The Man Who Fell to Earth

Forty-five years ago this past Monday a Russian cosmonaut was launched into space. No, it was not Yuri Gagarin, the first man to make it into space for one orbit on April 12, 1961 – six years earlier. The man I am referring to was Vladimir Komarov. Never heard of him? Little wonder. Soviet secrecy about its space program – especially the disasters – made sure of that. The little we know of Komarov and his fateful flight on April 23, 1967 was mentioned in a book published last April entitled Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin by authors Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony.

The authors claim they were able to learn what they published during a short period of "expressive freedom" while they were in Russia and the old security system was rendered ineffective by the collapse of the Soviet security system. Because of this, they were able to speak with many of the people who were eye witnesses to the flight operations of Soyuz 1, the designation of Komarov’s capsule, and its failure to return to earth safely. The reason that Komarov’s story is inside of a story about Yuri Gagarin is that Gagarin was the back-up pilot for the flight if for any reason Komarov couldn’t or wouldn’t fly it. As we shall see, he had ample reason to refuse the flight, but Gagarin was his friend and if one of them was to die, the authors claim, Komarov decided it should be him.

The early spacecraft designs for both the Russians and Americans were primitive. The pilot was more a passenger than a controller of the vehicle. About all he could do was adjust the attitude of the craft during flight with small bursts of rocket thrusts. John Glenn had to do some "steering" during his flight when minor problems developed in his Mercury capsule. The big difference in the Mercury and Soviet Vostok spacecraft was Mercury’s pilot stayed on board and the capsule parachuted into the sea for a relatively soft landing, whereas, the Vostok reentry was slowed by a single parachute and the pilot ejected in the last phase of the flight to land on the ground by means of his personal parachute.

As America and the Soviet competed to be first in a moon landing, the Kremlin became less concerned with safety than it was with winning. Americans Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White had died in an interior fire aboard the Apollo command module during a test drill four months before Komarov’s death. Other American astronauts would die in later flights in the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters. Space flight could be made safe but never risk-free.

The Soviet Soyuz program was the Soviet answer to advances we made in our Gemini earth orbit program. Soyuz was a three-man craft like Apollo, and like Apollo, it was the vehicle planned to take a Russian crew to the moon. Unlike earlier Soviet space craft, Soyuz could be maneuvered in space, which it would be required to do to dock up with the "mother ship" after an ascent from the lunar surface.

As a young engineer with Scientific-Atlanta in the 1960s, I was the program manager for the construction of the Lunar Lander and Rendezvous antenna boresight test facility in Houston which my company built. Our instrumentation and capsule positioning gantry calibrated the onboard rendezvous radar system which allowed the lunar ascent module to find and dock up with the Apollo command module. The command module carried three men to and from the moon, two of whom descended to the surface in the lunar excursion module. To return, the lower portion of the excursion module served as a launch pad and was left behind. Due to the minimal gravity of the moon and the lighter payload, the ignition to insert the ascent module into lunar orbit did not require a lot of lifting power. The ascent module "chased" the command module in lunar orbit, using its rendezvous radar system to find it, and upon "catching" it, both the command module pilot and ascent module pilot maneuvered to hook up much like a tanker refuels planes in flight. Hooked and locked, the two-man lunar crew scrambled aboard the command module for the return trip, jettisoning the no-longer-needed ascent module.

The propulsion for the trip home was provided by the service module, which would be jettisoned just before entering earth’s atmosphere. This is the tricky phase in getting home safely. The entry angle had to be correct, because too shallow an angle would have caused the command module to skip along the outer fringe of atmosphere and land far away from the planned touchdown. The Apollo command module was conically shaped with a slightly rounded bottom to act as its heat shield. The point of the cone was aft during reentry. As the command module continued through the denser regions of the atmosphere, the heat shield would begin to burn away by design, giving the appearance that the module was on fire. The denser atmosphere would also slow the descent. At an altitude of 25,000 feet, drogue parachutes were shot out of the aft end, and at 10,000 feet, the drogues were jettisoned and three main descent parachutes were shot out to lower the module to the ocean’s surface.

The Soyuz module had a bell shape and a flat bottom giving it less lift than Apollo. Its landings were land-based, rather than at sea, and a single descent parachute was deployed. The Russian cosmonauts would remain onboard unlike the Vostok capsule. As the craft neared the earth’s surface, retrorockets would be ignited to provide a soft landing, working much like the descent rockets on the Apollo lunar excursion module. A lunar descent, however, is done in 1/6^th the gravity of an earth descent. Less power was needed and less could go wrong.

During the early stages of the Soyuz program, two important developments occurred which affected the integrity of the program. One was the untimely death of the Soviet space program director, Sergei Korolev. He had multiple health complications but entered the hospital in January 1966 supposedly for routine surgery to remove an intestinal polyp. He never recovered. The official story associated his death was complications in the removal of a cancerous tumor. The unofficial story is that he bled to death in a botched hemorrhoidectomy. His successor, Vasiliy Mishin, was a competent technocrat but no intellectual equal to Korolev. All of the political pressure to beat the Americans in the space race fell on Mishin with little warning or preparation.

The second development was the rise to power of Leonid Brezhnev. Although he was tacitly loyal to his mentor, Nikita Khrushchev, Brezhnev became involved in a 1963 plot to remove Khrushchev from power, allowing him to play a leading role in government. Brezhnev later succeeded in overthrowing the power structure and outmaneuvered all other contenders who threatened his ascendency. Like his predecessor Khrushchev, Brezhnev was high on symbolism, and in heady days of the 1960s, the Soviet space program seemed well ahead of the American program. Its mission launches were often scheduled to coincide with important dates in Soviet history.

As the 50^th anniversary of the Russian Revolution drew near in April 1967, Brezhnev allegedly made clear that he wanted to stage a space spectacular. The plan was to launch two spacecraft. The first would carry a single pilot; the second would launch the following day carrying two pilots. They would rendezvous in space and the pilot of the first craft would replace one of the pilots of the second craft, and the replaced pilot would transfer to the first craft. These were unnecessary risks to take early in the age of space with buggy spacecraft whose completion for the mission had been rushed – all to put on a show.

Preparations for this stunt were kept highly secret and it wasn’t until April 20, 1967 that the pilot and back-up pilot for the first launch were named – Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin respectively. The launch date was set for April 23.

The mission continued shrouded in secrecy, but observant participants noticed that for the first time a launch vehicle carried a number, in this case Soyuz 1, implying that there might also be at least a Soyuz 2 if not subsequent craft in the fleet.

The Soyuz spacecraft was not ready for manned flight. Unmanned flights had developed problems that would have killed the pilot. A rational plan would have been to continue unmanned flights until all of the bugs were worked out before manned space flights. But Brezhnev wanted Russians back in space to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system, not only to its own people, but also to the world.

Mishin and Komarov were pressured to meet the deadline with one Soviet official going so far as to threaten to strip Komarov of his colonel’s rank and his military honors if he refused. In those days, rank had its privileges – largely economic ones in a poor country, which Russia was.

A group of cosmonauts and engineers inspected the Soyuz and compiled a list of 203 flaws that affected the spacecraft’s flightworthiness. But the Soviet system had a tendency to punish the bearer of bad news, so getting this list into the hands of a trustworthy messenger who would assure that it made its way up the line of authority to the desk of someone who could halt this suicidal mission was a challenge.

Finally, a close friend of Yuri Gagarin, Venyamin Russayev, a KGB agent, was identified as a possible candidate. He had dined with Komarov and his wife one evening and learned the seriousness of the Soyuz launch. As Komarov walked Russayev to the door to leave, he told him, "I’m not going to make it back from this flight." Russayev asked why he didn’t refuse the assignment, and Komarov said, "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead. That's Yura, (i.e. Gagarin, Komarov’s dearest friend) and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears, according to the book’s authors. Russayev agreed to be the courier.

Russayev passed the memo detailing the flaws in Soyuz up the line in hopes that it would reach Brezhnev. It didn’t. Instead Russayev was demoted and reassigned to a job that prevented any interaction with the space program. The same fate befell everyone who read the memo.

Komarov’s Soyuz 1 lifted off at 3:35a in the morning of April 23. Soyuz 2 stood ready to launch the following morning. After the prescribed nine minutes into the flight, the spacecraft separated from the launch vehicle and was inserted into earth orbit. Things began to go wrong almost immediately. One of the solar panels did not deploy, cutting in half the power available for recharging the onboard batteries. That solar panel obstructed the star and sun sensors needed to maintain stable attitude. This prevented aligning the craft for engine firing in preparation for reentry. Manual deployment of the solar panel, including kicking the side of the craft on which the panel was stowed failed to dislodge it. A back-up telemetry antenna also did not deploy.

With power failing, it became obvious to the mission controllers that they had to get Komarov home while they still had the electricity to do it. The Soyuz 2 launch was scrubbed. Ground controllers developed a plan to bring Komarov down on the 17^th orbit but planned back-up options for orbits 18 and 19, which would still leave time before battery failure.

An order was sent up to reorient the craft on orbits 15 through 17 using a special engine onboard to do it. The engine failed. Komarov didn’t have time to attempt manual reentry until orbit 19. But to do a manual reentry, he had to be able to see the sun through the device blocked by the solar panel, and to land at the designated area, he had to fire the retrorockets on the night side of the earth. The system failures forced Komarov to extemporize a procedure for orienting the craft on earth’s daylight side and maintain attitude through earth’s night side using a gyro platform as a reference while he fired the reentry rockets.

About 6:20a, Komarov was to burn his retro engines for 150 seconds and manually maintain attitude. He started the retro burn but a computer failure shut off the engines prematurely. Ground controllers confirmed that the descent module had separated from the instrument module but the craft would land off target. That was the least of Komarov’s problems.

The solar panel that failed to deploy made the spacecraft asymmetrical and shifted the center of gravity as the craft reentered earth’s atmosphere. This caused the Soyuz to start spinning – a condition that worsened as atmospheric density increased. Without the ability to control attitude, Komarov couldn’t orient the craft to keep the heat shield pointed down in the direction of the reentry, and he couldn’t take advantage of the craft’s aerodynamic qualities to generate lift. At the prescribed altitude, the drogue parachute failed to deploy, which meant there was nothing to pull out the main parachute from its canister. Soyuz was simply falling as a meteor would, which is what it had become.

Eavesdroppers at the American National Security Agency were monitoring the mission and were listening in on the final moments of the descent. A Russian official talking to Komarov was crying, telling him he was a national hero. His wife spoke to him about putting his personal affairs in order and about their children before saying goodbye. Toward the end of the NSA tape Komarov’s voice began to show signs of panic, saying "the parachute is wrong" and "heat is rising in the capsule." The final transmission consisted of yells of rage and frustration that he had been sent on a mission of death.

Soyuz 1 hit the ground at full speed. The capsule was flattened and the impact set off the retrorockets that were to slow the descent, causing the wreckage to catch fire. Helicopter rescue crews got to the site to save Komarov, but their extinguishers were ineffective in putting out the fire. It was only extinguished with shovels and dirt. When they were able to clear away the dirt and wreckage, Komarov’s charred remains were in the center seat of the three-man Soyuz 1.

Remarkably, Komarov was given an open-casket state funeral, which for those with stomach for it can be viewed here. The official version of his demise was filled with lies. Moreover, a number of critics with space race expertise have disputed some of the facts presented by the authors of Starman. Notwithstanding the expertise of those critics, it seems to me that a fraud of these proportions is unlikely. What purpose would it have served? Under the present regime, an accurate version of the incident will likely never be known until Russia becomes a very different, open society.

As things turned out Vladimir Komarov’s choice to sacrifice his life was in vain. Yuri Gagarin and a flight instructor died a year later in a 1968 MIG crash. The Americans walked on the moon the following year.