And the old hatch took several minutes to open. It was a horrible thing all the way around.
One of the Cosmonauts basically took Uri Gargarin’s place in a flight he knew was doomed, and died when the heat shield failed on re-entry.
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Soyuz 1.
There were hundreds of unresolved design issues, but Brezhnev put schedules before safety. The heat shield had been made heavier, and the parachutes had been made bigger, but the parachute cannisters had not, so the parachutes didn’t deploy properly.
That was a bit different since the cosmonauts knew it was a death trap, and Gagarin wanted to replace the original pilot because he figured Brezhnev might care about the embarassment of a death if it was Gagarin’s life on the line.
He said they were ejected, not that they had ejected. They may have fallen out of the aircraft as it broke up, similar to a driver not wearing a seatbelt being ejected in a rollover. This has happened before. During the testing of the SR-71, an engine failed at 71,000’ while they were going mach 3.18. The aircraft yawed violently, and before anyone could do anything, both pilots were unconcious from the extreme g forces. One of them woke up essentially unhurt seconds before his parachute deployed automatically at 15,000, he’d gotten out by pure luck as the plane disintigrated around him. Both crew members actually escaped the aircraft in this way, though one was killed in the process (his parachute still deployed, though).
http://roadrunnersinternationale.com/weaver_sr71_bailout.html
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Grissom knew, complained, Shea promised to remove flammable stuff from the cabin, but it apparently got installed back afterwards if it was ever done. The contractor, North American Aviation, was concerned more about money than about mission. How typical. To quote Shea,
I do not have a high opinion of North American and their motives in the early days. Their first program manager was a first-class jerk… There were spots of good guys, but it was just an ineffective organization. They had no discipline, no concept of change control.
Gagarin was the backup. Komarov was the main one.
The heat shield held, but the chute did not deploy. It’s being said that the pilot cursed the Party during the unbraked descent.
Since then, “komarov” is a unit of flatness. (Yes, engineers tend to have somewhat grim sense of humor.)
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“Angle of Attack” by Mike Gray addressed the issue; I don’t know how much of a factor it was, but it turns out that the astronauts themselves were inadvertantly responsible it at least a small way. They were so nutty for Velcro that they had installed a lot of it themselves around the cabin wherever it was convenient. Because the engineers and manufacturers were more concerned with their own jobs, no one really thought that much about it. I imagine the adhesive would have lit like a fuse in that kind of atmosphere.
An unfortunate oversight.
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An interesting comment here:
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/11/02/ntsb-spaceshiptwo-feather-mechanism-deployed-prematurely/#comment-1674172802
The footage from previous test-flights demonstrate that whatever instructions were given to the pilots, and whatever has been stated to the NTSB and then to the media, in practice they were in the practice of unlocking the booms before the end of the burn.
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