Episode 61 - What the Soviet Have Been Up To (The Apollo Program, Part VI)

 

Just like NASA was progressing from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, the Soviets were also moving on to their thrid generation spaceship - from Vostok, to Voshkod, to Soyuz. And just like the early Apollo program, the early Soyuz program was rife with problems. The Soyuz 1 tragedy came as the capsule was reenting Earth, when its parachutes failed and cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, the first cosmonaut to fly in space twice and a rockstar in the Soviet space program, fell to his death. Supposedly, an NSA listening station picked him up curing Soviet engineers over an open mic on the way down.

He was given a state funeral and his ashed were interred in the wall of the Kremlin in Red Square. Because the Soviet space program didn't want to another high-profile loss, the Soyuz program was compleatly reworked and the most famous of Soviet astronauts, Yuri Gagarin, who was trianing for his next space mission, was removed from the program all together and sent back to the Soviet Air Force.  He was killed about a year later when his MiG-15 crashed in bad weather.

Like Komarov a year earlier, Gagarin was given a state funeral and his ashes were interred in the wall of the Kremlin in Red Square.

Gagarin is still revered world wide for being the first person in space, particularly in former-Soviet Bloc countries. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of his space flight, Ukraine issed a commemorative stamp in 2011.