The Soyuz 11 Crew: A Silent Return, 1971
1971 · event
On 30 June 1971 the descent module of Soyuz 11 came down on the steppe of Kazakhstan exactly as planned. The parachute had opened, the soft landing rockets had fired and the capsule stood upright. The recovery team opened the hatch within minutes and found the three cosmonauts in their seats, still strapped in, showing no sign of injury. Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev had died during the return.
They had just completed a mission that was, until that moment, a triumph. Their spacecraft had docked with Salyut 1, the first space station ever placed in orbit, and they had lived and worked aboard it for twenty three days, setting up equipment, making observations and giving television broadcasts to viewers at home. No crew had ever spent so long in space.
The cause was found quickly. During the separation of the modules a pressure equalisation valve had opened early, and the cabin lost its air in less than a minute at an altitude of around one hundred and sixty kilometres. The crew were not wearing pressure suits, because the Soyuz cabin of the time could not hold three men in suits. They remain the only human beings to have died above the boundary of space.
The Soviet space programme stopped flying for more than two years. When Soyuz returned it carried two cosmonauts instead of three, both in pressure suits for launch, docking and reentry, a rule that has been kept ever since. The three men are buried at the Kremlin wall in Moscow, and their names are on the small memorial plaque left on the Moon for those who died in the exploration of space.