posted 04-24-2020 02:33 PM               

A Newly Discovered Document Debunks Soviet Space Conspiracy Theories on Soyuz-1

In April 1967, the immediate futures of both the United States and the Soviet space programs were shrouded in mystery. NASA was still trying to understand the causes of the fire that killed the crew of Apollo 1 on the launch pad, and no one seemed to know how well Apollo would recover from this catastrophe. The Soviet Union's human space program had not been heard from for 25 months, but rumors were flying that something big was in the offing as the 50th anniversary of Russia's October Revolution approached. On April 23, the Soviet Union announced the launch of the first of a new generation of spacecraft called Soyuz with a veteran cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov.

The next day there was an ominous silence until a sketchy news bulletin contained the shocking announcement that Komarov had become the first person to die during a spaceflight when his craft plunged to Earth after a parachute failure. Conjecture and rumors quickly filled in the vacuum created by the lack of hard information, and even as the Soviet space program recovered from this setback and moved on, the flight of Soyuz-1 and the death of Vladimir Komarov remained shrouded in controversy.

A recently discovered copy of an official Soyuz-1 Onboard Journal was discovered by the publisher of "Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly" at auction. Inside was information not previously available to researchers or the public including the final hours of the Soyuz-1 flight.

In this book, noted Soviet space expert Asif Siddiqi, PhD, uses this information to debunk the various conspiracy theories that surrounded the Soyuz-1 mission and the death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, the first fatality of a spacefarer during a space mission.

Now with the official journal from the mission, the true and complete story can finally be told.

A copy of the Soyuz-1 Onboard Journal (in Russian) is included.

Proceeds from this title benefit SPACE 3.0, a 501c3 charitable foundation, an organization with the mission to build an endowment to grant/fund projects focused on preserving space history, empowering entrepreneurs and visionaries, and helping to craft a vision for a space future.

• Paperback: 80 pages
  
• Spacehistory101.com Press (April 13, 2020)
  
• ISBN-10: 1887022953
  
• ISBN-13: 978-1887022958

posted 04-25-2020 12:29 AM               

This 16-page document, divided into three parts, is essentially a real-time compilation of data on the mission prepared and signed by the shift directors of the Soviet version of "mission control." It was declassified only in 2019. The three parts correspond to the moments at which each part was prepared — about 8.5 hours into the mission, about 18.5 hours into the mission, and 13 days after Komarov's death, on 3 May 1967. The latter part contains information on the final hours of the flight. The information presented in each part is a mix of different types of data, including:

• transcriptions of air-to-ground communications between Komarov and the Soviet ground tracking network;

• detailed status of spacecraft systems at different points of the mission; and

• summaries of various problems on the spacecraft as discovered by mission control in real time.

posted 04-26-2020 05:07 AM            

Those familiar with both Chertok’s and Siddiqi’s previous work will find very little that’s new. Yes, there’s some details, but they don’t really change the broad picture as known by serious historians. So far as the Onboard Journal is concerned, it’s barely legible on Kindle. I know it’s not really meant to be about 7K-OK no. 5, and as such Chertok provides more detail on that part of the planned combined flight than you get here.

Overall, I’d recommend it as being the most recent account, but it’s nothing really earth-shattering.

posted 04-26-2020 12:45 PM               

Soviet Mission Soyuz 1: Official Copy of "Onboard Journal" (Transcript) for the Ill-Fated Flight, from the Collection of General Nikolai Kamanin. A sixteen-page typescript in Russian, 8" x 11.25" in size, documenting the April 23-24, 1967, voice transmissions between "Dawn" (ground control) and "Ruby" (cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov) who became the first in-flight fatality in the history of spaceflight. At the close of the last page is a handwritten notation by a KGB agent dated May 3, 1967. Its folder has "Soyuz 1" handwritten on the cover by Kamanin.

posted 04-26-2020 01:46 PM               

• Page 2: Komarov informs that the left solar panel did not deploy, then there are just informations on the cabin pressure, etc.

• Page 15: There are communication problems, Komarov hears the ground perfectly, the ground has problems to understand all he says, he has to repeat some statements.

  Besides that Komarov says everything's ok, he feels fine, he works according to the plan, no reason to worry.

• Page 16: Komarov informs that he oriented the ship correctly, retrofire took 146 seconds as planned, he is in the middle couch with the harness locked, everything is ok, he feels fine.

  The last info is the ship's modules separated as planned, all is ok.

posted 04-28-2020 02:57 PM               

The article published in Quest is exactly the same as the stand-alone publication listed on Amazon. After I wrote the article for Quest, Scott Sacknoff, the publisher for Quest, approached me and asked me if I would object to publishing the article as a stand-alone publication for sale, with the proceeds going to charity. I had no objection and he put the whole thing together. I really had nothing to do with it (although I am very grateful to Scott for giving it wider dissemination). I actually haven’t even seen it yet!

As far as the provenance of the document (the so-called “on board journal’), it was from the private collection of Nikolai Kamanin, but as I note in the article in Quest, the copy was signed by Vladimir Pravetskii of the USSR Ministry of Health responsible for biomedical support. My guess is that Pravetskii gave Kamanin a copy which he kept in his private collection. It was auctioned for sale in May 2018 at Heritage Auctions.

And finally, there are indeed a few new revelations in the article, including details of air-to-ground communications unknown before, details of the single firing of the main engine (which we did not know about before), and the fact that there were three attempts at reentry, not two. Additionally, many other minor errors are corrected in the version published in Quest.

posted 05-01-2020 09:01 AM               

I have no direct knowledge of when it was declassified. Since it was offered at an auction in November 2018, it would strongly imply that the document was declassified earlier than that. My guess is that Kamanin's family (or perhaps the person representing Kamanin's family) received official permission from the Russian government within the past few years to auction the item.

For what it's worth, the document bears no visible stamp denoting declassification (which is very common to see in declassified Soviet-era documents) but that doesn't mean it didn't go through an official declassification procedure — the stamp could have been on a cover not included in the sale. I don't think this document was "accidentally" put on sale without declassification. There are serious risks to that for Russians which one can perhaps imagine.

posted 06-11-2020 01:22 PM            

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Originally posted by dom:
...this is the cover story in the latest issue.

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posted 06-11-2020 01:27 PM            

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Originally posted by RobertB:
80 pages, some of them a Russian language document? I wonder how much there is to read in this book.

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posted 06-11-2020 08:12 PM            

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Originally posted by Lasv3:
...the document release sequence is logical now.

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