The Chilling Final Words of Vladimir Komarov, the "Man Who Fell from Space" on a Doomed Mission

The Chilling Final Words of Vladimir Komarov, the "Man Who Fell from Space" on a Doomed Mission

The 1967 death of Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was not an unforeseeable accident. It was a disaster that engineers documented in advance, a mission whose fatal flaws were known at every level of the Soviet space programme. On the morning of April 23, 1967, a Soviet colonel climbed into a spacecraft at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, strapped himself in, and waited for launch. What made the moment extraordinary was not the mission. It…