Added 1 new A* page:A new book out this month, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin, purports to reveal much that has been previously unpublished concerning the life of the first man in space. Judging from the user reviews there on Amazon, the authors do not buy into the conspiracy theories about his death in a Soviet test flight at age 34; they do, however, do some investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of his good friend and fellow cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, only 14 months earlier.
This NPR article has details of the Komarov account, along with a grisly photo of his charred remains, and what is supposed to be a recording of some of his last moments, screaming in rage and cursing the engineers (as some translators render the difficult recording) while plunging to his death in the fatally malfunctioning Soyuz 1.
Gagarin had been assigned as the backup pilot for the mission, and, according to the account, had enumerated 203 flaws in the spacecraft prior to launch; he sent a memo about it up the chain by way of a friend of his in the KGB, but that friend--and every other lesser official who saw the memo, supposedly--was demoted, and some of them were sent to Siberia; Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev insisted on the mission going ahead, as he was determined to score a coup in the space race by having the pilot of the Soyuz 1 rendezvous and exchange places with the crew of a second Soyuz module.
The Soviets could not make a space mission succeed by willpower alone, however, and engineering problems quickly became apparent, beginning with the solar panels of Komarov's craft failing to open once he reached orbit; this prevented some navigation and maneuvering systems from functioning correctly, and the craft could not orient on the Sun. The second Soyuz module, which could have repaired the solar panels on the first, was never launched--either due to a thunderstorm at the launch site, or because the first had so many problems, depending on which Wikipedia article you read. After five unsuccessful hours of trying to orient the Soyuz 1 with the main maneuvering rockets, Komarov tried the secondary system, and it failed. After two days in space, on his 19th orbit, he managed to put the craft into atmospheric re-entry with a manual retro-fire, but then the final failure occurred: the module's parachutes failed to deploy correctly, and on April 24, 1967, the Soyuz 1 plunged to Earth, killing Komarov. His was the first in-flight death in a human space program; the three astronauts of the Apollo 1 mission had perished in a cabin test on the ground two months previously.
The book alleges that Komarov had known the mission would likely be fatal, but had gone ahead with it because he felt that if he protested or begged off, his friend Gagarin would have been made to go--and die--in his place.
Grim stuff. To illustrate that death in the space race was not unexpected in those days, that NPR article also shows a speech that the Nixon administration had prepared in case Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin had not returned alive from the Moon.
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