Key Takeaways:
- Soviet cosmonauts Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev became the first and only men to die in space when their Soyuz 11 capsule depressurized during reentry in 1971.
- The tragic loss of the Soyuz 11 crew transformed the Space Race from Cold War competition into cooperation, leading to the historic 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.
- A pre-mission medical exam detected a spot on cosmonaut Valeri Kubasov’s lung, saving the original crew's lives by replacing them with the doomed Soyuz 11 backup crew.
This story is a collaboration with Popular Mechanics.
Ask your average American when the Space Race ended, and they’ll likely tell you it came to a close in July 1969, when Neil Armstrong famously took his “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
But tell that to a Russian, and they’ll look at you like you just said Star Wars ended in May 1980 when Darth Vader told Luke he was his father. It’s a landmark moment, for sure, but not where the story ends.
The real end of the Space Race was July 1975’s Apollo-Soyuz Test Project—the first international space mission, a moment where two ships docked and two countries’ cosmic explorers came together and shook hands.
That thawing of Cold War tensions came about in part because of a shocking tragedy suffered by the Soviet space program. But the expression of mutual grief that bonded the American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts may well have laid the groundwork for seeing space as an opportunity for cooperation rather than conquest.
The Americans may have put the first man on the moon, but the USSR saw this as a single accomplishment for the US, not a total victory. The Soviets had already achieved their fair share of space “firsts,” and in the wake of Armstrong’s moon walk, they were only more determined to continue making history.
On April 19, 1971, while America was swept up in domestic issues like the sentencing of Charles Manson, the Soviet Union launched their most ambitious orbital endeavor: Salyut 1, the world’s first space station. Salyut was intended to play host to a number of spaceflight firsts. Because the space station was intended to float for six months above Earth, cosmonauts would be able to conduct experiments and perform many inaugural extra-atmospheric acts while setting a new record for most time spent in space.
The crew of Soyuz 10 were originally meant to be those groundbreaking cosmonauts, but when they reached Salyut, a mechanical issue prevented them from boarding the space station, and the chance to achieve all the historic “firsts” that Salyut offered now fell to the crew of Soyuz 11. That crew would achieve many of those intended firsts, and one more that the USSR hadn’t planned for: they would be the first and only men to die in space, to date.
But the men who eventually docked at Salyut from Soyuz were not even the same cosmonauts originally intended to fly the Soyuz 11 mission. Valeri Kubasov, a veteran of the Soyuz 6 mission in 1969, was initially slated to undertake the Soyuz 11 mission alongside Alexei Leonov and Pyotr Kolodin. But a pre-mission medical exam spotted a swelling in Kubasov’s lung that doctors suspected might be tuberculosis. As a result, the entire crew was removed from the mission in favor of their backups: Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev.
Leonov would later recount in his memoir his crew’s displeasure at the decision. He and Kolodin thought they should still be able to fly even if Kubasov was sick, and when it turned out Kubasov’s ailment was merely an allergic reaction to “chemical insecticide used to spray trees,” it felt all the more absurd that they had to stand down.
That pesticide, and the spot on Kubasov’s lung, is what saved their lives.
The new crew of Soyuz 11 successfully made it to Salyut and spent 23 days conducting experiments there. They grew plants, battled fire and exhaustion, tested the limits of human endurance through treadmill exercise, and Patsayev even made history as the first man to have a birthday in space when he turned 38 years old.
The days aboard Salyut were an undeniable success, but unfortunately, tragedy struck when the crew was leaving Salyut.
Between the orbital module and the descent capsule where the cosmonauts sat was a pressure equalization valve—a small mechanism designed to let outside air into the capsule once it had landed safely back on Earth. But when the explosive bolts separating the descent capsule from the service module fired simultaneously instead of sequentially, the resulting jolt loosened a seal inside the valve, causing it to open while the capsule was still in the void of space.
Air rushed out of the cabin. It wasn't the practice of the USSR at the time to outfit their space crews with pressurized suits for reentry, so Dobrovolsky, Volkov, and Patsayev were defenseless. The valve was impossible to locate and block before the air was lost. Flight recorder data showed that the crew was dead within 40 seconds.
For a brief time, especially on the American side, what happened aboard Soyuz 11 was a mystery. “Several factors had led to the confusion that surrounded this topic,” NASA suggested in their 1978 book Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The theories offered in explanation ranged from mistranslations of early Soviet analysis to inaccurate private remarks passed along to the Western press.
But suspicions about the exact cause of the cosmonauts’ deaths gave way to a mutual grief expressed by two nations otherwise at odds. President Richard Nixon sent NASA’s Chief Astronaut Tom Stafford as his representative to the funeral of the Soyuz crew. On his arrival, the Soviets asked Stafford to be one of the pallbearers. “The whole world followed the exploits of these courageous explorers of the unknown,” Nixon would say in an official statement, “and shares the anguish of their tragedy.”
Nixon’s words weren’t empty, either. The tragedy of Soyuz 11, and the outpouring of international grief it elicited, sparked a move away from competition in favor of cooperation, culminating in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.
When American and Soviet crews met in the weightlessness of space in July 1975, they included U.S. commander Stafford and Soviet flight engineer Valeri Kubasov, who was removed from the Soyuz 11 crew just days before launch in 1971.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
