Word: soyuz
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...dispatch to the Washington Star last week, Veteran Moscow Correspondent Edmund Stevens traced the Soyuz tragedy back to the moment in 1966 when Soviet Space Chief Sergei Korolev died of complications after surgery for cancer. It was Korolev, said Stevens, who was largely responsible for Russia's early manned space program; his stature and prestige shielded him from political and economic expediency and enabled him to insist upon thorough testing of new spacecraft before they were flown...
Korolev's 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...
Died. Colonel Vladimir M. Komarov, 40, Soviet cosmonaut who commanded the first multi-manned (three) spacecraft, Voskhod 1, which orbited the earth 16 times in 1964; when his second venture into space aboard a new capsule, Soyuz 1, ended in disaster; somewhere in the U.S.S.R. (see SCIENCE...