The wildest ride in history?

Forty years ago this week saw one of the most spectacular escapes from certain death in recorded history. Commander Boris Volynov was one of the Soviet Space program’s finest and had missed prime selection five times prior to piloting Soyuz 5 – on several of those occasions he was clearly the Soviet Space Program’s preferred Commander. He had been the reserve Pilot/Cosmonaut on Vostok3, Vostok 4 and Vostok 5, and the reserve Commander onVoskhod 1 and Soyuz 3. It is believed that Marshal Rudenko continually blocked his selection for flight on the grounds that Volynov’s mother was Jewish, but eventually he got his chance in 1969 aboard Soyuz 5.

In this period, which was at the height of the cold war, there was intense rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The soviets saw success in this arena as a metaphor for military capability, and unrealistic pressure was brought to bear on the soviet space program to continually outperform the better-funded NASA.

These political pressures to meet unrealistic deadlines for herculean tasks meant many corners were cut, and there were many tragedies in the Soviet space program, with many still to surface due to the long term disinformation surrounding the area. Indeed, Mikhail Rudenko disclosed in an interview in 2001 that Yuri Gagarin had not indeed been the first man into space – three had tried and died before him – he was just the first one to return alive.

As the scant details which have become available in the period of glasnost bear testimony, it’s a great wonder that many more cosmonauts didn’t die.

Volynov’s first space flight was in command of Soyuz 5 in January,1969 for the first docking of manned spacecraft and the first transfer of crew.

The RIDE!

Soyuz 4 with Commander Vladimir Shatalov flying solo, met up with Soyuz 5 carrying Volynov, Aleksei Yaliseyev and Eugeni Khrunov on January 16, 1969. After a textbook docking, Yaliseyev and Khrunov spacewalked over to join Shatalov and headed home, leaving Volynov to solo home next day.

It was after retrofire that things went wrong. Explosive bolts were used to detach each stage of the capsule, and this was not to be the first time that the explosive bolts failed to accomplish their required task.

When the bolts didn’t fire, Soyuz 5's service module failed to detach, and this inverted the aircraft as it entered the earth’s atmosphere, leaving the heat shield pointed the wrong way.

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