Soyuz 1

In the small hours of 23 April 1967, Vladimir Komarov rode a brand-new spacecraft off the pad at Baikonur, becoming the first Soviet cosmonaut ever to fly to space twice. His backup, standing by at the cosmodrome, was Yuri Gagarin. Soyuz was the machine meant to carry the Soviet Union to the Moon, and the plan was ambitious: Soyuz 2 would follow a day later with three more cosmonauts, dock, and exchange crew members by spacewalk. The spacecraft, rushed through development, began failing almost as soon as it reached orbit.

One of the two solar panels never unfolded, starving the ship of power. Orientation sensors faltered, communications grew patchy, and Komarov, a trained engineer, spent hours coaxing a half-blind spacecraft into line. Ground controllers cancelled the Soyuz 2 launch and ordered him home. After a failed first deorbit attempt, Komarov manually oriented the ship, a feat of airmanship in its own right, and fired the retrorockets after roughly a day aloft. The descent module came through the fire of reentry intact.

Then the parachutes failed. The drogue deployed, but the main canopy stayed jammed in its container; the manually released reserve chute streamed out and tangled in the drogue's lines. The capsule struck the steppe of the Orenburg region at roughly 40 metres per second, and its soft-landing rockets ignited the wreckage. Komarov, forty years old, decorated, and respected on both sides of the Iron Curtain, became the first human being to die during a spaceflight.

The Soviet Union gave him a state funeral and an urn in the Kremlin Wall, and grounded crewed Soyuz flights for eighteen months while engineers tore the parachute system apart and rebuilt it. Investigators concluded that the same flaw lay waiting in Soyuz 2's descent module; the cancelled launch had almost certainly spared three more lives. The redesigned Soyuz flew again with a crew in October 1968 and never stopped: descendants of Komarov's spacecraft still carry people to orbit today.