April 23, 1967: The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 1 into orbit.
Yuri Gagarin was the first man to fly in space, but Colonel Vladimir Komarov was the first man to fly twice - and, when Soyuz 1 returned from orbit and hurtled to the Earth at terminal velocity, failed by a malfunctioning parachute, Komarov became the first to die in flight.
The colonel had in 1964 successfully commanded the Voskhod 1 mission, carrying a three-member crew. He and Gagarin were two of the Soviet Union’s premier cosmonauts, and more than that, they were close friends. Gagarin was to be Komarov’s backup pilot for the Soyuz 1 mission. This was why, although both men knew that the craft was seriously technically flawed, perhaps even doomed, Komarov would not back out — at least according to one account of that fated friendship and flight (note: this account, while vivid, is of questionable scholarship):
[Komarov] said, “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.”
Russayev asked, Why not refuse? …
Komarov answered: “If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead… That’s Yura. And he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.” Komarov then burst into tears.
Embellished or not, the high stakes that surrounded the tragedy were real. The Space Race had entered its lunar stretch. John F. Kennedy had, in 1961, announced the United States’ intent to land a man on the Moon before the decade’s close; Kennedy would not live to see either close or landing, but the Apollo program was now deep underway, and the Soyuz program was the Soviet response. In contrast to the earlier phase of the Space Race, it was now the Soviet effort that stumbled a few steps behind. Much was riding on the success of Soyuz 1 - all the hopes of the Soviets’ future on the Moon! - and all of this rested equally on the shoulders of Colonel Komarov.
Gagarin, along with an engineer and head cosmonaut trainer Nikolai Kamanin, accompanied Komarov to the rocket before dawn on the morning of April 23, 1967. Gagarin “went all the way to the top of the rocket and remained there until the hatch was closed.” He was likely the last person to see Komarov before his ill-fated flight, which was to return to Earth just over a day later, after 18 orbits.
Originally, Soyuz 1 was to remain in orbit for four days, during which it would rendezvous with Soyuz 2, but technical problems plagued the mission from the beginning. These could not be smoothed over; Soyuz 1 had to come down. Technical problems even in emergency re-entry sentenced the mission to its violent, fiery end. The idea that the colonel began to scream and bitterly curse the engineers and politics and politicians that had condemned him to this immolation is likely another embellishment. In a mission so shrouded in confusion and so amplified in its drama and lurid horror, rumors about the gruesome details and about the final hysterical moments of a betrayed cosmonaut before death were quick to fill in the spaces of the unknown.
But based on what is known, such a reaction on Komarov’s part would have been reasonable. Without a parachute, the re-entry capsule became a veritable missile fired into the Earth and, had anything managed to survive impact, it would have been swallowed in the explosion that engulfed the Soyuz afterward. It was only after careful assessment and excavation of the wreckage that the Soviets were able to recover what remained of Komarov’s body - “a small burnt lump measuring 30 to 80 centimeters.”
Vladimir Komarov was posthumously awarded the Gold Star Medal of Hero of the Soviet Union and the Order of Lenin. Gagarin would die, less than a year later, in a jet fighter crash during a routine training exercise. Both were cremated, interred in the walls of the Kremlin. And the Soyuz outlived both, outlived the Soviet Union itself, and it soldiered on, and to this day the Soyuz line continues to ferry flights to and from the International Space Station (since the termination of the American Space Shuttle program, American astronauts now rely on the Soyuz for ISS-related transport). At the foot of a lunar mountain, Komarov’s name is enshrined on a plaque with thirteen others, alongside that of his friend, Yuri Gagarin.