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The valve that opened in descent and bled their air before landing · Space Exploration Stories

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: On June 30, 1971, a Soviet search and rescue team
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: approached the Soyuz 11 capsule on the steppes of Kazakhstan.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: The parachutes had deployed perfectly. The retrorikach had fired on schedule.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: The capsule sat upright in the grass, exactly where mission
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: controllers had calculated it would land. One of the recovery
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: crew knocked on the outer hull. There was no response
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: from within. Every automatic system had performed exactly as designed.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: The navigation had been flawless. The re-entry trajectory matched the
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: flight plan to within acceptable margins. From the outside, this
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: was a textbook mission conclusion. The men inside had been
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: in space for 23 days, a world record at the time.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: The world was waiting to celebrate them. The hatch opened.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Vokov, and Viktor Patsaev were sitting in
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: their seats, still strapped in, in the correct positions for landing.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: They looked, to the first rescuers on scene. Like men
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: who had simply fallen asleep, none of them was breathing.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: All three were already dead. The capsule had landed in
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: the right place at the right time, with the right
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: three crewmen. Everything the mission required of the machine, the
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: machine had delivered. What it had not delivered was air.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Somewhere between the moment the crew sealed their hatch in
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: orbit and the moment that recovery team knocked on the
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: hull over Kazakhstan, the atmosphere inside Soyuz 11 had bled
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: out into space. The three men died, not in an explosion,
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: not in a fire, not in a collision. They died
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: in silence, in the dark, at an altitude where no
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: one could reach them, in a spacecraft that was working perfectly.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: These are the only three human beings in history to
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: have died in space, above the Kármán line, the boundary,
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: where Earth's atmosphere ends and space begins. No one else
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: has ever died there, and for nearly two years after
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: that morning in Kazakhstan, the Soviet government did not tell
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: the world how it had happened. The warning signs were
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: already visible before the mission launched, and the men who
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: built the spacecraft that killed these three cosmonauts already knew,
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: in principle, exactly what could happen. To understand what killed
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: the crew of Soyuz 11, it is necessary to understand
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: what sent them there in the first place, and who
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: almost went instead. The mission was Soyuz 11. Its destination
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: was Salyut 1, the world's first space station. Launched into
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: orbit on April 19, 1971, the Soviet space program intended
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: to dock a crew with Salyut 1 live and work
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: aboard the station for an extended period and demonstrate to
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: the world and to the Americans that Soviet cosmonauts could
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: survive and function in prolonged weightlessness. The first crew sent
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: to accomplish this The prime crew for Soyuz 10 had
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: failed to complete a successful docking in April. So a
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: new mission was prepared. A new crew was named. Alexei Leonov,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: the man who had performed the world's first spacewalk six
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: years earlier, was named commander of the prime crew for
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Soyuz 11. His crew included Valery Kubasov as flight engineer
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: and Pyotr Kolodin as research engineer. Four days before launch,
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: A routine medical examination flagged Kubasov. A chest x-ray showed
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: a shadow on his lung. The flight surgeons suspected tuberculosis.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: It was not perbucculosis. The finding was later determined to
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: be an allergic reaction to a pesticide used near the
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: cosmonaut's training facility. But in 1971, with four days remaining
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: before the launch window, the doctors could not confirm that.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: And so Leonov's entire prime crew was removed from the mission.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: The backup crew stepped in. Commander Georgi Dobrovolsky, flight engineer
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Vladislav Volkov, and research engineer Viktor Patsaev would fly Soyuz
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: 11 instead. They had not expected to fly. None of
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: them had commanded a long-duration mission before. Dobrovolsky was 43
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: years old. Patsaev was 38. Volkov, at 35, was the
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: youngest of the three. What made the substitution significant was
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: not just its timing, it was the capsule they were
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: flying in. Soyuz 11, like all Soyuz spacecraft of that era,
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: had originally been designed to carry three cosmonauts in pressure suits,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: suits that would protect them if the cabin lost pressure.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: But the interior had been reconfigured to fit three people.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: The suit support systems had been removed. On Soyuz 11,
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: the crew flew without pressure suits. There was no individual
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: life support backup if the cabin atmosphere failed. This was
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: a known engineering compromise. The logic was straightforward. If the
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: spacecraft's pressure integrity held, the suits were unnecessary weight. The
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: mission designers accepted the trade-off. Alexei Leonov, who had been
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: removed from the mission with his crew, later said he
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: had not trusted the pressure valves to close automatically in
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: an emergency. He had raised the concern. The concern was noted.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: The mission proceeded. The crew docked successfully with Salyut 1
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: on June 7th. They spent 23 days and 18 hours
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: aboard the station, conducting scientific experiments, performing observations, setting the
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: world record for time in space. By all accounts, the
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: mission was proceeding well. On June 29th, they undocked and
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: prepared for re-entry. What no one on the ground knew,
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: as Soyuz 11 began its descent, was that something had
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: already gone wrong aboard the spacecraft. The crew had gone
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: quiet early, before the scheduled communications blackout. The silence arrived early.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: At the time, no one on the ground registered it
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: as significant. Reentry blackouts were normal. A few minutes of
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: silence before the blackout was unusual, but not immediately alarming.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: The recovery teams waited at the landing site. The parachutes
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: opened on schedule. The retro rockets fired. The capsule touched
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: down in Kazakhstan, and the knock on the hull went unanswered.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: When the recovery team opened the hatch, the first thing
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: they noticed was the color. Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Viktor Patsyov were seated in their positions, seatbelts fastened. No
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: visible trauma, but their skin had taken on a bluish cast,
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: and there were dark traces around their noses and mouths.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: The medical staff began CPR immediately. They kept working. They
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: did not stop for a long time. Nobody on the
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: ground knew what had killed them. That is the part
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: that stays with you. Doctors pressing on the chests of
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: men who had been dead for more than 30 minutes
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: performing the correct procedure for the wrong emergency, because nothing
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: in the capsule told them what had actually happened inside it.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: The instruments had recorded a normal descent. The parachutes, the retrocaches,
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: the landing sequence, all nominal. Whatever had gone wrong before
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: any of that, and it had left no mark on
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: the spacecraft. That question what exactly failed, and when, would
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: take investigators weeks to reconstruct. The answer, when it came,
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: turned on a single bolt. Soyuz 11 had two orbital
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: modules joined together. The descent capsule, where the crew sat
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: during re-entry in the work compartment, where they lived and
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: operated during the mission. Before re-entry, the two had to separate,
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: That separation was triggered by a set of pyrotechnic bolts,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: small explosive charges that fired simultaneously to release the modules cleanly.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: On June 29th, the bolts fired. They were designed to
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: fire in sequence, a fraction of a second apart. Instead,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: the charges detonated at the same instant. The simultaneous blast
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: sent a mechanical shockwave through the capsule structure. That shockwave
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: traveled directly into the pressure equalization valve. a small component
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: roughly the diameter of a coin, designed to open briefly
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: after landing to equalize internal and external air pressure. The
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: jolt knocked the valve open. At an altitude of approximately
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: 150 kilometers, in the vacuum above the Karman line, the
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: cabin atmosphere began venting into space. There was no warning light.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: There was no alarm. The pressure inside the descent capsule
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: dropped from normal to zero, In under 70 seconds, cardiac arrest,
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: the post-mortem would establish, occurred within 40 seconds of the
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: pressure loss beginning. 40 seconds. The crew would have regained
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: consciousness for perhaps 15 of those seconds after the pressure
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: drop began. Enough time to feel something was wrong. Possibly
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: enough time to reach toward the valve. Victor Patsiev's body
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: was found positioned near the equalization valve. His hand was
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: close to it. The valve was partially closed. He had
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: reached it. He had gotten his hand on it. He
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: had not been able to finish. Here is where the
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: physics become unbearable. The valve was not inaccessible. It was
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: not behind a panel. Not behind wiring. Not in a
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: sealed compartment. It was reachable. A person who knew where
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: it was and moved immediately, with full motor control, could
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: close it manually. But 40 seconds is not a long
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: time when you are losing air. You cannot see from
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: a cause you cannot identify in a spacecraft falling through
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: the upper atmosphere. Alexei Leonov, the cosmonaut who had been
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: pulled from the prime crew four days before launch, later
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: sat down with a stopwatch. He ran his own test,
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: simulating how long it would take a trained person. to
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: locate the valve, recognize the problem, and manually force it shut.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: It took him nearly a minute. That single number recontextualizes everything.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: Leonov had warned before the mission that he did not
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: trust the pressure valves to close automatically in an emergency.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: He had said it, The concern had been acknowledged. The
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: mission had launched anyway. And when he timed himself doing
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: what Patsaev had attempted, he arrived at a figure that
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: meant it was already over before anyone could have reached
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: it in time. Patsaev had moved toward the valve within
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: seconds of the pressure drop. He had closed it partway.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: He had done exactly what a trained cosmonaut was supposed
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: to do. It was not enough. It could not have
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: been enough for anyone. The three men of Soyuz 11, Dobrovolsky,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Volkov and Patsiev died at an altitude above 100 kilometers
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: in the vacuum of space more than 30 minutes before
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: their capsule touched down in Kazakhstan. They remain, to this day,
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: the only human beings ever to have died above the
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Karman line. In space itself. Not during launch, not during re-entry,
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: not on impact, in space. And the capsule that carried
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: them home landed exactly where it was supposed to. When
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: the recovery helicopters reached the capsule on June 30th, 1971,
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: the medical teams came running. They had reason to run.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: The Soyuz 11 capsule had landed on target, on schedule,
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: with all parachutes deployed correctly. The radio had gone quiet
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: during blackout, as expected. Everything looked exactly as it should.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: They knocked on the hatch. No answer. They opened it.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: What happened next was not in any protocols. The support
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: crews pulled Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Potsev from
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: the capsule and began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. They worked on all
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: three men simultaneously, there on the steppe of Kazakhstan, in
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: the open air, with the capsule still warm from re-entry.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: They kept working for a long time. Nobody stopped them,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: because nobody on the ground yet knew what had actually
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: killed these men. The medical teams believed or hoped that
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: prolonged exposure to weightlessness had caused some kind of cardiovascular collapse.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: That was the fear that had circulated among researchers before
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: the mission. That microgravity itself, after 23 days in orbit,
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: might prove fatal on return. So they attempted resuscitation. They
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: called for more equipment. They did everything they were trained
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: to do. The capsule had depressurized in space. It had
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: happened at an altitude above 100 kilometers. The three men
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: had been dead for more than 30 minutes before the
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: capsule entered the atmosphere. No resuscitation attempt on a landing
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: field in Kazakhstan was ever going to change that. The
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: doctors working on those three men did not know they
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: were trying to reverse something that had already been irreversible
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: for half an hour. That image, competent, trained people working
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: desperately on a problem that had already been solved by physics,
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: is the one that stays. The Soviet government did not
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: disclose the true cause of death publicly for nearly two years.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: In the immediate aftermath, the official statements described the crew
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: as having been found in their seats, appearing to be asleep.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: The cause of death was listed, eventually, as decompression. But
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: the full technical account of what had happened, the pressure
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: equalization valve, the simultaneous bolt detonation, the 42nd window, Patsayev,
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: at the valve, did not enter the public record until
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: much later. In the meantime, Western space agencies were left
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: to reconstruct what they could from fragmentary reports. NASA's own
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: concern in that period was partly selfish and partly genuine.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: American astronauts were preparing for their own long-duration missions. If
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: Soviet cosmonauts had died from the physiological effects of extended weightlessness,
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: that changed the calculus for everything. It was only when
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: the actual technical cause became clearer that the specific, singular
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: nature of the failure could be understood. This was not
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: a systemic problem with human bodies in space. It was
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: a valve. One valve. Two bolts. Forty seconds. The Soyuz
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: program was grounded after the accident. Engineers went back through
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: the entire design of the descent module. What they found
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: was not a complex cascade of failures, or a theoretical
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: flaw that had slipped through review. They found a mechanism
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: that worked correctly in every test condition, but could, under
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: the specific dynamic stress of explosive bolt separation, be jolted
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: open by the vibration itself. The very force that was
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: supposed to separate the modules safely was the force that
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: could open an air seal that was supposed to stay closed.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: The fix was not complicated. It was a redesigned valve
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: with a manual override that a cosmonaut could close by
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: hand in a single motion faster than the equalization process
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: could complete. It was also a new suit, the Sokol suit,
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: a full-pressure garment worn during launch and landing, designed to
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: keep a cosmonaut alive through a depressurization event long enough
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: to respond. Not a guarantee, a margin. A few minutes
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: of breathable air and survivable pressure in a sealed suit
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: while the crew assessed and acted, the Sokol suit entered
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: service in 1974. Updated versions of that suit remain in
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: use today. Every cosmonaut who has launched aboard a Soyuz
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: since then has worn a direct descendant of the design
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: that came out of the inquiry into what happened to Dobrovolsky, Volkov,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: and Patsyev. Every American astronaut who flew to the International
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Space Station aboard a Soyuz capsule wore one. Every crew
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: that has launched in a commercial vehicle since then has
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: worn a pressure suit during the critical phases of flight.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Because the principle has held across every subsequent program, the
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: ascent and descent phases carry specific risks that a pressure
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: garment can partially mitigate. Three men died, and the suit
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: they were not wearing became standard equipment for every human
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: being who has gone to space since. There is a
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: monument outside Moscow, at the Kremlin Wall. Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov,
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: and Viktor Potseyev are buried there, near Yuri Gagarin. near
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: Vladimir Komarov, near the others who did not come back.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: The state gave them that honor. It was the correct
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: thing to do, and it was also the kind of
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: honor that is easier to give than the truth. The
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: truth took two years. Across the world in a very
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: different political context, a small aluminum plaque was left on
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: the surface of the moon by the Apollo 15 crew
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: in August of 1971. Less than two months after Soyuz 11,
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: The plaque is called The Fallen Astronaut. It lists the
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: names of 14 people who had died in the service
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: of space exploration. Three of those names are Dobrovolsky, Volkov,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: and Patsaev, an American crew on the lunar surface, honoring
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Soviet cosmonauts who had died two months before. The Cold
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: War was still fully operational. The plaque went anyway. Patsaev's memorial,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: in his hometown of Aktyubinsk, now Aktobe, in Kazakhstan, was
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: vandalized badly enough that it had to be removed. In 2013,
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: Roscosmos restored it. A new monument in the same city
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: where he was born, standing again. Viktor Patsaev was 44
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: years old. He was the first human being to operate
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: a telescope in space, aboard Salyut 1. He was also,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: by the physical evidence, the last person on Soyuz 11
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: to act. He moved toward the valve. He positioned himself
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: at it. He got it partway closed. In the remaining seconds,
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: with pressure dropping and consciousness failing, he did the thing
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: a trained engineer and cosmonaut would do. He worked the problem.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: He was 40 seconds from a solution that required a minute.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Georgi Dobrovolsky was 43. He was the mission commander, making
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: his first spaceflight. He had been added to the crew
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: four days before launch, replacing Leonov because a chest X-ray
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: had flagged a possible abnormality in Valery Kubasov that turned
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: out to be nothing serious. Dobrovolsky had not been scheduled
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: to die on Soyuz 11. He had been scheduled to
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: fly later. A medical precaution put him on this mission instead.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Vladislav Vokov was 35. He was the only one of
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: the three who had flown in space before, having been
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: part of the Soyuz 7 mission in 1969. He had
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: been part of the original backup considerations and had trained
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: extensively for long-duration spaceflight. He was 35 years old. These
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: were not symbols before they were people. They were engineers
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: and pilots who had spent years preparing for a mission
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: that asked everything of them, and then asked more than
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: physics allowed anyone to give. The capsule that brought them
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: home landed exactly where it was supposed to land. The
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: parachutes opened on schedule. The retrocotics fired. The descent was textbook.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: Every automatic system performed exactly as designed. The craft touched
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: down on the Kazakh step at the correct coordinates. at
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: the correct time, having completed 23 days and 18 hours
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: in orbit, including a successful docking with the Salyut 1
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: space station. In the morning silence on that step, with
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: the capsule sitting upright in the grass, the only thing
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: the mission had failed to return was the three men
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: inside it. They knocked, and there was no response from within.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: That silence was not a malfunction. The mission had worked.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: The hardware had done everything it was asked to do.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: The silence was the record of what 40 seconds means
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: when the margin disappears, when the warning was given and
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: acknowledged and set aside. when the only person close enough
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: to act was already running out of time before he
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: took his first step. Dobrovolsky, Volkov, and Patsayev remained the
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: only human beings ever to have died above the Karman line.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: Not in an explosion. Not on impact. In the quiet,
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: in space, on the way home, in a capsule that
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: landed perfectly. The clock ran out at 100 kilometers above
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: the Earth. Everything after that was just the landing. This
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: show is made by Oboe Media.