The Explorers' Club, № DCCCLXXVII

Operation AXIOM: The Space Race—The 55th Anniversary of Soyuz 1
23-24 April 1967: Soyuz 1 lifted off from the Kazakh S.S.R.'s Baikonur Cosmodrome, with Pilot Vladimir Komarov aboard a Soyuz 7K-OK capsule atop a Soyuz rocket; one solar panel failed to deploy & a rendezvous with three cosmonauts aboard another Soyuz capsule was cancelled when they didn't launch; Soyuz 1's parachutes failed to unfurl during re-entry & Komarov died on impact.

Commentary: The second Soyuz capsule had the same fatally flawed parachute configuration as Soyuz 1; so, if the cosmonaut trio of Valery Bykovsky, Yevgeny Khrunov, & Aleksei Yeliseyev had lifted off, they would never have returned safely to the Earth, suffering the same deadly fate as Comrade Komarov.

Subsequent Soyuz flights will be covered on their fiftieth or sixtieth anniversaries, but we wanted to add Komarov to our "Glorious Dead" roll of honor. Plus, this was the first Soviet manned spaceflight since Voskhod 2 in March 1965, just prior to Gemini 3 & it seemed in keeping with the Space Race rivalry to cover this anniversary on the same fifty-five year mark as Project Gemini.

Bonus! Space Race Song o' the Day: The Soyuz 1 Disaster
The Phenomenauts, "Heroes" from For All Mankind (Space Cadet Mike Papa Whiskey)

Semper exploro.