Word: komarov
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...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, and what...
...successors apparently could not resist mounting pressures for 1967 space spectaculars, Stevens reported, and they agreed to a Soyuz mission timed to coincide with May Day celebrations. Thus, despite an earlier unmanned Soyuz flight that is believed to have come to grief, Soyuz 1 may have been launched with Komarov aboard before it was fully qualified for a manned mission. To celebrate the November 1917 revolution, another Soyuz mission was planned to put men in orbit around the moon...
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 re-entered the atmosphere, according to this version, he radioed that the temperature inside his cabin was rising rapidly. There was a final S O S-then silence, as the space craft plummeted "like a fiery ball" and crashed in the Ural Mountains, hundreds of miles from the planned landing site...
...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...