Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [98]
They knew they had problems for about two hours before Komarov died, and were fighting to correct them. We taped [the dialogue] and listened to it a couple of times afterwards. Kosygin called Komarov personally. They had a video-phone conversation, and Kosygin was crying. He told him he was a hero . . . The guy’s wife got on too, and they talked for a while. He told her how to handle their affairs, and what to do with the kids. It was pretty awful. Towards the last few minutes, he was falling apart . . . The strange thing is, we were all pretty bummed-out by the whole thing. In a lot of ways, having the sort of job we did humanizes the Russians. You study them so much, and listen to them for so many hours, that pretty soon you come to know them better than your own people.8
As he began his descent into the atmosphere, Komarov knew he was in terrible trouble. The radio outposts in Turkey intercepted his cries of rage and frustration as he plunged to his death, cursing for ever the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship – although his ‘final screams’, mentioned later in Fellwock’s account, may be an exaggeration.
Korolev’s inadvertent prophesy about ‘flying under rags’ was fulfilled when the parachutes did not deploy properly. A small drogue canopy came out, but failed to pull the bigger canopy from its storage bay – yet another serious design flaw. A back-up parachute was released, only to become entangled with the first drogue. There was nothing to slow the capsule’s fall, and Komarov slammed onto the steppe near Orenburg with all the force of an unrestrained 2.8-ton meteorite. The capsule was utterly flattened, and the buffer retro-rockets in its base blew up on impact, burning what little wreckage was left.
Recovery troops picked up handfuls of soil to try and dampen the flames. Their radio messages back to base were garbled and distressed: something about the cosmonaut ‘requiring urgent medical attention’. It seems unlikely that any recognizable portion of Komarov’s body would have survived intact, although Russayev says that a heel bone was found among the ashes.
This was the first Soviet fatality during an actual space flight, and it came as an immense shock; nor could the basic truth of the disaster be discreetly hidden from the outside world (although the Soviet authorities admitted only to an unfortunate parachute failure, and not to a series of design and preparation flaws dating from long before the ship took off). This time it was NASA’s turn to send letters of condolence. Both sides in the superpower divide had learned that the space environment showed no concern for nationalities or flags, but treated all trespassers – Russian and American alike – to the same set of risks.
Three weeks after Komarov’s death, Gagarin met Russayev at his family apartment, but refused to speak in any of the rooms because he was worried about bugs – listening devices buried in the walls or hidden in light fittings and telephones. The lifts and lobby areas were not safe either, so the two men trudged up and down the apartment block’s echoing stairwells and along the corridors. Anything to keep moving and confuse the eavesdroppers.
The Gagarin of 1967 was very different from the optimistic and carefree young man of 1961. Komarov’s death had placed an enormous burden of guilt on his shoulders. ‘He told me the story about the huge research effort undertaken to try and prevent the flight,’ says Russayev. ‘He said the results were supposed to have been reported to the Main Man [Brezhnev]. He explained how they’d thought of me as an envoy in charge of getting the letter to the relevant offices. I told Yuri how I’d worked on it, and everything that had happened . . . He warned me, “Walls have ears.” It was Yuri’s idea to avoid the lifts. Somebody must