Premonition of Fire

As more information about the death of Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov filters out of Moscow, it becomes increasingly apparent that there were close parallels between the first fatalities in the U.S. and Russian space programs. Like Apollo, whose troubles may have stemmed partly from pressure to achieve a manned lunar landing by 1970, Komarov's Soyuz project was probably pushed into a manned mission to provide a space spectacular for the 50th-anniversary year of the Bolshevik Revolution. And like his Apollo counterparts, Cosmonaut Komarov may well have met a fiery death.

In a dispatch to the Washington Star last week, Veteran Moscow Correspondent Edmund Stevens traced the Soyuz tragedy back to the moment in 1966 when Soviet Space Chief Sergei Korolev died of complications after surgery for cancer. It was Korolev, said Stevens, who was largely responsible for Russia's early manned space program; his stature and prestige shielded him from political and economic expediency and enabled him to insist upon thorough testing of new spacecraft before they were flown by men.

Korolev's successors apparently could not resist mounting pressures for 1967 space spectaculars, Stevens reported, and they agreed to a Soyuz mission timed to coincide with May Day celebrations. Thus, despite an earlier unmanned Soyuz flight that is believed to have come to grief, Soyuz 1 may have been launched with Komarov aboard before it was fully qualified for a manned mission. To celebrate the November 1917 revolution, another Soyuz mission was planned to put men in orbit around the moon on Nov. 7.

Final SOS. Although the Russians attribute Komarov's death to the crash of Soyuz after its parachute straps became tangled, Stevens cites widespread rumors in Moscow that the cosmonaut was dead before he returned to earth.

As Komarov re-entered the atmosphere, according to this version, he radioed that the temperature inside his cabin was rising rapidly. There was a final S O S--then silence, as the space craft plummeted "like a fiery ball" and crashed in the Ural Mountains, hundreds of miles from the planned landing site.

Western experts are reasonably sure that Soyuz 1, designed to re-enter the atmosphere and descend at a controlled attitude, had only one surface protected by a heat shield against the high temperatures of reentry. If Soyuz was indeed tumbling upon reentry, as many U.S. experts believe, its unshielded surfaces would also have been exposed to the direct frictional effects of the atmosphere. As these surfaces began to burn up, temperatures in the spacecraft cabin would quickly have reached fatal levels.

Komarov may have had a premonition of his fate. Shortly before the veteran cosmonaut entered the spacecraft, Stevens says, he handed Soviet Reporter Sergei Borzenko the book he had been reading--a biography of Joan of Arc. In a section describing the Maid of Orleans' burning at the stake, Borzenko noticed later, Komarov had underlined the following passage: "She bade her farewells and continued gazing at the clear blue sky until the final second when the black smoke blotted out that sky forever."

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