Trained as a Soviet Air Force pilot from the age of 15 and a 1959 graduate of the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, Vladimir Komarov piloted Voshkod 1 in 1964 – the first multi-human-passenger space mission. On April 23, 1967, he took off for his second mission, a solo flight in Soyuz 1. The capsule did successfully reenter Earth’s atmosphere, but a parachute failure sent it screaming into the ground from miles up; Komarov was killed in the crash.
The exact details of the flight are shrouded in disagreement, hearsay, and Cold War secrecy. In 2011, Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony published Starman, an account of Komarov’s mission that suggested the spacecraft was rife with known mechanical flaws, and that in their eagerness to score a Space Race win, the government sent Komarov to his death. They also paint an emotional picture of Komarov as a man who knew he was going to die, but went regardless to protect his back-up and friend Yuri Gagarin. While these details are now oft-repeated, historians have called many aspects of the account into question, finding some errors, some sources wanting, and some details so obscured by the Soviet era that they’re impossible to substantiate.
Regardless of the exact circumstances, what is not debated is that Komarov became the first fatality during a space mission, dying just months after the Apollo 1 astronauts’ death in the launchpad fire, and a year before Gagarin’s death on a routine training flight.
