The Cosmonaut who cried in rage

[Dr Mordrid]

Link....

Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth 'Crying In Rage'

So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexsei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."

This extraordinarily intimate account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, to be published next month. The authors base their narrative principally on revelations from a KGB officer, Venymin Ivanovich Russayev, and previous reporting by Yaroslav Golovanov in Pravda. This version — if it's true — is beyond shocking.

Starman tells the story of a friendship between two cosmonauts, Vladimir Kamarov and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space. The two men were close; they socialized, hunted and drank together.
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[UtwigMU]

If I go to KZ this year I'll try to go to Baikonur (last year I was at city close to Ex Soviet nuclear polygon and visited musuem there). Baikonur is problem since you need to go to capital ~1000km away and get a trip by agency (Baikonur is leased to Russia and is closed)

Here are some links to Soviet space related sites:
Energia museum:

http://www.energia.ru/english/energia/history/museum/museum.html

Lunokhod (lunar rover panoramas):

http://www.planetology.ru/panoramas/?language=english

Russian space program was quite formidable and apart from Apollo/Shuttle they were ahead or in parity with USA right about untill 1985:
- first animal in space
- first man in space
- first satellite
- first woman in space
- first multi crew flight
- first space walk
- first landing of a probe on Moon
- first flyby of living beings of the Moon and return (they sent a steppe turtle, worms and grains)
- first rover on another body
- first landing of unmanned craft on another planet
- first space station

Komarov was also sadly the first casualty in space

I only did a read-up on this recently. When I was little I thought Americans were ahead.

[GT98]

Russian space program was quite formidable and apart from Apollo/Shuttle they were ahead or in parity with USA right about untill 1985

I only did a read-up on this recently. When I was little I thought Americans were ahead.

All depends on what your sources are...I ran across a webpage a couple weeks ago about the space race and after the Apollo program started getting traction, the Soviets fell further and further behind...their Moon rocket would never work and their space program was never seperated from the military...and focus on ICBM's where first and foremost. it was a race up to this point and only after the collape of the Soviet Union they even admit to even trying to have a race to the moon with the US.

[Dr Mordrid]

To this day their manned space program is dependent on rockets that have changed little save for engines & avionics from the old R-7 ICBM.

One can say that provides operational history, and it does, but it's also very limiting in terms of payload and trajectories. They've tried to move beyond Soyuz since before Buran, starting with Spiral and the MiG-105, then the BOR-4 testbed and on through Buran and Kliper, but Soyuz is still there with its limiting 3-man crew and constant quality control difficulties. (not that Shuttle was that great either, but the losses were operational screwups)

It's also been long suspected that the Soyus 3-part modular structure; service module, crew/return module, and mission module, was an interesting case of "parallel development" when compared to General Electric D-2, a concept for Apollo started even before Gagarin flew. Almost identical, even their mass, save for D-2 having a fairing.

Sounds like their bolt-for-bolt copies of the B-29 bomber and British Nene jet engine after World War II.

[UtwigMU]

There is a Russian site that claims that Americans basically took engines from Energia (Buran) rocket and use them for their Atlas rocket. And that little applicative in terms of rockets came out of Apollo.

I'm not claiming Russians were awesome and Americans were not but also to claim Americans were awesome and Russians were making junk is not correct either.

Otherwise both space programs started from German rocket program. Americans got most of scientists and Werner von Braun and Russians got more rockets and parts. Also Russians had some experimental rocketry (plane, wing mounted rockets) before or during WW2.


As for original post: I found a Russian reconstruction of events in Evpatoriya radio tracking center on youtube

It's in Russian.

Komarov: "I hear you excellently, booster worked for 146 seconds, craft has been oriented properly, everything going normally, I'm in the middle seat, I've fastened my seat belt"
Control: "Understood, awaiting landing."
Komarov: "Thanks to entire crew."
"There has been a breakup."

Those were his final words. The ground crew did not inform pick up crew that he is gone.

There is a monument at crash site near Orenburg.

[Dr Mordrid]

[sanitized re-creation]

Plenty came outb of Apollo, and it's being used in the Orion & CST-100, and the Saturn V's 2nd stage J-2 engine is being adapted/updated for use in a heavy lifter. In fact, SpaceX talked of using it down the road in one of their big boosters at last years AIAA.

The Atlas V most definitely uses Russian engines, the RD-180 to be exact - a 2 chamber design with both fed by a common turbopump.

We started buying Russian engines in the early 1990's as a way to keep the Russian space program going after the fall and to prevent their engineers from relocating to NK, Iran or whatever. This in turn funded a good percentage of their early ISS committment.

The RD-180 is currently sold in the US by a joint venture of NPO Energomash and Pratt & Whitney, called RD AMROSS. Other Russian engines are also used here, one being the NK-33 used by Orbital Sciences in their Taurus II booster. This is being marketed in the US by Aerojet as the AJ-26.