At work today, I got to chatting about my recent trip to Sweden with a co-worker. She asked where I’d been in the world, and where I’d like to go next. Somehow, I got to mention that I’d like to travel into outer space, to the ISS, or even to the moon.
She seemed to think it was a rather dangerous idea, but I said that no one has ever died in space, and only a handful have died on the ground trying to get there (the three Apollo astronauts, the Challenger crew, and one or two Russians I think I read about once).
So, I just want to make sure I was correct in saying that no one has died in space? Has anyone?
I think the question was if anyone has ever died in space, not whether or not someone could die in space. I’m thinking the answer is no, but I don’t know for sure.
At least one Russian, Komarov, died in the seventies, inside his one-man craft.
If you go there and die, will it make any difference, where exactly? I mean, to, from or while “there”?
A couple of Soviet cosmonauts died while in reentry because their space craft lost pressure through a faulty valve. The Russians were practicing returns without the crew being suited up and sealed in an effort to make the Americans look bad.
I read a book once where it was mentioned that ham radio operators once picked up and recorded a signal from space that was determined to have come from a Russian space ship of unknown launch, and was a medical telemetry transmission of a dying person’s heart. It was determined also, by investigators who examined the tape and reports from other ham operators, that the Russian capsule was headed for the sun, a runaway.
Other than those two reports, the only thing I’ve ever come across are unsubstantiated comments about Russian disasters in orbit where people died and the Russians covered it up.
All of this was very early in the space race before we had the sophisticated technology in orbit to detect ground activity and space launches.
Yep. Gene Roddenberry and Timothy Leary among them, courtesy of Celestis. You can, too, for between $5,300 and $12,500, but the cheaper one is placed in LEO and re-enters, burning up.
Gene Shoemaker’s remains were placed on the Lunar Prospecter, which was crashed into the Moon earlier this year.
1967GTO said “I read a book once where it was mentioned that ham radio operators once picked up and recorded a signal from space that was determined to have come from a Russian space ship of unknown launch, and was a medical telemetry transmission of a dying person’s heart.”
That story was being passed around the intelligence community in the 60’s. One variant of the story said that a woman was involved and was heard saying that no one would ever know about her/them. Rather than a ham operator though it was supposed to have been monitored by either the NSA or a group reporting to them.
I have always wondered if it was true or if it was an urban legend.
I am fully prepared to believe that it could have happened and that the Russians would have kept it a secret.
Whether they could have kept it secret this long or not is another question.
Quite a few astronauts and cosmonauts have died while participating in their space programs. As a general rule, astronauts have trouble going up or sitting still (Challenger and Apollo 1), while cosmonauts have to worry about getting back down.
At least four cosmonauts have died during reentry. As stated previously, the first acknowledged space-related death was in 1967, when Komarov’s parachute tangled four miles up. Then, in 1971, a Soyuz II depressurized on reentry, suffocating three more cosmonauts. There are intriguing rumors that the first man in space may have been an unnamed cosmonaut who died in orbit when his life support system failed. If that’s true (and most folks in the know doubt it), he would be the only one to actually depart outside of the earth’s atmosphere.
When you consider the total hours in space, the Russian space program is far safer than the American program, but thankfully there have been so few disasters that the comparison isn’t really relevant.
However, it’s not terribly safe to be working on the ground for the Russian/Soviet space program. The “Nedelin Disaster” killed at least 100 engineers and technicians when a liquid-fueled ICBM exploded in 1960, including the possibly incompetant Marshal Nedelin. Another fifty or so bought it in another explosion in 1980. In 1969, a Soviet N-1 heavy lift vehicle detonated on the launch pad with the force of a small atomic bomb, but I don’t know if anyone died.
No manned space thread should go without a plug for Mark Wade’s excellent Encyclopedia Astronautica. It’s a great reference.
Prior to the Great Post Erasure, we did a pretty good job of knocking the bottom out of the dying cosmonaut rumor and the one claiming that Colonel Vladimir Ilyushin was actually the first man in space.
Something strange did happen, though. A number of reporters sprung man-in-space stories days before Gagarin launched. I recall someone mentioned that Robert Heinlein was in Moscow at the time and was informed that the Soviets had successfully launched a man into space the week before Gagarin went up. I think I was guilty of fanning the flames a little bit by pointing out that the Soviets generally prepared their launches in pairs and that the Soviet brass was hanging around the launch site for at least a week before Gagarin flew. Having reviewed the available evidence, I think I was wrong.
The aforementioned Mark Wade points out that the early Soviet space records are completely declassified, and nothing points to any successful or unsuccessful manned launches prior to Gagarin’s launch. James Oberg has republished his 1975 dissection of these rumors on Wade’s site.
Oberg’s article seems pretty thorough and convincing.
However, I did see a news documentary on the Russian Space Program this past year - well, maybe 1999. It talked candidly about the challenges the program face. Was called something like “The Rise and Fall of the Russian Space Program”. It was narrated by a Russian. This special did claim that there was in fact a cosmonaut prior to Gagarin, but that he was ill upon return and the Soviets did not want to hold him up as their hero, so Gagarin got the official nod. However, it did not claim any other deaths.
As for a cosmonaut “heading for the Sun”, it’s highly doubtful that the Russians had a manned rocket capable of escaping the Earth in 1960-- We didn’t have one until 1969, and we beat the Russians to the Moon easily. It’s also important to note that even in a worst-case scenario, falling into the Sun is about the least of your worries: The Sun is big, but space is a lot bigger. It makes for an awfully small target.
As for animals in space, I’m pretty sure that Laika was the only non-human mammal that died for the space program: All of the chimps that the US launched returned safely and after a few tests, lived out there lives in retirement at high-class zoos. Of course, there’s plenty of paramecia, spiders, and other lower organisms that have been sacrificed for the cause.
Although the Apollo 13 crew ultimately survived (thanks to the generally excellent movie, I don’t have to explain the details), for a while it looked so grim that President Nixon had a speech drafted in which he memorialized the astronauts to the American public.
Nobody has asked yet, but it is not true that astronauts carry cyanide capsules with them in case they become marooned in space. If they want to do themselves in, they just open the hatch and let the near-vacuum of space do the rest.