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For no fault of their own they met a horrible fate.

But these young men had died building a weapon, not a space probe. The families of these Soviet rocket workers were alone in their grief. The explosion had occurred on Monday, October 24, shortly after 6:45 in the evening. Suddenly the second-stage engine ignited, bursting the fuel tanks of the first stage and covering the launch pad in a tidal wave of flame. More than confirming my suspicions, the article personalized the horror for me. How many others had been sent home? Dozens more were burned beyond recognition in the horrible conflagration, and whatever remains could be found -- teeth, charred leather, shards of bone, keys and coins -- were swept up from the scorched concrete, placed in a single coffin, and lowered into a grave in a park in the rocket workers' city of Leninsk. When the accident occurred, he wrote, "automatic cameras had been triggered along with the engines, and they recorded the scene. Over the years, many conflicting accounts of the disaster reached the West. U.S. intelligence officers had something more concrete: several blurred, spotty photographs of the site brought back by a Discoverer recoverable reconnaissance satellite. But none of those later accidents at the Cosmodrome (or another that killed 50 men at the Plesetsk rocket center north of Moscow in 1980) ever approached the death toll of that October evening only three years after Sputnik 1. There were also reports of the involvement of rocket designer Mikhail Yangel, who was not a member of the team behind Sputnik and the two previous Mars shots. Those who had run away tried while moving to tear off their burning clothing, their coats and overalls. But many of the USSR's spaceflight … By the time I updated the account for a new book, Uncovering Soviet Disasters, in 1988, my belief in the Mars hypothesis was fading. the U.S.S.R, the obelisk had assumed the role. Many of the survivors suffered severe burns and lung damage. I tried to add it all up. [1][2], The official investigation responsible for determining the cause of the disaster headed by Leonid Smirnov assigned blame to the crew that was killed at the site of the fire by specifically stating the official cause as "explosion (inflammation) of material soaked in liquid oxygen as a result of unauthorized actions of one of the members of the ground crew".

When I had first asked to see "the Nedelin memorial" I was gently rebuked by my young guide, who hadn't even been born when the tragedy occurred. Another witness had been on the pad but had finished his work and been ordered away by Nedelin. When it mentioned a memorial obelisk over the burial site, I promised myself that someday, somehow, I would visit it. The grave site in the Leninsk park was covered with a grassy mound 40 feet across and fenced in. I asked my guide who had made these visits so many years after the explosion and his reply caught me by surprise: "Weddings." Over 80% of surviving eyewitnesses to the disaster reported that the first explosion originated from Block E of the rocket and was followed by multiple secondary explosions. The most terrible fate befell those located on the upper levels of the gantry: the people were wrapped in fire and burst into flame like candles blazing in mid-air. The Mars rocket scenario couldn't account for a few troubling items, however. Evidently much more is still held in secret Soviet archives or, worse, was documented in records the museum staff was regularly ordered to destroy.

But every answer raises another question I might have taken the 54 names listed there as the total death toll had I not noticed that Nedelin's name was not among them.

Details came from credible On 17 March the rocket was installed at the launch site.

Something horrible may indeed have happened, Western experts concluded, but there was no way to be sure what it was.

('The scorched area was tremendous," one officer told me two decades later shaking his head.). He rushed to the medical center to help the survivors and found the front of the building surrounded by bodies. Only four were ever deployed as missiles, at the Plesetsk military center.

Friends, relatives, and co-workers at the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch complex kept the memorial decorated.

Local officials erected a memorial obelisk, with 54 name-bearing plaques spaced along the four sides of its square perimeter. As I stood before the obelisk, the gruesome details in the Ogonyok article came to mind.

These pages of space history, I thought, were fated to remain blank forever. The catalytically active lead solder on the filters would cause an explosion upon contact with hydrogen peroxide. The 1980 Plesetsk launch pad disaster refers to the explosion of a Vostok-2M rocket carrying a Tselina-D satellite during fueling at Site 43 of the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Mirny at 19:01 local time (16:01 GMT) on 18 March 1980, two hours and fifteen minutes before the intended launch time. I couldn't help thinking that their loss might have been more meaningful had it been for space exploration, the common world struggle that has claimed so many other lives around the planet. They were shipped home from the Soviet central Asia launch site for individual interment. Most tantalizing was the spy Penkovskiy's explicit reference to funerals at a rocket plant in the Ukraine, an installation later revealed to be devoted entirely to military projects. The revelation that the exploding rocket was a military ICBM puts the disaster into the greater perspective of the Cold War. It was impossible to recognize anybody.

And still I despaired of ever finding out what really happened, short of the violent overthrow of the Soviet government and a personal search through captured top-secret archives. The recent opening up of the Cosmodrome to outsiders also opened up many of the workers' bitterness at the decades of official denial. "Above the pad erupted a column of fire," he recalled. No label was necessary. If any one man deserved such an eponymous disaster, it was Field Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, then 54 years old. On July 3, 1969, the Soviet Union’s dreams of a moon rocket went up in smoke and fire on the launch pad as the largest explosion of any rocket in history. Various preliminary tests conducted before the fueling went as expected and without problem. The ships used to track the Mars probes had been in position in the south Atlantic and northeast Pacific for the failed October 10th and 14th launches, but they had set course for their home ports before the explosion. Flight tests the following year were unsuccessful, probably due to the loss of so many experienced engineers. "If you only knew of all the explosions and deaths," one museum official lamented to a visitor earlier this year, "you would be horrified at the size of the deceptions." I had arrived at the summit of my investigation thanks to a project on the Soviet space program for PBS' NOVA television series (to air in the United States this February), for which I served as researcher and on-camera tour guide. It was a long time ago and the bodies had been at rest for decades, but standing at the obelisk I felt a chill down my spine.

One man who miraculously survived gave this account: "At the moment of the explosion I was about 30 meters from the base of the rocket. But at the time they were as quiet as the Soviets about their findings. But the horror was not specifically identified or connected with Nedelin, who is still, officially, a hero. Over the decades the local rocket workers, who knew the Cosmodrome's full history from first-hand accounts of survivors and family members, wore the wooden case smooth with their hands. Flowers, pine boughs, and tufts of prairie grass decorated many of the markers. Time passed. In 1989 the first published account of the disaster appeared. The launch team, ordered outside to attempt repairs, mounted the scaffolding around the balky, fully fueled missile. Part of the military contingent and testers instinctively tried to flee from the danger zone, people ran to the side of the other pad, toward the bunker ... but on this route was a strip of new-laid tar, which immediately melted. The films showed a rocket exploding and human figures on fire running and falling. Early 1990 found me before the obelisk, reading aloud the names of the dead and placing a bouquet by the stone.

A feeling of wholeness, of a fully restored flow in a history long obstructed, made me proud to have played a small outsider's role in the mending process. But as space historian Curtis Peebles recently observed, the strategy would not have been necessary had the Soviets' new missile succeeded sooner. As far as the rest of the world knew in that fall of 1960, the Soviets' efforts in space continued to move from one crowning success to another. Standing there in the mid-winter gloom, brushing the snow off a few of the plaques, I did not feel like the winner in some "pierce the cover-up" contest.

Furthermore, the Sputnik pad was used in a launch only five weeks after the explosion, suggesting little if any damage there. Pravda reported that the launch of the rocket was a success and did not say anything about the explosion. I stood by the cold, lonely graves and tried to imagine the rocket workers' perspective, influenced by wars both hot and cold.

[1][3][4], The disaster was not reported in Soviet media at the time and only reached western media outlets in 1989 upon declassification. Launch explosion of Kosmos-3M rocket 18 March 1980: Plesetsk … The pressure on Nedelin to launch would have been intense: Khrushchev had been at the United Nations in New York earlier that month giving a speech about Soviet foreign policy and anticipating another spectacular feat to flaunt before the world. Officials quickly announced that the commander had died in an airplane crash. Under the light of the moon they seemed the color of ivory." The guide thought for a moment "About 40,"he suggested tentatively.

The designer Yangel was in charge of the technical proceedings at the pad, it said, but at one point he became so nervous he stepped into a special fireproof hut for a cigarette.

Since the rocket workers' city has no World War II memorials like the ones newlyweds traditionally visit and decorate elsewhere in Indeed, it can be argued that the catastrophe almost led to a thermonuclear war.

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