When the capsule began its descent and the parachutes failed to open, the book describes how American intelligence "picked up cries of rage as he plunged to his death." Komarov's wife was also on the call to talk about what to say to their children. Fellwock described how Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin called on a video phone to tell him he was a hero. In this account, an NSA analyst, identified in the book as Perry Fellwock, described overhearing Komarov tell ground control officials he knew he was about to die. listeners knew something was wrong but couldn't make out the words. The National Security Agency had a facility at an Air Force base near Istanbul. And worse, Komarov's chances for a safe return to Earth were dwindling fast.Īll the while, U.S. The next day's launch had to be canceled. Once the Soyuz began to orbit the Earth, the failures began. The Soyuz left Earth with Komarov on board. Golovanov called this behavior "a sudden caprice," though afterward some observers thought Gagarin was trying to muscle onto the flight to save his friend. On launch day, April 23, 1967, a Russian journalist, Yaroslav Golovanov, reported that Gagarin showed up at the launch site and demanded to be put into a spacesuit, though no one was expecting him to fly. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears. "That's Yura," the book quotes him saying, "and he'll die instead of me. Vladimir Komarov couldn't do that to his friend. Russayev asked, Why not refuse? According to the authors, Komarov answered: "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead." That was Yuri Gagarin. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, "I'm not going to make it back from this flight." With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems - serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen. It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. The next day, a second vehicle would take off, with two additional cosmonauts the two vehicles would meet, dock, Komarov would crawl from one vehicle to the other, exchanging places with a colleague, and come home in the second ship. The plan was to launch a capsule, the Soyuz 1, with Komarov inside. The story begins around 1967, when Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, decided to stage a spectacular midspace rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships. But he wouldn't back out because he didn't want Gagarin to die. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. In 1967, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. The two men were close they socialized, hunted and drank together. Starman tells the story of a friendship between two cosmonauts, Vladimir Kamarov and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space.
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