Word: cosmonaut
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Probably launched from the Tyuratam Cosmodrome in central Kazakhstan, the first of the satellites, Cosmos 186, lifted off on Oct. 27. Western scientists immediately noted that it was traveling in an orbit remarkably similar to that of Soyuz 1, which crashed on landing last April, killing Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir M. Komarov. Three days later, a cylindrical object called Cosmos 188 was rocketed aloft into the same orbital track, a scant 14.9 miles from Cosmos 186. The accuracy was remarkable, but it had to be. Western space experts have learned that Russian spacecraft radar lacks power for long-range precision...
...greatest Soviet surprise was the launch vehicle that in 1961 sent Pioneer Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit in Vostok I. Although envious Western space experts have long assumed that a single giant booster had been used to launch Vostok and later Soviet spacecraft, the vehicle displayed at Paris consisted of a relatively small two-stage rocket surrounded by a cluster of four conical, strap-on rocket engines. Instead of achieving the major breakthrough in rocket technology believed by the West to have made the Gagarin flight possible, the Russians had simply strapped together enough smaller rocket engines to provide...
...more information about the death of Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov filters out of Moscow, it becomes increasingly apparent that there were close parallels between the first fatalities in the U.S. and Russian space programs. Like Apollo, whose troubles may have stemmed partly from pressure to achieve a manned lunar landing by 1970, Komarov's Soyuz project was probably pushed into a manned mission to provide a space spectacular for the 50th-anniversary year of the Bolshevik Revolution. And like his Apollo counterparts, Cosmonaut Komarov may well have met a fiery death...
Final SOS. Although the Russians attribute Komarov's death to the crash of Soyuz after its parachute straps became tangled, Stevens cites widespread rumors in Moscow that the cosmonaut was dead before he returned to earth...
Komarov may have had a premonition of his fate. Shortly before the veteran cosmonaut entered the spacecraft, Stevens says, he handed Soviet Reporter Sergei Borzenko the book he had been reading-a biography of Joan of Arc. In a section describing the Maid of Orleans' burning at the stake, Borzenko noticed later, Komarov had underlined the following passage: "She bade her farewells and continued gazing at the clear blue sky until the final second when the black smoke blotted out that sky forever...