June 30, 2013

42 Years Ago Today


The crew of Soyuz 11 docked with the very first space station (Salyut 1) and stayed in orbit for 23 days, setting a space endurance record before they were forced to cut short their mission due to an electrical fire on the station.



During the re-entry of the Soyuz 11 capsule , there was a loss of radio contact, but the spacecraft landed quite normally in Kazakhstan.

Tragically, when the recovery team arrived however, they found that a pressure release valve had opened during reentry and exposed the crew to the vacuum of space. They were not wearing pressure suits. Despite the best efforts of the recovery team to revive them, Georgiy Timofeyevich Dobrovolsky, Viktor Ivanovich Patsayev and Vladislav Nikolayevich Volkov had died on re-entry.

As terrible as this was, it bears remembering that if the boundaries of the future are allowed to be set by the, the timid, or far worse, those who would presume to forbid others from striving for great things...then our future will be a dark age. The human race is fortunate to have people such as these who will step into the breach and attempt great deeds.

They deserve to be remembered.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:17 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 This is a valid point that applies to all nations.

In America, the crew safety turned into a joke, as ASAP posts obviously cooked numbers and calculates the loss-of-crew estimates for SLS, which does not yet exist, against rockets that already fly.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sun Jun 30 11:00:25 2013 (RqRa5)

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