They Put 250 Men Onto a Fueled Rocket in 1960 — 20 Seconds Later Half of Them Were Dead

The Nedelin catastrophe killed about half the men standing at a Soviet launch pad in 1960, and the way out was open the entire time. On the evening of October 24th, at the Tyuratam range that became Baikonur, an R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile sat fueled while roughly 250 people worked around it and a marshal of the Soviet Union watched from a bench twenty meters away. Its second stage lit on the ground. The explosions ran about twenty seconds and the fire burned for two hours, and the Soviet state said Marshal Nedelin had died in a plane crash and kept saying it for twenty-nine years. What almost no telling of the Nedelin disaster includes is the meeting the night before. The commission's own findings, published later by the engineer Boris Chertok, record that a lieutenant colonel stood up and proposed draining the rocket, which was possible, which was written down, and which had been done on a sister missile three months earlier. He was overruled because of his rank. This R-16 rocket explosion is usually told as recklessness. The paperwork says something worse, and it says it in the apparatus's own words. Sources: Brezhnev commission technical findings, reproduced verbatim in Boris Chertok, Rockets and People, Volume II (NASA SP-2006-4110). The blowout discs in the stage 1 fuel lines were detonated instead of those in the stage 2 oxidizer lines, traced to design and production defects in a detonation control panel developed by OKB-692. Chertok, Rockets and People, Volume II. Once the discs ruptured the missile could not remain on the pad longer than 24 hours before the propellants destroyed the gaskets and leaks developed. Lieutenant Colonel S. D. Titov proposed at the State Commission to drain the components and return the missile to the factory; Chertok's verdict is that this "would have been the only absolutely correct decision." The same volume records the July 1960 R-14 precedent, in which Yangel's first deputy did exactly that. Commission findings, in Chertok. The fire was caused by premature actuation of the VO-8 electro-pneumatic start tank pressurization valve when the control system step motors were reset to zero, which started the stage 2 engine. The engineering plan required the step motors to be zeroed before the batteries were connected. Yangel's emergency telegram to the Central Committee, in Chertok. Fire at 6:45 p.m. local time, 30 minutes before the launch of article 8K64. Chertok, Rockets and People, Volume II. Nedelin was seated not more than 20 meters from the missile and was identified afterward by his surviving Gold Star medal. Inna Doroshenko was dismissed and barred from defense work; Chertok states she was not punished for a circuit error but for defending herself at the wrong moment. Death toll figures. 54 (Soviet government, 1989); 78 (state commission report, 1994); 92 documented by name; 126 (Roscosmos, 50th anniversary, citing Chertok, with a stated range of 60 to 150). R-16 (missile) service record. First successful flight February 2, 1961; initial operational capability November 1, 1961; 30.4 meters long, 141 tons, red fuming nitric acid oxidizer with UDMH fuel. Baikonur, October 24. A second fatal accident on the same date in 1963, an R-9 silo fire that killed seven, made October 24 the cosmodrome's day of mourning. No launches are conducted on that date.