Cosmonaut Crashed into Earth 'Crying in Rage' (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Cosmonaut Crashed into Earth 'Crying in Rage' (2011)

npr.org

110 pointsvinnyglennon63 comments

As noted in the amended post (link below), this isn't actually true.

http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-...

I think the update puts some context around events and calls some of the details into question, but it does not really dispute the basic thrust of the story. I think that it is categorically unfair to say, "This isn't true," but it is also inappropriate to put too much stock in this version of events.

That isn't a debunking as much as a refinement of the claims. The USSR's early space program was really this dangerous. Soyuz 1 was a failure that lead to a death and Komarov knew he was going to die before he stepped into the craft. Komarov was the first in-flight fatality in the history of spaceflight. Just four years later the Soyuz program killed three more cosmonauts as well.

I'm not sure it's helpful to rattle-off number of fatalities when discussing whose space program might have been more 'dangerous'. Both 'sides' were running at break-neck speed to achieve the most the first. Both were using essentially the same technology in the same manner. Who died when was more a case of chance than anything systematic to either the USA or USSR's philosophy.

The Apollo program killed three astronauts before they even left the pad. Apollo 13 was a failure that very nearly killed three more. And we'll not mention STS.

But all that pales into insignificance compared to the number of test-pilots who quietly died in the advancement of aviation in the same era. That's how Yuri Gagarin died, for example.

My point isn't a us vs them as much as it was showing that the early Soyuz program did results in fatalities and as such posting a curt "No, this is wrong" is fairly disingenious.

Also, the USSR engaged in cover-ups fairly routinely. The Nedelin disaster was covered up for 39 years, for example. This cost nearly 200 ground crew lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe

>The Apollo program killed three astronauts before they even left the pad.

Again, this is public record. Again, the USSR was very dishonest with its space program. Having people still parrot their propaganda is ridiculous in this day and age. There is still a lot we don't know about the daily ins and outs of their program and pretending none of this happened is extremely disingenuous.

This is one of those cases where you can study the processes, which people set up, because the structure of the outcomes invariably resembles the structure of the processes that produced them. The difference in processes here (US v USSR) is quite striking.

This is another great example of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. [1] You're an expert in a field, read an article about it, realize how wrong people are, then read another article and think the author is an expert. Lots of people read this article, thinking the author and the novelist were correct. Then the actual experts wrote in and pointed out where it was wrong.

I think this is a great example of media bias toward drama without having the proper time to track down and research the truth. I expect, as the news cycle speeds up even more, articles will continue to be this wrong and worse. It's going to be ever harder to tell what is true and what is not. Anything pertaining to be true will require numerous citations and evidence. We can no longer rely on the brand ("NPR" or "NYT") to determine if something is true.

[1] https://embracepith.wordpress.com/2015/09/11/on-gell-mann-am...

In an interesting twist, this story is plagiarized in the book Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offil. It appears on page 61 of the book.

The fact that this was reported by "Starman" was enough for me to question its veracity. That is one tall book, written in a conspiratorial tone, telling Soviet tales with no questioning or radar for right and wrong. It is impossible to trust right from the preface.

I'm normally very much a skeptic and not prone to conspiracy theories, but one that's always really fascinated me is the "lost cosmonauts" theory.

The idea that Yuri Gagarin wasn't the first human to travel into space, he was just the first human to return safely from space is haunting.

The concept that the USSR got ahead in the space race by a willingness to sacrifice a number of souls to the perils of space, and went to great lengths to cover it up, still seems plausible in my mind.

Putting humans into space is incredibly dangerous, and there are so many ways for a human to die in space. I've always felt there was a curious lack of death-in-space in the history of the early days of the space race, on both the Soviet and American sides.

Even though it is almost certainly warped by Cold War fear mongering, the idea that the Soviet Union shot capsules out of orbit, frequently had cosmonauts burn up on reentry etc just seems to fill in the gaps nicely.

Anyhow mostly conspiracy theory nuttiness, but I still believe there are nuggets of truth in there somewhere...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cosmonauts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judica-Cordiglia_brothers

Some of these aren't conspiracy theories. The Soyuz 1 pilot knew he was going to die and, well, he did. The 1960 R-16 rocket explosion at the Baikonur Cosmodrome killed something like 200 ground crew. This was covered up for decades and only officially acknowledged as the USSR was beginning to fall apart in 1989.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe

I also believe the Polyus anti-satellite weapon platform intended to militarize space was a secret to the West until it failed to achieve orbit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_%28spacecraft%29

Pretty much every space mission in the USSR was a secret. The West would detect a launch, or sometimes be told in advance a launch was happening to lower nuclear tensions, and then days later we'd see in Pravda what mission it was.

NOVA episode talked about first "secret" Soviet space station- mainly a cylinder for extending spy photography missions. A human in space was a more efficient photographer than a robot in the 1960s.

it's way beyond plausible. the proven willingness to sacrifice souls in ww2 basically proves it. the space race wasn't very long after the war. it was the same people running the show.

But, if it happened, the CIA must have known about it, the same way the knew about Komarov. So, why are American keeping quiet about it as well? Do we need to extend this conspiracy to the American side as well?

and blow the cover of the agents who got you the info?

Not then of course, now, after the documents from the era were declassified, and the agents in question are either dead or long retired.

Spy agencies are good but they're not omniscient. It's entirely possible that things happened that the CIA didn't know about, especially back before spy satellites were a common thing.

Heinlein is pretty sure such an event happened while he was traveling in the Soviet Union, which he relates in a chapter in Expanded Universe.

I personally like the conspiracy theory of a break-away civilization that we fund with black project money. I just hope it actually exists.

"Conspiracy theory" is IMHO an intellectually lazy term in that as normally used it promotes blanket dismissal of an entire category of thing based on prejudice. Conspiracies can and do happen. If that weren't the case, the FBI would not have a "conspiracy" division.

As always it boils down to Ockham's Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is usually correct unless there is evidence otherwise.

Ockham's Razor in turn is probably a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. Complex artifacts in space and time (like conspiracies) represent higher energy states of the universe and therefore are less likely to exist. When the probability of something being true is below the median, the burden of proof shifts to proving that it does exist. The further below the median, the higher the burden of proof. For example: it would require stronger unambiguous evidence to convince me Bigfoot exists or that the Roswell UFO crash happened than it would to convince me that there were cover-ups in the Soviet space program. The latter is not terribly unlikely given what we know of Soviet behavior.

We cannot rule this out, but it seems very unlikely to me. The more I read about it, the less likely it seems.

- Laika was launched aboard Sputnik 2 in October 1957

- Gagarin on Vostok 1 in April 1961

Sputnik 2 was much lighter than the Vostok capsule (500 kg vs. 2,500 kg) and did not feature any re-entry apparatus. In just 3.5 years, the Soviets had to improve their carrier rocket and develop a man-rated capsule with a heat-shield and braking system, a guidance system and had to improve the whole life-support system.

We know they launched dogs on the Vostok in Dec. 1960, so it is unlikely they'd launch a cosmonaut in the time before. So the time-span between the end of 1960 and April 1961 seems like the only time they could have lost cosmonauts. That just does not seem that much time and I have a hard time believing they managed to lose two cosmonauts in four months.

After the death of Komarov in April 1967, they took 1.5 years to fix their design till the launch of Soyuz 2. Likewise, they needed 2+ years after the Soyuz 11 tragedy to launch again. I don't believe they would have just launched a couple of cosmonauts nilly-willy after a deadly accident.

Wouldn't the absurdly short time period for design test iteration and the extreme political pressure weighing on success be the most ripe conditions for making sacrifices of this type though? We're talking about a generation that lived through WWII, Hitler and Stalin, where wartime values around dying for one's country were still viewed as a necessary and noble sacrifice. Seems like if there was ever a moment in history in which people would be willingly flung into space, knowing there was a high likelihood they would die, that would be it.

But what we know of their space program indicates that yes, they were cutting corners and reducing safety margins, they still used unmanned flights with dolls and animal flights. So, they were not willing to just shoot up a couple of guys and see who makes it down alive.

An image of the actual charred remains, and audio of Komarov as he died? I love NPR, but this is bordering on snuff. It seems far more graphic than is necessary.

Personally, I appreciate the author's focus on telling Komorov's story with Komorov at the center and the corpse as meteorite knifed the romantic abstractions that let me be comfortably unempathetic when reading about people dying.

For me, imagining knowing that your parachute won't deploy as you hurtle toward the earth is pretty good at making me empathize with someone's death. I don't need to the photo to haunt me as well.

The interesting thing as I was replying was that it's the caption that matters. If it was "commissars inspect moonrock" suddenly it would be science. With the caption, the photo creates the potential to empathize with the people who might have made better decisions...if not the actual decision makers, the people in uniform are a good representation. The audio is consistent with the tradition of space flight documentary. "Houston we have a problem," doesn't always work out to a Hollywood ending.

None of which is to diminish someone's reaction. There are many news stories I forgoe because I don't want to go to the place they are likely to to take me, too.

Had a similar thought – definitely qualifies as graphic content and could have done with a fair warning. Tough image to confront first thing in the morning.

I am surprised nobody mentioned why it crashed. Technical flaws could be expected on prototype aircraft. And Soyuz mostly worked fine without major redesign for several years.

Sojuz program was postponed, while soviets worked on Voschod. In result Soyuz 1 was put into storage for several months. Parachutes were rolled into capsules all that time, and nobody repackaged them before start. Parachutes failed to open on landing.

My source is Karel Pacner. Well known Czechoslovak journalist who writes mostly about space exporation. He was only journalist from soviet block who covered Apollo 11 launch onsite from Florida. After soviets opened archives he studied their records and wrote several books.

The sad thing too is that both space shuttle accidents the astronauts knew for seconds to minutes what was happening. NASA isnt making full reports to protect relatives. In either accident the astronauts could not do anything. The new Orion system changes this.

In what way does the new Orion system change that?

Orion and Dragon capsules have a pad-abort system. In the event of a malfunction, the crew capsule will jettison fast enough to escape any explosions.

The acceleration will probably knock out the astronauts and cause internal bleeding, but that's still better than immolation.

Failed re-entry is still going to be fatal, but the Dragon can theoretically recover from a failed parachute with its Draco engines.

The issues with having the Space Shuttle slung on the side of the fuel tank, where falling foam could (and did, many times before Columbia) strike the Shuttle.

Oh, for Columbia's crew it could have been far worse than that.

There's reasonable evidence [0] that the director of NASA and ground crews knew the Columbia's wing damage was bad enough to make re-entry impossible. But they had two options, tell the astronauts they were never coming home at the start of their mission, or wait until they discovered it minutes before their vehicle disintegrated.

The director chose the former path, and ended up getting fired as it looked like a cover up. It was really just being compassionate.

No pad abort system would have saved Columbia. But on the flip-side, while everyone is up and arms over the loss, NASA's astronauts are trained to WANT to fly. We can hem and haw and say what a tragedy, but there is a class of people who know the risks, who know the possibility of death always exists and will still pilot or crew the vehicles that we send into space.

0: http://goo.gl/vdagzb

I wouldn’t place any trust in the Daily Mail whatsoever. Do you have a more reliable link?

As far as I’m aware, NASA knew that there had been a foam / ice strike on the orbiter but had no idea how bad it was. Given those circumstances, why tell the astronauts about a theoretical risk (that turned out to be very real) ?

NASA had third and fourth options as well. Have the Columbia crew patch the hole and pray while doing what little they could to reduce stress and heating on the damaged wing during re-entry, or expedite Atlantis' next launch as a rescue mission (there would have been something like a four-day margin for launching it without skipping safety checks before Columbia ran out of consumables).

Five days, and they could have expedited it without skipping safety checks.

Do you have a source besides the Daily Mail? There are other ways to get astronauts back from the ISS, if they knew about the issue ahead of time.

Columbia's last mission wasn't an ISS mission. They had a pretty limited amount of time before it became hard to breathe. There was a potential rescue option in the form of Atlantis which was already being prepped for another mission and could have been redirected to pick up the Columbia astronauts, but it would have been a big rush and would have required getting things rolling fairly rapidly after they became aware of the ice strike.

Except that is entirely bullshit.

The reason everyone is up in arms, still to this day, about the Columbia "accident" is because we could have sent a second shuttle to retrieve them very easily.

NASA engineers were fighting the decision for the Columbia to return because they already were assembling a plan to get them home alive.

Seven astronauts died because Bush put Sean O'Keefe in as Administrator of NASA, and Sean O'Keefe decided it'd cost NASA less money to let the astronauts die instead of bringing them back alive.

Sean O'Keefe personally tried to halt any work on sending Atlantis up as a rescue mission, and ended up succeeding, all in the name of budgetary concerns. He didn't give a fuck about those astronauts.

And to him? It was just a revolving door. He's now working some cushy job at Airbus as their US CEO, a military contractor he made friends with when he worked for the DoD and was Secretary of the Navy (under Bush's father, the other President Bush).

So, fuck him. This wasn't an accident, this was murder for profit.

> So, fuck him. This wasn't an accident, this was murder for profit.

Except for the profit part? It's not like he got the Airbus job because he killed some astronauts.

It pretty much is. They wanted a CEO that was a bean counter, and that's what they got. He proved on the job that he's the kind of guy that puts budget before lives.

Do you have sources for this? This is the first time I hear that someone had definite knowledge of damage to the thermal protection tiles on Columbia. The review board didn't mention this, from the accounts I have skimmed through.

> sent a second shuttle to retrieve them very easily

Every report I've read this, the math doesn't check out here. It takes months at a minimum to get a shuttle ready for launch and there's no proven method for accelerating that time frame or keeping people alive in the shuttle for the extended periods of time required to prep another launch. It's not like they had a second one waiting on the pad ready to go.

This isn't even taking into consideration the required engineering and logistics around moving people between shuttles, which there's no procedure for.

These things aren't minor details.

Source: I've played kerbal space program. :-)

They actually had a second shuttle already on the launch pad, ahead of schedule for prep for the next mission.

Wikipedia quote time: "The CAIB [Columbia Accident Investigation Board] determined that a rescue mission, though risky, might have been possible provided NASA management had taken action soon enough.[56][57] They stated that, had NASA management acted in time, two possible contingency procedures were available: a rescue mission by shuttle Atlantis, and an emergency spacewalk to attempt repairs to the left wing thermal protection.

Normally, a rescue mission is not possible, due to the time required to prepare a shuttle for launch, and the limited consumables (power, water, air) of an orbiting shuttle. However, Atlantis was well along in processing for a planned March 1 launch on STS-114, and Columbia carried an unusually large quantity of consumables due to an Extended Duration Orbiter package. The CAIB determined that this would have allowed Columbia to stay in orbit until flight day 30 (February 15). NASA investigators determined that Atlantis processing could have been expedited with no skipped safety checks for a February 10 launch."

56: Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003). "Decision Making at NASA" (PDF). CAIB Report, Volume I, chapter 6.4 "Possibility of Rescue or Repair". p. 173ff. Retrieved March 28, 2013. http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net/anon.nasa-global/CAIB/C...

57: Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003). "STS-107 In-Flight Options Assessment" (PDF). CAIB Report, Volume II, appendix D.13. p. 391ff. Retrieved January 30, 2006. http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/PDFS/VOL2/D13.PDF

There was a story published about that potential rescue mission recently [1]. Briefly stated, the complexity involved in getting Atlantis up there in time to rescue the Columbia crew members makes the rescue plans depicted in the book/movie The Martian (the Iris probe, and the Rich Purnell Maneuver) look completely safe and sane. Any delay at all in getting Atlantis up would probably have made it too late for the Columbia crew, as their lithium hydroxide canisters would have run out and they would have choked to death on their own CO2. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board came to similar conclusions in their own report [2].

It would have made for great drama. But either having Atlantis get up there too late to save the Columbia crew, or, even worse, losing Atlantis as well, would have been a PR disaster from which NASA might well not have recovered. Hell, they barely recovered from Columbia as it is.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-...

[2] http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html

See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074677

From the AT article: "Atlantis was already undergoing preparation for flight as STS-114, scheduled for launch on March 1. As Columbia thundered into orbit, the younger shuttle was staged in Orbital Processing Facility 1 (OPF-1) at the Kennedy Space Center. Its three main engines had already been installed, but it didn't yet have a payload or remote manipulator arm in its cargo bay. Two more weeks of refurbishment and prep work remained before it would be wheeled across the space center to the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building and hoisted up for attachment to an external tank and a pair of solid rocket boosters."

So Atlantis wasn't actually as close to launching as your comments make it sound. Later in the article, they state that it would be a minimum of 21 days to get Atlantis on the pad and ready to launch. And it always took longer than NASA thought; the article author looked for any instances in which a Shuttle moved from OPF to VAB to the pad and launch without errors or faults, and couldn't find a single one.

That's why they planned for this contingency in the remaining Shuttle missions, with the so-called "Launch On Need" planned missions. (In all but one case, they assumed that the Shuttle crew could take refuge at the ISS until a rescue mission could be mounted. For the one mission where they couldn't assume that, STS-125, the Hubble servicing mission, they actually had a second Shuttle on the pad before the first one launched.)

Just out of simple curiosity. Isn't/ wasn't there any other vector or capsule, from any other nation (that is, Russia) that could have been sent up in rescue?

No, the ars article talks about this. The orbital inclination of the doomed shuttle was so they could not reach the ISS, and likewise the Russian Soyuz could not launch at a similar inclination. Changing orbits seems to burn obscene amounts of fuel.

I don't fully understand why it would not have been possible to put a Soyuz in a different orbit but with a near-collision course though.

Not to recover 7 astronauts. And that only matters if they were prepared to launch inside of 14 days, which the vast majority of vehicles are not.

Regardless, the Soyuz can only hold 110 lbs of extra weight beyond three crew members. So they'd need almost as many skeleton-crew Soyuz modules as there were crew aboard Columbia.

Maybe they could have shipped additional supplies on the Soyuz up to transfer to the Shuttle, to keep the remaining crew alive for enough time to prep additional STS or Soyuz launches to bring them back. Or maybe send up some supplies for them to attempt a repair on the wing in-orbit.

Unlikely. There would have had to have been a Soyuz almost ready to go that could be used for the purpose, and there wasn't. I'm also not sure that a Soyuz could have been launched from Baikonur into the orbital plane that Columbia was flying in; they commonly launch into the ISS' orbital plane, and we already know Columbia couldn't have gotten there. And, even if you could get a Soyuz there in time, Columbia wasn't equipped for retrieving supplies from another spacecraft. It wasn't carrying a RMS robot arm, for instance, nor did they have any SAFER jetpacks for their pressure suits. Getting supplies out of another spacecraft, even one nearby, without either of those would be tricky at best...maybe too tricky for a crew already possibly suffering from partial CO2 poisoning.

Ars has a pretty fantastic write up on the whole thing [1]. Seems like beyond getting Atlantis into orbit, it would have required creating whole-cloth procedures for EVAs for extracting astronauts from a Shuttle and doing it with a skeleton crew of four people, which, even then, would have led to serious space issues on re-entry.

And even with all of that, was the question of, could Atlantis launch without the same insulation damage issue arising? Given that they hadn't prepared any mitigation strategies yet, the answer was "no" and under those conditions, the Shuttle is grounded.

How awful would it have been to lose Columbia AND Atlantis?

1: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-...

Do you mean he chose the latter?

It's creepy and tasteless to make the sound clip of his last words available for sale:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002SHRCYU?ie=UTF8&*Versio...

Known to be false. Stop posting such crap.

title should probably have in parenthesis that it was published in 2011. i know i read this a long time ago.

Date: 2012

Thanks. Might as well say "Date: 1967" as well.

This is obviously a historical piece.

Well, it's not that obvious to someone who hasn't heard about this in 2012. Adding the year next to the title would definitely help people to make a decision to click on it or not.

It's conventional on Hacker News to add the publication year to stories that have been around for a while. I suspect this is because by editing the title, it avoids needless "This is old" comments.

(2011)

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