6 ms·

A Cosmonaut's Fiery Death Retold (2011)

128 points by todayiamme 13y ago

losethos 13y ago
We have a failure to communicate. I sit in knowledge of God. You are an atheist. You are, simply, ignorant. Retard-nigger. God says... handyman and_then_what I_could_be_wrong where's_the_love heathen I'll_get_right_on_it hooah ahh_thats_much_better services cowardice can_you_hear_me_now delicious SupremerCourt I'm_done foul kludge Angel heads_I_win_tails_you_lose do_you_want_another vermin
kahirsch 13y ago
Be sure to read the follow-up, which casts doubt on parts of the story: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...
- Someone 13y ago
  As far as I can tell, this article _is_ the follow-up (the same URL, even)
  - nicw 13y ago
    In my RSS feed, the original 2011 is linked [1]. But loading the page takes you to the follow up [2] [1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmo... [2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...
jt2190 13y ago
Previous discussions: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342677 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342058 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346331
jaxytee 13y ago
"The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed." This helps puts things in perspective when I'm obsessing over trivial things like the max length my RegExp will allow on some arbitrary form field. One of my user's phone won't blow up if he/she wasn't able to use five more characters in a message. We should do our best to minimize the amount of bugs we code, but when we (inevitably) do code buggy software we can fix it relatively fast. Unless of course one is coding a GPS system for SpaceX or something of the such.
g123g 13y ago
Reminds me of some companies where the team knows that a particular project is doomed from the start but has to still work on it as no one has guts to tell the boss the truth.
- bsullivan01 13y ago
  Almost the same :-) Cast doubt on a Dear Leader's idea and all of the sudden you're shipped to a gulag or to the firing squad. Just like that....enemy of the people, support the US imperialists...trying to sabotage socialism, etc. Ask an Eastern European or Russian that lived through the communist times.
  - koenigdavidmj 13y ago
    In my naive young western view, Gagarin (and possibly Komarov) would be one of the most likely people to get away with it. These guys were national heroes. They had statues built of them. Shifting to a different dictatorship, the case has been made in Burma that the only reason Aung San Suu Kyi was kept alive the whole time was that her father was very well regarded even by the military. But then I've also read 1984 and remember the memory holes.
    - bsullivan01 13y ago
      These guys were national heroes. True, thy could away with more than others, especially since the leaders and the Party benefited from them (Unless they became a threat to replace the leaders etc..). But never underestimate the power of 24/7 propaganda and how they confessed to being CIA spies, how the risked lives of our comrades...blah blah. The higher you are the harder you fall. For these guys the top leader would decide, but for the poor peasant complaining about the bread, a local communist bureaucrat would do to ruin his life. They had statues built of them. Nothing a bulldozer can't remove :-)
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  The term is "death march" [1]. Entirely appropriate for this story. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management...
MrBra 13y ago
Webpage has a play button to "Listen to Komarov as the Soyuz capsule began to fail". And then - unbelievably - there is a link for buying it for "89 cents at Amazon.com". At Amazon they're selling one man's last words of despair. And linking to that you are even advertising this. The whole thing is sick and sad.
- civilian 13y ago
  I paid 15 euros in Kutna Hora (Czech Republic) to visit the Ossuary and the Cathedral nearby. There were roughly 10k stacked skeletons in the Ossuary basement, and there were two cannonized Saints in the Cathedral. (As in-- mummified and dressed up, in glass boxes with wax faces.) The market is everywhere, and your emotion is misplaced.
  - hyperbovine 13y ago
    Cathedrals and catacombs at least require some upkeep. If the $.89 is somehow making its way to this man's next of kin then fine. Otherwise it just seems like cynical profiteering.
    - baddox 13y ago
      You're using a fairly useless theory of value for this context.
      - hyperbovine 13y ago
        I do not know what that sentence means.
  - killerpopiller 13y ago
    no it is not and shouldn't. Selling ones last words is body-strapping and a violation of the persons civil liberties. And the market isn't anywhere, it is a defined area with laws as fences and you don't live in wilderness but in society where we people decided that rules improve life. Besides, this display of dead people similar to one in Palermo/Italy is macabre and mentally healthy people probably have emotions looking at dead people exhibitions, especially since one doesn't learn anything of it. In contrast to http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/ http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/
jlgreco 13y ago
Another interesting read is the timeline of the other famous reentry disaster, the Space Shuttle Columbia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster#Re-entry_timeline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster... One of the things that I find surprising is the amount of time between when the breakup started ("8:53:46 (EI+577): Various people on the ground saw signs of debris being shed. ... Dialogue on some of the amateur footage indicates the observers were aware of the abnormality of what they were filming.") to last radio contact (nearly 6 minutes later).
- Pxtl 13y ago
  And on takeoff, the Challenger crew compartment was still intact after the explosion and the crew was protected and quite likely conscious for the 2 minutes and 45 seconds while it hurtled along in a ballistic arc until it splashed down into the ocean hard enough to pulverize everything on board. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster#Cause_and_time_of_death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast...
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Yeah. A similar thing happened during Columbia; the cabin remained somewhat intact for up to 39 seconds after the rest of the vehicle really started to fall apart, though it ultimately disintegrated with the rest of the orbiter. It seems those crew compartments were pretty damn tough.
Recoil42 13y ago
There are too many holes in the story. Highly recommend the followup, where it's confirmed that many parts are flatly made up or just vaguely inaccurate: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...
- Edvik 13y ago
  I am not sure if these replies count as confirmed. They are more sources citing different events. But the sources are often official USSR documents, which are not being doctoring. The final official transcript, for one, reads like propaganda.
ck2 13y ago
Those that were protesting social justice articles being posted, where are you for this article? (not personally complaining about either one, just want to check the perspective)
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I don't really see this as a "social justice" article. More like an article that drives home the human impact of engineering. I mean, the people responsible for this are almost all dead now, and the government that pushed to hard has long since dissolved. The lingering relevance is engineering and risk.
zaroth 13y ago
Literally, WTF! The first thing you see is a large picture of molten human remains. That's just horrific.
guard-of-terra 13y ago
Just proves heroism is stupid. His death threw Soviet space program back for several years. Postponing the mission would undeniably cause much less harm if any at all. But it's in Russian nature to take stupid risks that are clearly not worth it. Авось.
- avmich 13y ago
  Remember Apollo-1.
- rwallace 13y ago
  It's not specific to Russian nature. It's the nature of any environment where people are punished for reporting bad news up the chain of command. That's the relevant message most of the HN readership should be taking from this. You'll never be in charge of a Soyuz launch but you might someday be in charge of a project or company that has an opportunity to correct problems before they become disasters. Make sure the workers on the ground floor aren't afraid to tell you about the problems. Conversely if you are on the ground floor and find yourself afraid to report problems, it might be time to start looking for another job.
- speeder 13y ago
  No, it was just shitty management, like how Eike Batista frequently made clear his displeasure for non-optimistic news, and then went to create a billionaire loss on oilfields that had not much oil, because he told his geologists to tell him that there was much oil in them
- Aqueous 13y ago
  "Nothing is certain but death, taxes, and management fail."
pattisapu 13y ago
I hate how this article begins with "So . . . " right above a picture of charred human remains. Ira Glass often does this kind of flip intro too.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
leefrank 13y ago
Ethan. I agree that Linda`s stori is really great, on monday I bought a new GMC from having made $6642 this last five weeks and-just over, $10 thousand this past-munth. it's certainly the most-rewarding I have ever done. I actually started 10-months ago and immediately began to earn more than $80.. per-hour. check it out http://goo.gl/HRSfiS http://goo.gl/HRSfiS
nsxwolf 13y ago
Photo of remains has been removed.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  There are two different articles: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmo... http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos... The second article is an update, and does not have the picture.
hansjorg 13y ago
> According to the authors, Komarov answered: "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead." That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn't do that to his friend. "That's Yura," the book quotes him saying, "and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears. This doesn't seem to make any sense. I think people might be a bit credulous when it comes to stories about the SU.
derleth 13y ago
This sounds like the Torre Bert recordings, which are almost certainly a hoax: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4115 http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4115 Of course, the Torre Bert story goes further, with a whole passel of cosmonauts going missing and unreported on except for these two guys in Italy, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, with a lash-up radio rig, who weren't influenced at all by all the publicity they were getting every time they reported a new cosmonaut dying in pain. Not at all. Also, in their world, spacecraft can just kind of 'drift' out of Earth orbit without any additional engine thrust. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2433/are-there-really-lost-cosmonauts-stranded-in-space http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2433/are-there-real...
andrewliebchen 13y ago
It's really hard to take Krulwich seriously after the way he treated the Hmong witness in Radiolab's "Yellow Rain" story, including the callousness of the follow-ups.
croisillon 13y ago
They wanted to protect Gagarin, yet he died less than one year later.

128 points by todayiamme 13y ago

We have a failure to communicate. I sit in knowledge of God. You are an atheist. You are, simply, ignorant. Retard-nigger. God says... handyman and_then_what I_could_be_wrong where's_the_love heathen I'll_get_right_on_it hooah ahh_thats_much_better services cowardice can_you_hear_me_now delicious SupremerCourt I'm_done foul kludge Angel heads_I_win_tails_you_lose do_you_want_another vermin

kahirsch 13y ago

Be sure to read the follow-up, which casts doubt on parts of the story: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...

Someone 13y ago
As far as I can tell, this article _is_ the follow-up (the same URL, even)
- nicw 13y ago
  In my RSS feed, the original 2011 is linked [1]. But loading the page takes you to the follow up [2] [1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmo... [2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...

jt2190 13y ago

Previous discussions: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342677 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342058 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346331

jaxytee 13y ago

"The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed." This helps puts things in perspective when I'm obsessing over trivial things like the max length my RegExp will allow on some arbitrary form field. One of my user's phone won't blow up if he/she wasn't able to use five more characters in a message. We should do our best to minimize the amount of bugs we code, but when we (inevitably) do code buggy software we can fix it relatively fast. Unless of course one is coding a GPS system for SpaceX or something of the such.

g123g 13y ago

Reminds me of some companies where the team knows that a particular project is doomed from the start but has to still work on it as no one has guts to tell the boss the truth.

bsullivan01 13y ago
Almost the same :-) Cast doubt on a Dear Leader's idea and all of the sudden you're shipped to a gulag or to the firing squad. Just like that....enemy of the people, support the US imperialists...trying to sabotage socialism, etc. Ask an Eastern European or Russian that lived through the communist times.
- koenigdavidmj 13y ago
  In my naive young western view, Gagarin (and possibly Komarov) would be one of the most likely people to get away with it. These guys were national heroes. They had statues built of them. Shifting to a different dictatorship, the case has been made in Burma that the only reason Aung San Suu Kyi was kept alive the whole time was that her father was very well regarded even by the military. But then I've also read 1984 and remember the memory holes.
  - bsullivan01 13y ago
    These guys were national heroes. True, thy could away with more than others, especially since the leaders and the Party benefited from them (Unless they became a threat to replace the leaders etc..). But never underestimate the power of 24/7 propaganda and how they confessed to being CIA spies, how the risked lives of our comrades...blah blah. The higher you are the harder you fall. For these guys the top leader would decide, but for the poor peasant complaining about the bread, a local communist bureaucrat would do to ruin his life. They had statues built of them. Nothing a bulldozer can't remove :-)
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
The term is "death march" [1]. Entirely appropriate for this story. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management...

MrBra 13y ago

Webpage has a play button to "Listen to Komarov as the Soyuz capsule began to fail". And then - unbelievably - there is a link for buying it for "89 cents at Amazon.com". At Amazon they're selling one man's last words of despair. And linking to that you are even advertising this. The whole thing is sick and sad.

civilian 13y ago
I paid 15 euros in Kutna Hora (Czech Republic) to visit the Ossuary and the Cathedral nearby. There were roughly 10k stacked skeletons in the Ossuary basement, and there were two cannonized Saints in the Cathedral. (As in-- mummified and dressed up, in glass boxes with wax faces.) The market is everywhere, and your emotion is misplaced.
- hyperbovine 13y ago
  Cathedrals and catacombs at least require some upkeep. If the $.89 is somehow making its way to this man's next of kin then fine. Otherwise it just seems like cynical profiteering.
  - baddox 13y ago
    You're using a fairly useless theory of value for this context.
    - hyperbovine 13y ago
      I do not know what that sentence means.
- killerpopiller 13y ago
  no it is not and shouldn't. Selling ones last words is body-strapping and a violation of the persons civil liberties. And the market isn't anywhere, it is a defined area with laws as fences and you don't live in wilderness but in society where we people decided that rules improve life. Besides, this display of dead people similar to one in Palermo/Italy is macabre and mentally healthy people probably have emotions looking at dead people exhibitions, especially since one doesn't learn anything of it. In contrast to http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/ http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/

jlgreco 13y ago

Another interesting read is the timeline of the other famous reentry disaster, the Space Shuttle Columbia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster#Re-entry_timeline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster... One of the things that I find surprising is the amount of time between when the breakup started ("8:53:46 (EI+577): Various people on the ground saw signs of debris being shed. ... Dialogue on some of the amateur footage indicates the observers were aware of the abnormality of what they were filming.") to last radio contact (nearly 6 minutes later).

Pxtl 13y ago
And on takeoff, the Challenger crew compartment was still intact after the explosion and the crew was protected and quite likely conscious for the 2 minutes and 45 seconds while it hurtled along in a ballistic arc until it splashed down into the ocean hard enough to pulverize everything on board. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster#Cause_and_time_of_death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast...
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Yeah. A similar thing happened during Columbia; the cabin remained somewhat intact for up to 39 seconds after the rest of the vehicle really started to fall apart, though it ultimately disintegrated with the rest of the orbiter. It seems those crew compartments were pretty damn tough.

Recoil42 13y ago

There are too many holes in the story. Highly recommend the followup, where it's confirmed that many parts are flatly made up or just vaguely inaccurate: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...

Edvik 13y ago
I am not sure if these replies count as confirmed. They are more sources citing different events. But the sources are often official USSR documents, which are not being doctoring. The final official transcript, for one, reads like propaganda.

ck2 13y ago

Those that were protesting social justice articles being posted, where are you for this article? (not personally complaining about either one, just want to check the perspective)

jlgreco 13y ago
I don't really see this as a "social justice" article. More like an article that drives home the human impact of engineering. I mean, the people responsible for this are almost all dead now, and the government that pushed to hard has long since dissolved. The lingering relevance is engineering and risk.

zaroth 13y ago

Literally, WTF! The first thing you see is a large picture of molten human remains. That's just horrific.

guard-of-terra 13y ago

Just proves heroism is stupid. His death threw Soviet space program back for several years. Postponing the mission would undeniably cause much less harm if any at all. But it's in Russian nature to take stupid risks that are clearly not worth it. Авось.

avmich 13y ago
Remember Apollo-1.
rwallace 13y ago
It's not specific to Russian nature. It's the nature of any environment where people are punished for reporting bad news up the chain of command. That's the relevant message most of the HN readership should be taking from this. You'll never be in charge of a Soyuz launch but you might someday be in charge of a project or company that has an opportunity to correct problems before they become disasters. Make sure the workers on the ground floor aren't afraid to tell you about the problems. Conversely if you are on the ground floor and find yourself afraid to report problems, it might be time to start looking for another job.
speeder 13y ago
No, it was just shitty management, like how Eike Batista frequently made clear his displeasure for non-optimistic news, and then went to create a billionaire loss on oilfields that had not much oil, because he told his geologists to tell him that there was much oil in them
Aqueous 13y ago
"Nothing is certain but death, taxes, and management fail."

pattisapu 13y ago

I hate how this article begins with "So . . . " right above a picture of charred human remains. Ira Glass often does this kind of flip intro too.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

leefrank 13y ago

Ethan. I agree that Linda`s stori is really great, on monday I bought a new GMC from having made $6642 this last five weeks and-just over, $10 thousand this past-munth. it's certainly the most-rewarding I have ever done. I actually started 10-months ago and immediately began to earn more than $80.. per-hour. check it out http://goo.gl/HRSfiS http://goo.gl/HRSfiS

nsxwolf 13y ago

Photo of remains has been removed.

jlgreco 13y ago
There are two different articles: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmo... http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos... The second article is an update, and does not have the picture.

hansjorg 13y ago

> According to the authors, Komarov answered: "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead." That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn't do that to his friend. "That's Yura," the book quotes him saying, "and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears. This doesn't seem to make any sense. I think people might be a bit credulous when it comes to stories about the SU.

derleth 13y ago

This sounds like the Torre Bert recordings, which are almost certainly a hoax: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4115 http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4115 Of course, the Torre Bert story goes further, with a whole passel of cosmonauts going missing and unreported on except for these two guys in Italy, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, with a lash-up radio rig, who weren't influenced at all by all the publicity they were getting every time they reported a new cosmonaut dying in pain. Not at all. Also, in their world, spacecraft can just kind of 'drift' out of Earth orbit without any additional engine thrust. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2433/are-there-really-lost-cosmonauts-stranded-in-space http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2433/are-there-real...

andrewliebchen 13y ago

It's really hard to take Krulwich seriously after the way he treated the Hmong witness in Radiolab's "Yellow Rain" story, including the callousness of the follow-ups.

croisillon 13y ago

They wanted to protect Gagarin, yet he died less than one year later.