New Details On The Death Of A Soviet Cosmonaut

Purported photo of  CosmonautVladimir Komarov's remains

On NPR's science blog, writer Robert Krulwich tells a story about a Soviet cosmonaut circling the globe in 1967, convinced he will never make it back to Earth.  According to the story, he's on the phone with a high-ranking Soviet official who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes (though no one knows this) won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to-- literally-- crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. intelligence listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."

This extraordinarily account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, to be published next month. The authors base their narrative principally on revelations from a KGB officer, Venyamin Ivanovich Russayev, and previous reporting by Yaroslav Golovanov in Pravda. This story-- should it be proven to be true-- is beyond shocking.