A veteran cosmonaut and a new spacecraft
Vladimir Komarov was born in 1927 and trained as an air force pilot and engineer. He was one of the first group of Soviet cosmonauts and in October 1964 commanded Voskhod 1, the first spaceflight with more than one person aboard. By 1967 he was one of the most experienced men in the Soviet programme, and he was chosen to fly the first Soyuz.
Soyuz was a new, more capable spacecraft than its predecessors. It was designed to manoeuvre in orbit, dock with a second craft and support longer missions, and it was an important part of Soviet plans for the Moon. The first crewed flight was therefore a major step. Before it, however, there had been uncrewed tests, and by most later accounts these had not gone cleanly.
The plan
Soyuz 1 was to launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome on 23 April 1967. Komarov would fly alone. The next day a second Soyuz was to follow, carrying three cosmonauts, and the two craft were to dock. Two of the second craft’s crew would then spacewalk across to Komarov’s spacecraft and return to Earth with him, giving a demonstration of a technique that might be used in lunar missions.
Such a mission would have been the first docking of crewed spacecraft by the Soviet Union and a showpiece in a year when the United States was grounded after the Apollo 1 fire.
What went wrong in orbit
Soyuz 1 reached orbit, but a problem appeared almost at once. One of its two solar panels did not unfold, leaving the spacecraft short of electrical power. Komarov also had trouble with the system that kept the craft pointed correctly, as its orientation sensors and the automatic attitude control did not work as intended. He had to stabilise the craft by hand, which was difficult and used up fuel.
With these problems, the launch of the second craft was cancelled. Controllers decided to bring Soyuz 1 home. After some attempts to prepare, Komarov made a manually controlled retrofire burn to leave orbit, and the spacecraft began its descent.
The landing
The reentry was reportedly flown in a way that was not the preferred automated sequence, but the capsule did come down in the right region of the southern Urals, near Orenburg. The trouble came at the parachute stage. The small drogue parachute deployed, but the large main parachute failed to open properly. A reserve parachute was released, and by most accounts it tangled with the drogue chute and failed to slow the capsule enough.
The capsule struck the ground at high speed on 24 April 1967. Komarov was killed. He became the first person to die during a spaceflight itself. Earlier deaths in space programmes, including the Apollo 1 crew in January, had occurred in ground tests or in aircraft accidents.
Komarov’s remains are buried in the Kremlin Wall in Moscow.
What the investigation found
The Soviet inquiry reportedly concluded that the parachute system had a defect, and that the design of the spacecraft had a number of problems that had not been properly resolved before launch. In later years, accounts by engineers and officials suggested that many known faults had been noted before the flight and that there had been pressure to go ahead. Details of these claims, including stories about who objected to the launch, vary among tellers and are hard to verify, so they are best treated with caution.
The Soviet government did not at first publish a full account. It announced Komarov’s death with state honours and described the mission as a testing of a new spacecraft, while the technical story emerged slowly over the following decades.
Consequences
Crewed Soviet flight stopped. The Soyuz design was reviewed and substantially reworked, including its parachute system. The next crewed mission, Soyuz 3, did not launch until October 1968, about eighteen months after Komarov’s death. Yuri Gagarin, who had been Komarov’s backup, was kept from flying in space afterwards, and he died in March 1968 in the crash of a training jet.
Soyuz went on to become one of the most durable spacecraft ever built. Variants of it have been carrying crews for decades, and the basic design lineage extends from the craft Komarov flew. This is a reminder that the aerospace safety record owes much to those who died testing the early versions.
A shared lesson
The loss of Soyuz 1 followed the Apollo 1 fire by about three months. In both cases, pressure to meet schedules and a spacecraft not yet fully ready were part of the story. Both nations paused, rebuilt and returned more carefully. In the space race, 1967 was the year both sides paid heavily for their haste.