Yeah, those danged Russkies never needed any other reason… they’d just do anything to make the Americans look bad :rolleyes:
It sounds like you’re talking about the 1971 Soyuz disaster, which has already been mentioned here - three cosmonauts were killed when a valve stuck open and all the air in the capsule leaked out. However, they weren’t “practicing returns”, this was a genuine return from a mission aboard the Salyut 1, the first space station. (The previous mission may have been a “practice” mission, since the cosmonauts never entered the station, for reasons unknown.) There was a practical reason that the men were not suited up. A Soyuz capsule was just big enough to hold three men - without space suits. If they were wearing space suits, there was only room enough for two. The Soviet space folks wanted three-men crews on the Salyut, and figured that flying without suits was an acceptable risk. Unfortunately they figured wrong. That particular style of Soyuz capsule never took a three-man crew again.
Notice that this was after the Moon landing, when the Soviets were claiming that the Moon was small potatoes and their goal had been manned space stations the whole time. The very existence of the Salyut 1 was supposed to show Soviet superiority; I can’t see that they needed to do fancy tricks to rub it in.
The way my old man explained it to me was that Americans concentrated on “three nines” of safety while the Soviets aimed for “two nines” of safety.
That’s 99.999% safe versus 99.99% safe. It would appear as if someone actually got to a safety locker on the Challenger after the explosion. I suppose that was a few ticks within one nine short of the required redundancy.
The fact that at least eleven people have died in actual space exploration out of about four hundred belies those safwety figures. I’ve mentioned before that my father was appalled by the Soviet/Russian use of “plumbing fixtures” in their manned spacecraft. My silent argument is that they’ve spent far more hours in space for far less cost per hour, and the results are similar, if you’re counting corpses. I’m not going to argue with Dad on that one–he knows, I merely parrot.
Speaking of the Challenger, did the agency ever release any photographs of the recovered crew section? The whole recovery, from what I recall, was shrouded in somewhat of a news blackout. Even after aircraft wrecks, you can find pictures of the reassembled craft during the investigation or details showing where crew was, but I don’t recall any such programs ever showing up on TV.
I know I was interested in finding out how intact the crew cabin had remained.
Apollo 7 successfully tested the Saturn V rocket in August, '68. Apollo 8 went to the Moon in December, 1968.
Read this story from the Federation of American Scientists about the Soviet Manned Lunar Program. It says the Soviets managed to send some turtles and banana flies on a circumlunar flight in September '68 and bring 'em back alive. An unmanned test of the N1 rocket, capable of manned Moon flight, ended with the rocket blowing up. The test was on July 3, 1969, less than two weeks before the launch of Apollo 11.
It isn’t like you’re going to fall into the Sun and burn up, though. It’s so far away, you’d run out of oxygen long before you got there.
No, they haven’t, and the wreckage is in an abandoned missile silo at Cape Canaveral for added security. I believe that’s out of respect for the families of their dead friends as well as, frankly, the lack of a public “need to know”. Enough information came out during the investigation to suggest that at least some of the crew survived for several minutes after the explosion, possibly all the way to splashdown, and I really don’t think there’s any value in knowing more details than that.
There are pieces of Soviet moon-landing spacecraft now on semi-public display at the Monino air and space museum near Moscow, and there have been pictures in US publications. They would have used a simpler approach, with a huge rocket shedding stages one by one on its way to the moon, no dockings, just put the capsule and its whole return booster tail-down right on the surface. One of the crew of 2 would go down a long ladder, plant the flag, grab the rocks, etc., climb back up, and then fire away. The Soyuz spacecraft was designed to be the crew compartment and service module, and was developed so far that they just kept it.