Word: soyuz
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NASA's Deputy Director George Low and most other space specialists leaned to a far simpler explanation for the deaths: a mechanical or structural failure aboard Soyuz. Because the cosmonauts were not in protective pressure suits at the time of the descent, they could have died from any number of causes-excessive heat, carbon dioxide fumes from a small fire, a nitrogen leak from the spacecraft's atmosphere system, or even a rapid drop in cabin pressure. Such theories got support from some unconfirmed reports that all radio transmissions-not only voice but also telemetry signals-stopped...
Through telemetry from the spacecraft, the Russians may well have detected a failure aboard Soyuz-or even the moment of death. But except to say that the cosmonauts' deaths were being investigated by a government commission. Soviet space officials gave no explanation of the disaster...
...record length of the Soyuz 11 mission-six days longer than any previous manned space flight-led to theorizing that the cosmonauts had exceeded man's natural limits in space. The Russians themselves had invited such speculation by repeatedly stressing the debilitating effects of weightlessness on the human body: loss of body fluids, loss of calcium from the bones, loss of heart and muscle tone. Cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev and Vitaly Sevastyanov, for example, complained that they did not fully recover from their 17-day orbital mission aboard Soyuz 9 last year for more than a week...
...citizen often suspected of being a Russian agent), wrote that "human error and mechanical failure between them caused creeping depressurization in the spacemen's nine-foot cabin and deprived the astronauts of life-supporting oxygen on the final phase of their journey." During the turbulent re-entry of Soyuz, Louis said, the spacecraft's hatchway opened enough so that the oxygen supply escaped into space...
...cosmonauts-or the ground controllers-fail to notice the opened hatch in time? "The Soyuz hatchway is not unlike a car door," Louis explained. "When the hatch is open, a signal light goes on on a console at mission control. But the light will go out when the hatch is half closed, as with a half-slammed car door." The calamity came at a time when the Russians seemed to be overtaking the U.S. in space-a remarkable comeback after they abandoned the race to land the first man on the moon. Still, the comeback was not entirely without...