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Callum Jones
You cannot even begin to imagine the final words of someone falling to their death during a space mission - but one experienced cosmonaut did provide a harrowing idea.
Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov tragically lost his life in April 1967 while on a very important space mission.
Soyuz 1, a crewed spaceflight of the Soviet space program, tragically crashed 57 years ago.
The event led to Komarov being know as the ‘man who fell from space’, though many details regarding his death remain a mystery even to this day.
His death has very much been shrouded in mystery due to the secrecy of the Soviet Union, and we probably won't get some of the answers we desire.
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Komarov's death was covered extensively in the controversial 2011 book, Starman, The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin.
However, the validity of that book has long been questioned, with it even being described as ‘rife with errors’.
What we do know is Komarov made numerous orbits around the Earth in his spacecraft and struggled to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere after his mission was completed, ending up plummeting to the ground before he died in an explosion.
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On 23 April, 1967, Komarov’s final space mission journey took place and over the course of 24 hours, he orbited the Earth 16 times.
One of the two solar panels that supplied energy for the maneuver failed to deploy, meaning Komarov was unable to complete the end goal of the mission. He was instructed to come back to Earth, however, re-entry would prove to claim his life.
Two more trips around Earth in an attempt to re-enter would follow before his final attempt.
When he reached an altitude of 23,000 feet, Komarov’s parachute that was meant to deploy, failed to do so because the lines of the chute had gotten tangled during his re-entry issues.
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This led to the cosmonaut plummeting to the ground and was killed in an explosion on 24 April, 1967.
Tragically, Komarov knew he was about to die as his final words were overheard by the US listening posts in Turkey. He was clearly enraged talking to Alexei Kosygin, then a high ranking official of the Soviet Union, as his aircraft came crashing down.
According to reports, his charred remains resembled a ‘lump’ and only his heel bone was recognisable.
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The audio is from that truly terrifying moment. Starman claims he also said: “This devil ship! Nothing I lay my hands on works properly.”
However experts are skeptical of this, while reading the official transcript of Komarov’s final moments from the Russian State Archive, one of the last things he told colleagues was: “I feel excellent, everything’s in order.”
Just a few moments later he reportedly said: “Thank you for transmitting all of that. [Separation] occurred.”