Sunday, March 20, 2011

Sensational claims about fatal Soviet mission

If NPR thinks this is journalism, they DESERVE to be defunded.

There are still mysteries about the old Soviet space program, which was wrapped in secrecy and presented to the world as a monolithic, smoothly functioning machine rather than the pioneering but messy effort it really was. Sill, the claims in this article, reported apparently without caution or fact-checking, are extreme. Komarov's fatal Soyuz 1 mission was risky and ended in tragedy, but here it's presented as murder, or suicide depending how you read it.
"Everyone knew the mission would fail?" Come on. There's no real evidence for this or the other claims. (Another historian has pointed out that the sound clip offered on this site seems like a splice of three different transmissions. The article says only Komarov's heelbone was found: and then shows a shot of a charred body in a coffin. It gets worse from there.
My own opinion as a space historian: this is nonsense.
(Reminder as usual- All opinions represent only the personal opinion of the author as a private citizen)

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