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Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon

2018; The MIT Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jcws_r_00831

1531-3298

David M. Harland,

Space exploration and regulation

In a silent ceremony before the Apollo 15 astronauts lifted off from the moon on 2 August 1971 they left behind a small metal plaque bearing the names of eight U.S. astronauts and six Soviet cosmonauts known to have lost their lives during the first decade of human spaceflight. Later, the Soviet Union released the names of two other cosmonauts who died during that period. Placed horizontally in front of the plaque was a figurine of a man. This became known as the “Fallen Astronaut” and provided the inspiration for the title for this book. A photograph of the scene features on the front cover. Astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to stand on the lunar surface, contributed a heart-felt foreword to the book.The lead author, Colin Burgess, has written chapters on astronauts Theodore Freeman (who lost his life in October 1964 when a bird struck his jet aircraft and caused it to crash), Charles Bassett and Elliot See (both of whom died in February 1966 when their jet hit a building in bad weather); Edward Givens (who died from injuries suffered in a car crash in June 1967), and C.C. Williams (who was lost in an aircraft crash in October 1967). His colleague in Australia, Kate Doolan, has contributed a chapter on the loss of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, the crew of the Apollo 1 mission, who died when a fire broke out aboard their capsule during a ground test in January 1967.Bert Vis of the Netherlands separates truth from myth with the Soviet side of the story. He kicks off by discussing the seemingly never-ending speculation about cosmonauts that were supposedly lost on missions at the dawn of the space age. Many of these were real people. For example, Petr Dolgov, reportedly lost in a failed space launch in October 1960, was not a member of the cosmonaut team; he died in November 1962 making a parachute jump from a Volga stratospheric balloon. Moving on, Vis then deals with the real cosmonauts who lost their lives. Valentin Bondarenko died in March 1961, a few weeks ahead of Yurii Gagarin's pioneering flight, when a fire started in a test chamber that was pressurized with pure oxygen. Grigorii Nelyubov was dismissed from the cosmonaut group in 1963 for his behavior while drunk. In a fit of despair in February 1966 he died in an incident involving a train. Vladimir Komarov lost his life in April 1967 when the parachute of Soyuz 1 failed to deploy and the capsule smashed into the ground.As a national hero, Gagarin was deemed too valuable for his life to be put at risk, but in 1968 he was restored to flight status. Initially he could fly high performance jets only accompanied by an instructor. In March, on his fifth such flight, the MiG trainer crashed, killing both men.Having commanded Voskhod 2 in March 1965 and participated in training for a circumlunar mission that was canceled following the success of Apollo 8’s orbit of the moon in 1968, Pavel Beleev died in January 1970 from complications arising from surgery for an ulcer.The worst disaster for the Soviet Union occurred in June 1971 when Georgii Dobrovolskii, Viktor Patsaev and Vladislav Volkov, the crew of Soyuz 11, died while returning to earth after a record-breaking mission to the Salyut 1 space station. Apart from a lack of communication during the parachute phase the landing was perfect, but when the recovery team opened the capsule they discovered the men dead in their couches. The fault was a pressure equalization valve, intended to open once they were back in the atmosphere. The device accidentally vented the cabin to the vacuum of space and asphyxiated the crew who, as was the norm for that time, were wearing casual clothes.The book concludes with a thought-provoking epilogue in which the authors observe that although Givens undertook a week-long Apollo simulation in a vacuum chamber, served on the support crew for Apollo 1, and at the time of his death was on the support crew for Apollo 7, his name is not on the Astronaut Memorial that was created in 1991 at the Kennedy Space Center.In addition to providing biographies of the doomed men, the book captures the dignity of the ceremonies to honor their passing and briefly relates what happened to their wives and families afterward. The book also provides the basis for insights into the space programs of that era because, although it was expected that men would be lost on missions into space, all of the U.S. astronauts deaths in that first decade were attributable to accidents on earth; only the Soviet Union suffered cosmonauts lost in flight.One final point in praise of the authors: The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration issued only brief biographies of these astronauts. Burgess and Doolan had to carry out extensive research that included trawling through archives and interviewing the families and friends of the deceased. Vis over the years has developed friendly contacts in the cosmonaut community, and his accounts are based on many interviews. As a result, the stories told in Fallen Astraonauts have a welcome air of authority.The volume in hardback is extremely well produced and nicely illustrated with fifty black-and-white photographs provided in context. Although the structure of the revised edition is the same as its predecessor, each chapter contains much additional material, making the book considerably larger. Inevitably some minor errors slipped through the editing process, but with a few exceptions these are of no real significance. Every space enthusiast should own this book.