A look of troubled uncertainty creased the man’s face. Kneeling beside him, another member of the recovery team likewise listened to the Soyuz 11 capsule, which had just landed following a record-breaking 23-day stay at the world’s first space station. Moments before, both men were eagerly clamouring to greet the returning cosmonauts — Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev — whose fame swept Soviet Russia like a whirlwind in June 1971. But when they knocked on the capsule, they were met with only ominous silence.
The would-be rescuers opened the hatch to find a scene of indescribable horror. All three cosmonauts lay dead in their seats, with blue splotches on their faces and blood trickling from their noses and ears. On June 30, 1971, humankind was forced to grapple with the first — and so far only — deaths to occur in space.
A Troubled Mission
From the outset, Soyuz 11 was an unhappy assignment. After Neil Armstrong’s historic first steps on the Moon, the Soviets nixed their own lunar landing plans in favor of an Earth-orbiting space station. Salyut 1 was launched in April 1971, but it first crew failed to dock with the station during the Soyuz 10 mission. That meant it was up to Alexei Leonov (the world’s first spacewalker), Valeri Kubasov, and Pyotr Kolodin to try again with Soyuz 11.
