Details of Yuri Gagarin's Tragic Death Revealed 17 June 2013, by Jason Major

Details of Yuri Gagarin's tragic death revealed 17 June 2013, by Jason Major

later, details about what really happened to cause the death of the first man in space have come out—from the first man to go out on a spacewalk, no less.

According to an article published online today on Russia Today (RT.com) former cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov—who performed the first EVA on March 18, 1965—has revealed details about the accident that killed both Yuri Gagarin and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin in March 1968.

Officially the cause of the crash was said to be the ill-fated result of an attempt to avoid a foreign object during flight training in their MiG-15UTI, a two-seated, dual-controlled training version of the widely-produced Soviet aircraft. "Foreign objects" could be anything, from balloons to flocks of birds to airborne debris to… well, you see where one could go with that. (And over the years many have.) Yuri Gagarin on the way to his historic Vostok launch on April 12, 1961. Credit: NASA Images The maneuver led to the aircraft going into a tailspin and crashing, killing both men. But experienced pilots like Gagarin and Seryogin shouldn't have lost control of their plane like On the morning of April 12, 1961, Soviet that—not according to Leonov, who has been trying cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin lifted off aboard Vostok 1 to release details of the event for the past 20 to become the first human in space, spending 108 years… if only that the pilots' families might know minutes in orbit before landing via parachute in the the truth. Saratov region of the USSR. The soft-spoken and well-mannered Gagarin, just 27 years old at the Now, a declassified report, which Leonov has been time, became an instant hero, representing the permitted to share, shows what actually happened success of the Soviet space program (Alan during the training flight: an "unauthorized Su-15 Shepard's shorter, suborbital flight happened less fighter" flew too close to Gagarin's MiG, disrupting than a month later) to the entire world. Gagarin its flight and sending it into a spin. later went on to become a director for the Cosmonaut Training Center and was preparing for "In this case, the pilot didn't follow the book, a second space flight. Tragically, he was killed descending to an altitude of 450 meters," Leonov when a MiG-15 aircraft he was piloting crashed on says in the RT.com article. "While afterburning the March 27, 1968. aircraft reduced its echelon at a distance of 10-15 meters in the clouds, passing close to Gagarin, Gagarin's death has long been shrouded by turning his plane and thus sending it into a confusion and controversy, with many theories tailspin—a deep spiral, to be precise—at a speed of proposed as to the actual cause. Now, 45 years 750 kilometers per hour."

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The pilot of the Su-15—who is still alive—was was not named, a condition of Leonov's permission to share the information.

According to first woman in space Valentina Tereshkova, who was officially grounded by the government after Gagarin's death to avoid a loss of another prominent cosmonaut, the details come as a bittersweet relief.

"The only regret here is that it took so long for the truth to be revealed," Tereshkova said. "But we can finally rest easy."

Source: Universe Today APA citation: Details of Yuri Gagarin's tragic death revealed (2013, June 17) retrieved 25 September 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2013-06-yuri-gagarin-tragic-death-revealed.html

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