 15, Komarov enlisted in the 1st Moscow Special Air Force School to start training in aviation, as well as learning other more traditional school subjects. While he was at school, Komarov’s father was killed in the war. No more details were given to his family other than that. Around the same time, the Air School was moved from Komarov’s hometown of Moscow to Tyumen, Siberia in order to be better protected from the war. Komarov graduated in 1945 with honors and by then, the war had ended.
Instead of being shipped off to battle, Komarov began more specialized training at several military aviation schools. Sadly, Komarov’s mother passed away seven months before he graduated in 1949. Komarov began his military career as a lieutenant. He became a fighter pilot and then a senior lieutenant. During this time, he also married a woman named Valentina Yakovlevna Kiselyova in the fall 1950. He served as the chief pilot of a fighter pilot regiment from about 1952–1954, when he began studying engineering at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy. In 1959, he started on a new path. becoming a test pilot at the Central Scientific Research Institute.
Komarov had raced through the skies for a decade. But something kept his eyes looking up even higher. The same year he began as a test pilot, he was promoted to engineer-captain and applied to become a cosmonaut. 3,000 other Soviet pilots were also in the running. But Komarov made the cut to become one of twenty men chosen for Air Force Group One.**This article contains graphic descriptions and images of deadly accidents that some readers may find disturbing. View/read at your own discretion.**
Wątek: [rbc.ru] Нестыковки: аварии и катастрофы на космических кораблях «Союз» (Przeczytany 1276 razy)