Have any astro- /cosmonauts died in SPACE?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030117.html

Followup to the above column.

The accidents I know of all seem to involve deaths during liftoff and reentry (Challenger, those Cosmonauts with the bad hatch seal, the Apollo launchpad fire). Has anyone actually died while in space? Apollo 13 was a prime candidate, but they squeaked through.

2

According to the Encyclopedia Astronautica, the cosmonauts of Soyuz 11 died when:

As far as I know, they would be considered to have been in space at that point.

The only other deaths during actual missions were Vladimir Komarov, killed due to parachute failure on Soyuz 1, and the Challenger crew.

Eric

3

I remember reading (don’t know where) about a cosmonaut being stranded in space after the retrorockets failed. It struck me when the story said he kept calling and no one would answer him.

4

One more point: There is no such thing as an “expanding orbit” that will take you farther and farther from Earth. Either you have reached escape velocity, in which case you will be traveling in a parabolic arc, not a spiral. Or you haven’t, in which case you will be traveling in an ellipse. You’ll get farther and farther away from the earth, but you’ll start going slower and slower and eventually turn back.

The converse of this of course, is that there is no such thing as a “decaying orbit”, unless you are close enough to the earth to be slowed by friction from the upper atmosphere.

5

Uh…rogmey, I don’t think that “I remember reading (don’t know where)” carries much wait at the Straight Dope…

6

Duh…of course, extremely moronic spelling errors are ALWAYS impressive here! :wink: (I meant “weight”, of course…)

7

Basic answer: that anyone can prove, the Challenger 7, Komarov and the Soyuz-11 crew are the only deaths of spacecrew while the spacecraft was underway. Apollo 1 and the cosmonaut that died under virtually the same conditions some weeks before Gagarin’s flight are the only documented other cases of spacecrew perishing in their spacecraft.

and rogmey, the Cecil Adams column being discussed in this thread and linked to in the first post, and specially the web document that Cecil himself quotes in that column, is precisely about the very story that you “remember reading”!