A Cosmonaut's Fiery Death Retold (2011)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold

by todayiamme • 13 years ago

128 45 13 years ago

kahirsch• 13 years ago

Be sure to read the follow-up, which casts doubt on parts of the story: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...

Someone• 13 years ago

As far as I can tell, this article _is_ the follow-up (the same URL, even)

nicw• 13 years ago

In my RSS feed, the original 2011 is linked [1]. But loading the page takes you to the follow up [2]

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmo...

[2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...

jt2190• 13 years ago

Previous discussions:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342677 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342058 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346331

jaxytee• 13 years ago

"The problem was Gagarin. 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. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed."

This helps puts things in perspective when I'm obsessing over trivial things like the max length my RegExp will allow on some arbitrary form field. One of my user's phone won't blow up if he/she wasn't able to use five more characters in a message.

We should do our best to minimize the amount of bugs we code, but when we (inevitably) do code buggy software we can fix it relatively fast. Unless of course one is coding a GPS system for SpaceX or something of the such.

g123g• 13 years ago

Reminds me of some companies where the team knows that a particular project is doomed from the start but has to still work on it as no one has guts to tell the boss the truth.

bsullivan012• 13 years ago

Almost the same :-)

Cast doubt on a Dear Leader's idea and all of the sudden you're shipped to a gulag or to the firing squad. Just like that....enemy of the people, support the US imperialists...trying to sabotage socialism, etc.

Ask an Eastern European or Russian that lived through the communist times.

koenigdavidmj• 13 years ago

In my naive young western view, Gagarin (and possibly Komarov) would be one of the most likely people to get away with it. These guys were national heroes. They had statues built of them.

Shifting to a different dictatorship, the case has been made in Burma that the only reason Aung San Suu Kyi was kept alive the whole time was that her father was very well regarded even by the military.

But then I've also read 1984 and remember the memory holes.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

The term is "death march" [1]. Entirely appropriate for this story.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management...

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

Literally 90% of startups.

MrBra2• 13 years ago

Webpage has a play button to "Listen to Komarov as the Soyuz capsule began to fail".

And then - unbelievably - there is a link for buying it for "89 cents at Amazon.com".

At Amazon they're selling one man's last words of despair. And linking to that you are even advertising this. The whole thing is sick and sad.

civilian2• 13 years ago

I paid 15 euros in Kutna Hora (Czech Republic) to visit the Ossuary and the Cathedral nearby. There were roughly 10k stacked skeletons in the Ossuary basement, and there were two cannonized Saints in the Cathedral. (As in-- mummified and dressed up, in glass boxes with wax faces.)

The market is everywhere, and your emotion is misplaced.

hyperbovine2• 13 years ago

Cathedrals and catacombs at least require some upkeep. If the $.89 is somehow making its way to this man's next of kin then fine. Otherwise it just seems like cynical profiteering.

killerpopiller2• 13 years ago

no it is not and shouldn't. Selling ones last words is body-strapping and a violation of the persons civil liberties. And the market isn't anywhere, it is a defined area with laws as fences and you don't live in wilderness but in society where we people decided that rules improve life.

Besides, this display of dead people similar to one in Palermo/Italy is macabre and mentally healthy people probably have emotions looking at dead people exhibitions, especially since one doesn't learn anything of it.

In contrast to http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/

alexeisadeski3• 13 years ago

Will somebody please think of the children??

lolwutf• 13 years ago

Depraved? Yes.

Intentional? I doubt it.

Something they'd fix, if it were pointed out to them? I'd like to think so.

Why don't you write them a note, instead of offering your opinions here?

civilian2• 13 years ago

Another thing to point out-- the track is part of a larger collection of tracks meant to be used by people making film about space history; or possibly use it as a sample. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002SHRCX6/ref=dm_sp_alb

And it was published in 1998, when it would've been hard to find on the internet. That it's selling on Amazon is just part of a trend that most old media is sold cheaply on Amazon.

icebraining2• 13 years ago

Something they'd fix, if it were pointed out to them? I'd like to think so.

It has, in fact, been taken offline. (Along with the whole collection of "sound effects".)

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

Another interesting read is the timeline of the other famous reentry disaster, the Space Shuttle Columbia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster...

One of the things that I find surprising is the amount of time between when the breakup started ("8:53:46 (EI+577): Various people on the ground saw signs of debris being shed. ... Dialogue on some of the amateur footage indicates the observers were aware of the abnormality of what they were filming.") to last radio contact (nearly 6 minutes later).

Pxtl• 13 years ago

And on takeoff, the Challenger crew compartment was still intact after the explosion and the crew was protected and quite likely conscious for the 2 minutes and 45 seconds while it hurtled along in a ballistic arc until it splashed down into the ocean hard enough to pulverize everything on board.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast...

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

Yeah. A similar thing happened during Columbia; the cabin remained somewhat intact for up to 39 seconds after the rest of the vehicle really started to fall apart, though it ultimately disintegrated with the rest of the orbiter.

It seems those crew compartments were pretty damn tough.

Recoil42• 13 years ago

There are too many holes in the story. Highly recommend the followup, where it's confirmed that many parts are flatly made up or just vaguely inaccurate: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...

Edvik• 13 years ago

I am not sure if these replies count as confirmed. They are more sources citing different events. But the sources are often official USSR documents, which are not being doctoring.

The final official transcript, for one, reads like propaganda.

ck2• 13 years ago

Those that were protesting social justice articles being posted, where are you for this article?

(not personally complaining about either one, just want to check the perspective)

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

I don't really see this as a "social justice" article. More like an article that drives home the human impact of engineering.

I mean, the people responsible for this are almost all dead now, and the government that pushed to hard has long since dissolved. The lingering relevance is engineering and risk.

zaroth• 13 years ago

Literally, WTF!

The first thing you see is a large picture of molten human remains. That's just horrific.

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

Just proves heroism is stupid. His death threw Soviet space program back for several years. Postponing the mission would undeniably cause much less harm if any at all.

But it's in Russian nature to take stupid risks that are clearly not worth it. Авось.

avmich• 13 years ago

Remember Apollo-1.

rwallace• 13 years ago

It's not specific to Russian nature. It's the nature of any environment where people are punished for reporting bad news up the chain of command. That's the relevant message most of the HN readership should be taking from this. You'll never be in charge of a Soyuz launch but you might someday be in charge of a project or company that has an opportunity to correct problems before they become disasters. Make sure the workers on the ground floor aren't afraid to tell you about the problems. Conversely if you are on the ground floor and find yourself afraid to report problems, it might be time to start looking for another job.

speeder• 13 years ago

No, it was just shitty management, like how Eike Batista frequently made clear his displeasure for non-optimistic news, and then went to create a billionaire loss on oilfields that had not much oil, because he told his geologists to tell him that there was much oil in them

Aqueous• 13 years ago

"Nothing is certain but death, taxes, and management fail."

pattisapu• 13 years ago

I hate how this article begins with "So . . . " right above a picture of charred human remains. Ira Glass often does this kind of flip intro too.

nsxwolf• 13 years ago

Photo of remains has been removed.

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

There are two different articles: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmo... http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...

The second article is an update, and does not have the picture.

hansjorg• 13 years ago

According to the authors, Komarov answered: "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead." That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn't do that to his friend. "That's Yura," the book quotes him saying, "and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears.

This doesn't seem to make any sense. I think people might be a bit credulous when it comes to stories about the SU.

derleth• 13 years ago

This sounds like the Torre Bert recordings, which are almost certainly a hoax: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4115

Of course, the Torre Bert story goes further, with a whole passel of cosmonauts going missing and unreported on except for these two guys in Italy, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, with a lash-up radio rig, who weren't influenced at all by all the publicity they were getting every time they reported a new cosmonaut dying in pain. Not at all. Also, in their world, spacecraft can just kind of 'drift' out of Earth orbit without any additional engine thrust.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2433/are-there-real...

andrewliebchen• 13 years ago

It's really hard to take Krulwich seriously after the way he treated the Hmong witness in Radiolab's "Yellow Rain" story, including the callousness of the follow-ups.

croisillon• 13 years ago

They wanted to protect Gagarin, yet he died less than one year later.

A Cosmonaut's Fiery Death Retold (2011)

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