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It was untrustworthy from the start:
The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.
He’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.
Komarov talking about Gagarin
The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage
When interviewed on 17 May by the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, Yuri Gagarin alluded to the failure of the administration to listen to the concerns about the Soyuz module that the cosmonaut corps had identified, and maintained that Komarov’s death should teach the establishment to be more rigorous in its testing and evaluation of “all the mechanisms of the spaceship, even more attentive to all stages of checking and testing, even more vigilant in our encounter with the unknown. He has shown us how dangerous the pathway to space is. His flight and his death will teach us courage.”[31] In May 1967, Gagarin and Leonov criticised program head Vasily Mishin’s “poor knowledge of the Soyuz spacecraft and the details of its operation, his lack of cooperation in working with the cosmonauts in flight and training activities,” and asked Kamanin to cite him in the official crash report.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Komarov#Response_to_Komarov’s_death
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