How many astronauts have died in space?

For a lot of wannabe astronauts, the concept of venturing into the nice unknown could be a dream come true. However over the previous 50 years, there’s been a slew of spaceflight-related tragedies which are extra akin to an astronaut’s worst nightmare.

Within the final half-century, about 30 astronauts and cosmonauts have died whereas coaching for or trying harmful space missions. However the overwhelming majority of those deaths occurred both on the bottom or in Earth’s ambiance — under the accepted boundary of space known as the Kármán line, which begins at an altitude of about 62 miles (100 kilometers).

Nevertheless, of the roughly 550 individuals who have to date ventured into space, solely three have truly died there.

The deadly frontier

Early within the space race, each NASA and the USSR skilled a surge in lethal jet crashes that killed a lot of pilots testing superior rocket-propelled planes. Then, after all, there was the Apollo 1 fire in January 1967, which killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee in a horrific method. Throughout a launch simulation, a stray spark throughout the cabin of the grounded spacecraft, which was crammed with pure oxygen, ignited. This led to an uncontrollable hearth that shortly overwhelmed the doomed crew, resulting in their tragic deaths as they struggled in useless to open the pressurized hatch door.

“We had executed precisely the identical check the evening earlier than however with out the hatch closed, so we weren’t on 100% oxygen,” Walter Cunningham, Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 7, instructed Astronomy. “So, when the [Apollo 1] crew died, it was a few weeks later earlier than they began choosing up the items, and at which level we have been assigned the prime crew of the primary manned Apollo mission.” Rather less than two years later, in October 1968, Cunningham, Wally Schirra, and Donn Eisele grew to become the primary Apollo crew to efficiently enterprise into space.

Over the following three years, Apollo astronauts accomplished seven extra missions — together with the first Moon landing during Apollo 11 and the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. Then, on June 30, 1971, humankind witnessed the primary (and, to date, solely) deaths to happen in space.

The Soyuz 11 catastrophe

The primary space station to park itself above Earth’s ambiance was the USSR’s Salyut 1, which launched (unmanned) on April 19, 1971. Only a few days later, a crew of three Soviets blasted off aboard Soyuz 10 with the aim of getting into the space station and staying in orbit for a full month. Although the Soyuz 10 crew docked safely with the Salyut 1, points with the entry hatch prevented them from getting into the space station. Throughout their untimely return journey again to Earth, poisonous chemical substances leaked into the air provide of Soyuz 10, inflicting one cosmonaut to move out. Nevertheless, all three members of the crew in the end made it residence secure with no long-lasting results.

Only a few months later, on June 6, the Soyuz 11 mission took one other crack at accessing the space station. In contrast to the earlier crew, the three Soyuz 11 cosmonauts — Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev — efficiently entered Salyut 1. As soon as aboard, they spent the following three weeks not solely setting a brand new document for the longest time spent in space, but in addition finishing up a great deal of experiments centered on how the human physique offers with prolonged intervals of weightlessness.

On June 29, the cosmonauts loaded again into the Soyuz 11 spacecraft and started their descent to Earth. And that’s when tragedy struck.

To these on the bottom, all the pieces about Soyuz 11’s reentry appeared to go off and not using a hitch. The spacecraft appeared to make it by the ambiance simply advantageous, in the end touchdown in Kazakhstan as deliberate. It wasn’t till restoration crews opened the hatch that they found all three crew members inside have been lifeless.   

“Outwardly, there was no harm in any way,” recalled Kerim Kerimov, chair of the State Fee, in Ben Evans’ e book Foothold within the Heavens. “[The recovery crew] knocked on the facet, however there was no response from inside. On opening the hatch, they discovered all three males of their couches, immobile, with dark-blue patches on their faces and trails of blood from their noses and ears. They eliminated them from the descent module. Dobrovolski was nonetheless heat. The docs gave synthetic respiration. Based mostly on their studies, the reason for demise was suffocation.”

The deadly accident was decided to be the results of a defective valve seal on the spacecraft’s descent automobile that burst open throughout its separation from the service module. At an altitude of 104 miles (168 km), the lethal mixture of a leaking valve and the vacuum of space quickly sucked all of the air out of the crew cabin, depressurizing it. And since the valve was hidden under the cosmonauts’ seats, it could have been almost inconceivable for them to repair the issue in time.

Throughout an early NASA vacuum check, Jim Leblanc’s pressurized go well with started to lose air, resulting in decompression. Inside about 30 seconds, he handed out, however his coworkers thankfully have been capable of get to him in time to avoid wasting his life.

As a direct results of the decompression deaths of the Soyuz 11 crew, the USSR shortly made the shift to requiring all cosmonauts to put on pressurized space fits throughout reentry — a follow that’s nonetheless in place at the moment.