The parachute on his space craft failed to deploy and he died on impact with the planet
Once mankind had learned to put a living being into space, we then had to figure out how to get them back down to the ground safely.
Sadly, space travel sometimes ends in tragedy, as it did in 1967, with the Soyuz 1 mission where cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died when his craft slammed back down to Earth.
Komarov had already successfully made it to space and back in the 1964 Voskhod 1 mission, and three years later, he was selected to command the Soyuz 1 mission.
His backup pilot would be Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and he was to take the spacecraft on its first crewed flight where he would orbit Earth numerous times.
Prior to the mission launch, Komarov and Gagarin raised a number of concerns about the Soyuz 1, and previous uncrewed missions with the craft had been a failure.
Vladimir Komarov was the first man to die as a result of journeying to space. (Getty images / ullstein bild)
During his mission to space, Komarov signalled an alert that one of his craft’s solar panels had failed to deploy, while on his re-entry attempt the Soyuz 1, his parachute failed to deploy properly.
What followed is disputed, but since the crash, experts have had one major question they wish they could have known the answer to, which is why Komarov didn’t use the Soyuz 1’s ejection system to bail out of the plummeting spaceship.
It would seem to be the most likely course of action for someone entombed inside a crashing craft, but if a certain version of events is to be believed, then he might have tried it.
According to 2011 history book Starman, US listening posts in Turkey picked up a furious conversation between the plummeting cosmonaut and Alexei Kosygin, a high ranking official in the Soviet Union.
The book claims that Komarov shouted: “This devil ship! Nothing I lay my hands on works properly!”
However, the official transcript of his final transmission held in the Russian state archives paints a rather different picture.
According to the official version as his spaceship crashed back down to Earth the cosmonaut said: “I feel excellent, everything’s in order. Thank you for transmitting all of that. [Separation] occurred.”
He is then supposed to have said ‘thank you, tell everyone it happened’ before the rest of his transmission became unintelligible.
Experts wondered why he didn’t eject from his craft, but there had already been a number of failures with his spaceship. (ullstein bild via Getty Images)
While Komarov’s final transmission is a matter of some dispute, what happened next isn’t, as his Soyuz 1 craft slammed into the ground at high speed and then exploded, leaving the man inside it a charred ‘lump’ whose only remaining recognisable body part was his heel bone.
Featured Image Credit: Getty images / ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images
