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: Althouse

"If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead... That's Yura" ? Yuri Gagarin ? "and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him."

It was 1967, and Vladimir Komarov knew ? a month in advance ? that he would almost surely die in the the showy spaceship link-up Leonid Brezhnev had planned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution.

Gagarin had written a memo explaining the 203 serious structural problems with the spacecraft, but there was an even worse structural problem with the Soviet government: "Everyone who saw that memo... was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia." The memo couldn't go up the chain of command.

Don't click on the link unless you want to see a photo of the open casket of Vladimir Komarov.

Full post as published by Althouse on March 20, 2011 (boomark / email).