The book Starman by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony examines the story of Gagarin and Komarov and how they couldn’t stop the USSR from going forward with the mission. The NPR says:
Gagarin and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems – serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.
Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia.
Komarov couldn’t refuse the mission because the backup cosmonaut would have been Gagarin, his friend. So he went along with it and when things predictably failed—antennas didn’t open, power was compromised, navigation was difficult—US intelligence picked up Komarov’s cries of rage “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.” Read the tragic story at NPR. Starman comes out next month. [NPR]
Travis New
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 12:43 PMThat’s horrible :(
stevjosco
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 2:09 PMA little bit of research shows that Starman was first published in 1998 and the book coming out in April is a re-issue with a new Forward.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Doran#Starman_.281998.29
glennc
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 4:15 PMsavages
ozoneocean
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 6:48 PMIt sounds a little false. Especially the stuff about Gagarin. Gagarin was a fighter pilot who was picked to be a cosmonaut because he was small… That’s it.
I’m sure he COULD have also been a clever rocket scientist and a capable engineer on the side, but I tend to doubt it.
And the thing about Komarov not giving it up because he knew it’d go to Gagarin instead and he didn’t want Gagarin to suffer…? That’s sounds totally made up. Sure people ARE selfless, but if Komarov had the option to pass on it, then so did Gagarin. And the whole premise of people being too afraid to pass the info up is a little silly as well since they’d have been extremely aware that a death in the space program would be a huge embarrassment and a setback, outweighing what a success would give.
Painkiller
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 7:46 PMAhhh Hello
Being to afraid to pass things up happens in every level of every Government. Also this is a communist country, you dont really have much of choice in Russia.
Just because your not selfless doesn’t mean others aren’t.
Callie Rasmussen
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 10:40 PMyou clearly don’t know much about Soviet history. my university tutor for Russian studies was a man who had been forced to join the Lenin Youth Army (the Soviet Boy Scouts) and whos brother was murdered by the KGB because he got one of those yellow “smiley face” tattoos…apparently doing that showed him to be “reckless, western and rebellious”.
if they’d kill a 17 year old kid over a stupid smiley face tattoo, of course they would do much worse to dissenters amongst their own rank and file.
Maret
Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 1:11 PMI can back up you Callie as I am coming from Soviet Union history and unfortunately it is true – people did not have a choice, it was to go and die or not to go and still die… Maybe Vladik was hoping on a miracle that he will return alive. Another heart breaking story.
simulacrum
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 12:36 AMA death can be written off as a heroic deed due to an unforeseeable accident, which shows the bravery of the Soviet people (don’t know if it’s published in English, but you should read Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra for a hilarious parody of the Soviet cult of the hero). Nothing is an embarrassment when you run the media.. the only embarrassment is failing to meet a deadline or letting your (perceived) enemies beat you to it. You can’t quite compare the rationale driving state bureaucracy under Stalin to anything even remotely sane or logical that was going on in the West.
That culture of group-think lasted well into my time. Even under Gorbachev when well educated people were conscripted to be dropped on to the Chernobyl power plant to beat out fires for periods of two minutes, wearing minimal protection they were scared to refuse… and ended up suffering for the rest of what was left of their lives afterwards. They knew what was going to happen but just couldn’t refuse.. something that I always found difficult to understand. Everyone involved in Soviet military programs or even Soviet industry was always scared to pass up knowledge of defects or problems.. better to slap together some band-aid solution and hope no one finds out.
Merkin
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 4:54 PMOzeoneocean – sorry but you are completely wrong with regards to the cosmonauts knowledge. They were all expected to know their craft inside out and took a very active part in the development and testing of them (as well as the repairs that constantly needed to be made). They were extremely intelligent and had a strong knowledge of most aspects of the craft from electronics to aeronautics and engineering. If you want to find out more about the race to the moon as told by an astronaut and a cosmonaut who were both involved check out “Two sides of the Moon” – an amazing story: http://www.amazon.com/Two-Sides-Moon-Story-Space/dp/0312308655
Alex
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 6:50 PMThey did the same with animals too :(
Steve Tran
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 7:54 PMJesus Christ that picture… He looks even WORSE than the infamous John Hurt scene in Alien.
But then again, the Soviets have never exactly been known for their valuing of human life, especially their own.
Ash
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 11:36 AMAs opposed to whom? The US and their forced invasions on Afghanistan, Iraq, etc? Or the UN who act as peace keepers and yet still many innocents are killed. The USSR was no more barbaric than what we see today. The only difference being is that its now safe to expose the past from those who are in the know, just like those in the know about the USA’s invasions on other countries will expose them in a few decades as well.
Osiris Fox
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 2:01 PMYou have absolutely NO idea what you are talking about Ash. The comparisons you are trying to make are not even remotely comparable..
Stalin was responsible for many more deaths than even Hitler, if not THE most deaths caused by any single human being in history.
Thanks goodness you are not leading a country as you are clearly as fallible as any president or leader thus far, fueled by emotion and scorn not logic and reason.
Nomad
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 11:02 PM@ozoneocean
and yet, he is dead, and it was an embarrassing setback. I guess you COULD be right about everything you just speculated about.