Posted on 03/30/2011 7:22:15 PM PDT by posterchild
So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.
The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."
This extraordinarily intimate account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, to be published next month. The authors base their narrative principally on revelations from a KGB officer, Venymin Ivanovich Russayev, and previous reporting by Yaroslav Golovanov in Pravda. This version — if it's true — is beyond shocking.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
why is shoddy soviet workmanship and disregard for human life in a communist country “shocking?”
Ping.
NPR writing something critical of the Soviet Union? Incredible!!!
Your thread has both NPR’ and PRAVDA’, so I have to take reading this with a grain of salt..
Another news source was more detailed about the story. The US listening posts were more graphic in the transcripts, and the book gives more than a hint that he was forced into the flight against his will. It was FUBAR Soviet-style.
This sort of thing has been known for decades.
Their system murdered 50million people, so what’s a cosmonaut, comrade?
Please post a link. I originally found an article on yahoo.com which referenced this article twice so I just linked directly to this one.
This piece brought to you courtesy of James O’Keefe.
npr posted the above image as "Vladimir Komarov's remains in an open casket".
Later in the story they state, "Komarov was honored with a state funeral. Only a chipped heel bone survived the crash."
???? Too gruesome to tactfully say much.
Someone please fill me in on the physics of a human body becoming molten on impact. Is it a friction thing?
“why is shoddy soviet workmanship and disregard for human life in a communist country “shocking?”
You beat me to it. Where was this guy Krulwich in 1967? Life is cheap in the Motherland. They let their submarine crew lay on the bottom and die because they didn’t want to ask anybody for help.
I heard Post named a cereal in his memory . . . Crispy Critter
You are waaaaay too trusting. With NPR and Pravda I’d need about 10 lbs. of salt!
1967 wasn't a good year for NASA as well.
I read in a report he complained about the capsule knowing it was a death trap and took the flight himself to prevent another pilot from being assigned. He knew the flight would not be canceled.
The casket appears to of fairly high quality.
And now that the space-shuttle is retiring and the next US rocket is not ready - US Astronauts will be riding on Russian Rockets into space
Good job US Govt!
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