The pressure on Nedelin to launch would have been intense: Khrushchev had been at the United Nations in New York earlier that month giving a speech about Soviet foreign policy and anticipating another spectacular feat to flaunt before the world. Another witness had been on the pad but had finished his work and been ordered away by Nedelin. The grave site in the Leninsk park was covered with a grassy mound 40 feet across and fenced in. They were all Russian or Ukrainian, and most belonged to 20- and 21-year-old soldiers. The guide thought for a moment "About 40,"he suggested tentatively.
In Leninsk there are streets named "Nosov" and "Ostashev" among the usual "Marx," "October," and "Red Army" streets. Yangel survived by a fluke. The explosion had occurred on Monday, October 24, shortly after 6:45 in the evening. Persistence finally paid off. Most tantalizing was the spy Penkovskiy's explicit reference to funerals at a rocket plant in the Ukraine, an installation later revealed to be devoted entirely to military projects. Late one afternoon a rocket's countdown was halted when problems cropped up. But as space historian Curtis Peebles recently observed, the strategy would not have been necessary had the Soviets' new missile succeeded sooner. It was while he was inside that the rocket exploded, probably when a technician plugged the first stage's umbilical cable into the second stage's receptacle, causing a normally innocent command wire to trigger the ignition. They surely thought of themselves as defenders of their nation and as explorers too, since multipurpose missiles, such as the R-7, were being diverted to peaceful space activities. How many others had been sent home? He rushed to the medical center to help the survivors and found the front of the building surrounded by bodies. With these pages of rocket history blank no longer, I mused about the implications of the tragedy. Under the light of the moon they seemed the color of ivory." The Sputnik's R-7 had turned out to be a great booster but a poor weapon. In 1989 the first published account of the disaster appeared. The Soviet N1 rocket booster was a giant rocket meant to carry objects or people beyond Earth orbit, basically to the moon. Top-level spy Oleg Penkovskiy, executed in 1965, wrote in his memoirs that a "nuclear-powered" missile had exploded, and many recent Russian �migr� elaborated on the theme (apparently basing their reports on the coincidental deaths of several top Soviet nuclear weapons experts elsewhere that October).
The revelation that the exploding rocket was a military ICBM puts the disaster into the greater perspective of the Cold War. Over the years, many conflicting accounts of the disaster reached the West. It was at this point that he decided to place missiles in Cuba, a gamble that brought the world to the brink of war during the Cuban missile crisis. The bodies that could be identified numbered several dozen, including that of the officer whose poor judgement had caused the disaster. There were also reports of the involvement of rocket designer Mikhail Yangel, who was not a member of the team behind Sputnik and the two previous Mars shots. Pravda reported that the launch of the rocket was a success and did not say anything about the explosion. By the time I updated the account for a new book, Uncovering Soviet Disasters, in 1988, my belief in the Mars hypothesis was fading. Andrey Sakharov's newly published memoirs add a poignant detail to the tragedy. [5][6][7], Coordinates: 62°55′43″N 40°27′24″E / 62.92861°N 40.45667°E / 62.92861; 40.45667, Vostok-2M rocket explosion during refueling, Initially after the events were declassified the, "Взрыв ракеты-носителя "Восток" на космодроме Плесецк (1980)", "Медаль "За отсутствие состава преступления, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1980_Plesetsk_launch_pad_disaster&oldid=982935399, Space accidents and incidents in the Soviet Union, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 11 October 2020, at 08:03. The films showed a rocket exploding and human figures on fire running and falling. Many of the survivors suffered severe burns and lung damage. Those who had run away tried while moving to tear off their burning clothing, their coats and overalls.
I knew that two unmanned Mars probes had been unsuccessfully launched only two weeks before from the pad used to launch Sputnik, and I believed that the basic Sputnik booster, the R-7, was the only big Soviet rocket flying at the time, so I postulated that the rocket that had blown up was also a Mars-bound vehicle. The recent opening up of the Cosmodrome to outsiders also opened up many of the workers' bitterness at the decades of official denial. After the addition of hydrogen peroxide was completed, a huge explosion at the site was witnessed at 19:01 MSK; 44 people in the area were killed instantly and another 43 required hospitalization for burns, four of whom later died while in the hospital. A feeling of wholeness, of a fully restored flow in a history long obstructed, made me proud to have played a small outsider's role in the mending process.
Flight tests the following year were unsuccessful, probably due to the loss of so many experienced engineers. No label was necessary. Details came from credible
The 1980 Plesetsk launch pad disaster refers to the explosion of a Vostok-2M rocket carrying a Tselina-D satellite during fueling at Site 43 of the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Mirny at 19:01 local time (16:01 GMT) on 18 March 1980, two hours and fifteen minutes before the intended launch time. Something horrible may indeed have happened, Western experts concluded, but there was no way to be sure what it was. But many of the USSR's spaceflight pioneers perished in the accident. The commanding officer had violated all standards of safety when he ordered the technicians onto the launch pad.
Over 80% of surviving eyewitnesses to the disaster reported that the first explosion originated from Block E of the rocket and was followed by multiple secondary explosions. What appeared to be authentic footage of the explosion aired on Soviet television last April 12, "Cosmonaut Day." But these young men had died building a weapon, not a space probe. Nikita Khrushchev himself mentioned the disaster in the first volume of his memoirs, smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the United States in 1970, but he gave no hint of the role he may have played. Getting to the Cosmodrome last February was difficult, but the crew and I surmounted the bureaucratic obstacles and at last arrived at Baikonur. Officials quickly announced that the commander had died in an airplane crash. [1][3][4], The disaster was not reported in Soviet media at the time and only reached western media outlets in 1989 upon declassification. When the accident occurred, he wrote, "automatic cameras had been triggered along with the engines, and they recorded the scene. "Above the pad erupted a column of fire," he recalled. It was a long time ago and the bodies had been at rest for decades, but standing at the obelisk I felt a chill down my spine. It was that missile, the R-16, that exploded.
Furthermore, the launch window--the planetary alignment that allowed such launchings--would have been rapidly closing day by day. 'In a daze we watched the flames burst forth again and again until all was silent." It was impossible to recognize anybody. Suddenly the second-stage engine ignited, bursting the fuel tanks of the first stage and covering the launch pad in a tidal wave of flame. We asked for a van to take us to the memorial park I'd spotted from the bus on the way in from the airport, and we had to spend half our free afternoon pleading and prodding for it.
Standing there in the mid-winter gloom, brushing the snow off a few of the plaques, I did not feel like the winner in some "pierce the cover-up" contest. The temperature at the center of the fire was about 3,000 degrees.
On 17 March the rocket was installed at the launch site. I tried to add it all up. However, less than a year later, on 23 July 1981 after a second disaster of the same cause was narrowly avoided, it was discovered that a design flaw in the fuel filters of the rocket were likely the cause of the 1980 disaster, although it was impossible to confirm which type of filters were used in the rocket that exploded. "The monument is for all who died that day," he said. Many of the plaques were cracked with age, but the shrine had not been ignored. 44 people were killed in the initial fire and four more soon died in the hospital from burns. But every answer raises another question I might have taken the 54 names listed there as the total death toll had I not noticed that Nedelin's name was not among them. "If you only knew of all the explosions and deaths," one museum official lamented to a visitor earlier this year, "you would be horrified at the size of the deceptions." From these stories a scenario emerged. The Mars rocket scenario couldn't account for a few troubling items, however.
I had arrived at the summit of my investigation thanks to a project on the Soviet space program for PBS' NOVA television series (to air in the United States this February), for which I served as researcher and on-camera tour guide. Friends, relatives, and co-workers at the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch complex kept the memorial decorated.
Other disasters occurred at the Cosmodrome from time to time, and new memorials were added to the park. The catalytically active lead solder on the filters would cause an explosion upon contact with hydrogen peroxide. Dozens more were burned beyond recognition in the horrible conflagration, and whatever remains could be found -- teeth, charred leather, shards of bone, keys and coins -- were swept up from the scorched concrete, placed in a single coffin, and lowered into a grave in a park in the rocket workers' city of Leninsk. Furthermore, the Sputnik pad was used in a launch only five weeks after the explosion, suggesting little if any damage there. But none of those later accidents at the Cosmodrome (or another that killed 50 men at the Plesetsk rocket center north of Moscow in 1980) ever approached the death toll of that October evening only three years after Sputnik 1. Several times a week, groups of young people came on foot from wedding ceremonies in Leninsk to stand by the grave site, pause in thought, and honor their dead. But at the time they were as quiet as the Soviets about their findings. Soviet sources both inside the USSR and overseas. When it mentioned a memorial obelisk over the burial site, I promised myself that someday, somehow, I would visit it. Back at the launch site, Nedelin's memory is not so dear. I asked. Over the decades the local rocket workers, who knew the Cosmodrome's full history from first-hand accounts of survivors and family members, wore the wooden case smooth with their hands. In my books, articles, and lectures, I labeled the event "the Nedelin Catastrophe." Now their nation was safe, and so was the truth. One man named Nosov had pushed the launch button for Sputnik three years earlier; another named Ostashev had been instrumental in developing the Sputnik booster. The ships used to track the Mars probes had been in position in the south Atlantic and northeast Pacific for the failed October 10th and 14th launches, but they had set course for their home ports before the explosion.
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