But many of the USSR's spaceflight … However, less than a year later, on 23 July 1981 after a second disaster of the same cause was narrowly avoided, it was discovered that a design flaw in the fuel filters of the rocket were likely the cause of the 1980 disaster, although it was impossible to confirm which type of filters were used in the rocket that exploded. Perhaps to support his order he went outside himself, and he died with the others when the missile exploded.

The Soviet N1 rocket booster was a giant rocket meant to carry objects or people beyond Earth orbit, basically to the moon. I couldn't help thinking that their loss might have been more meaningful had it been for space exploration, the common world struggle that has claimed so many other lives around the planet. Furthermore, the launch window--the planetary alignment that allowed such launchings--would have been rapidly closing day by day. Back at the launch site, Nedelin's memory is not so dear.

On July 3, 1969, the Soviet Union’s dreams of a moon rocket went up in smoke and fire on the launch pad as the largest explosion of any rocket in history. That was the scenario I proposed in my book about the Soviet space program, Red Star in Orbit, in 1981.

A magazine article by Aleksandr Bolotin, a young officer at the Cosmodrome, in the pro-glasnost weekly Ogonyok, identified the rocket as an ICBM. The bodies that could be identified numbered several dozen, including that of the officer whose poor judgement had caused the disaster. The Sputnik's R-7 had turned out to be a great booster but a poor weapon. By the time I updated the account for a new book, Uncovering Soviet Disasters, in 1988, my belief in the Mars hypothesis was fading. Pravda reported that the launch of the rocket was a success and did not say anything about the explosion. He rushed to the medical center to help the survivors and found the front of the building surrounded by bodies. As a lifelong space nut fascinated with Soviet mysteries and the sleuthing needed to unravel them, I collected and evaluated the stories and tried to fit the pieces together for more than a quarter of a century. By early 1962, as Americans began deploying ICBMs in entire squadrons, Khrushchev was faced with a tremendous missile gap.

No label was necessary. Many of the plaques were cracked with age, but the shrine had not been ignored. The ships used to track the Mars probes had been in position in the south Atlantic and northeast Pacific for the failed October 10th and 14th launches, but they had set course for their home ports before the explosion.

[5][6][7], Coordinates: 62°55′43″N 40°27′24″E / 62.92861°N 40.45667°E / 62.92861; 40.45667, Vostok-2M rocket explosion during refueling, Initially after the events were declassified the, "Взрыв ракеты-носителя "Восток" на космодроме Плесецк (1980)", "Медаль "За отсутствие состава преступления, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1980_Plesetsk_launch_pad_disaster&oldid=982935399, Space accidents and incidents in the Soviet Union, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 11 October 2020, at 08:03. Getting to the Cosmodrome last February was difficult, but the crew and I surmounted the bureaucratic obstacles and at last arrived at Baikonur. Several hours before the intended launch, the tanks were filled with kerosene at 19:00 and preceded by the addition of liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen to side tanks. It was a long time ago and the bodies had been at rest for decades, but standing at the obelisk I felt a chill down my spine. Under the light of the moon they seemed the color of ivory."

More than confirming my suspicions, the article personalized the horror for me. "The monument is for all who died that day," he said.

Alas, many did not succeed in doing this.". When it mentioned a memorial obelisk over the burial site, I promised myself that someday, somehow, I would visit it. The grave site in the Leninsk park was covered with a grassy mound 40 feet across and fenced in.

A thick stream of fire unexpectedly burst forth, covering everyone around.

Most tantalizing was the spy Penkovskiy's explicit reference to funerals at a rocket plant in the Ukraine, an installation later revealed to be devoted entirely to military projects. The launch of the rocket was scheduled to take place at 21:16 on 18 March. Many of the survivors suffered severe burns and lung damage. The death toll, then, was nearly 100 men. I stood by the cold, lonely graves and tried to imagine the rocket workers' perspective, influenced by wars both hot and cold.

But as space historian Curtis Peebles recently observed, the strategy would not have been necessary had the Soviets' new missile succeeded sooner.

It was while he was inside that the rocket exploded, probably when a technician plugged the first stage's umbilical cable into the second stage's receptacle, causing a normally innocent command wire to trigger the ignition.

One man momentarily escaped from the fire but got tangled up in the barbed wire surrounding

I tried to add it all up. But at the time they were as quiet as the Soviets about their findings. Early 1990 found me before the obelisk, reading aloud the names of the dead and placing a bouquet by the stone. What appeared to be authentic footage of the explosion aired on Soviet television last April 12, "Cosmonaut Day." Indeed, it can be argued that the catastrophe almost led to a thermonuclear war.

But none of those later accidents at the Cosmodrome (or another that killed 50 men at the Plesetsk rocket center north of Moscow in 1980) ever approached the death toll of that October evening only three years after Sputnik 1. I knew that two unmanned Mars probes had been unsuccessfully launched only two weeks before from the pad used to launch Sputnik, and I believed that the basic Sputnik booster, the R-7, was the only big Soviet rocket flying at the time, so I postulated that the rocket that had blown up was also a Mars-bound vehicle. But many of the USSR's spaceflight pioneers perished in the accident. Something horrible may indeed have happened, Western experts concluded, but there was no way to be sure what it was. Local officials erected a memorial obelisk, with 54 name-bearing plaques spaced along the four sides of its square perimeter. Several times a week, groups of young people came on foot from wedding ceremonies in Leninsk to stand by the grave site, pause in thought, and honor their dead. Nikita Khrushchev himself mentioned the disaster in the first volume of his memoirs, smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the United States in 1970, but he gave no hint of the role he may have played. When the accident occurred, he wrote, "automatic cameras had been triggered along with the engines, and they recorded the scene. The details of the disaster were confirmed and elaborated on by the Ogonyok article, the only one ever to appear. Andrey Sakharov's newly published memoirs add a poignant detail to the tragedy.

They were all Russian or Ukrainian, and most belonged to 20- and 21-year-old soldiers.

Various preliminary tests conducted before the fueling went as expected and without problem.

the launch pad.

U.S. intelligence officers had something more concrete: several blurred, spotty photographs of the site brought back by a Discoverer recoverable reconnaissance satellite. Flowers, pine boughs, and tufts of prairie grass decorated many of the markers.

Only four were ever deployed as missiles, at the Plesetsk military center.

"Above the pad erupted a column of fire," he recalled. Yangel survived by a fluke. They surely thought of themselves as defenders of their nation and as explorers too, since multipurpose missiles, such as the R-7, were being diverted to peaceful space activities. Over the decades the local rocket workers, who knew the Cosmodrome's full history from first-hand accounts of survivors and family members, wore the wooden case smooth with their hands. A feeling of wholeness, of a fully restored flow in a history long obstructed, made me proud to have played a small outsider's role in the mending process. The launch team, ordered outside to attempt repairs, mounted the scaffolding around the balky, fully fueled missile. Time passed.

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