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List of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents

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Space Shuttle Challenger was torn apart 73 seconds after launch due to hot gases escaping the SRBs cutting a hole into the external tank. The accident resulted in the death of all seven crewmembers.

Space disasters, either during operations or training, have killed 22 astronauts (five percent of all people who have been in space, two percent of spaceflights), and a much larger number of ground crew. This is an overview of all acknowledged fatalities and near-fatalities that occurred during manned space missions, accidents during astronaut training and during the testing, assembling or preparing for flight of manned and unmanned spacecraft. Not included are fatalities occurring during the ICBM accidents, and Russian or German rocket-fighter projects of World War II. Also not included are the rumors about alleged Russian space accidents prior to Gagarin's flight that allegedly have killed several cosmonauts, but were hushed up by the centralized Soviet press. (See Lost cosmonauts)

Spaceflight fatalities

(In the statistics below, 'astronaut' is applied to all space travelers to avoid the use of 'astronaut/cosmonaut'.)

The history of space exploration has been marred by a number of tragedies that resulted in the deaths of the astronauts or ground crew. As of 2006, in-flight accidents had killed 18 astronauts, training accidents had claimed 11 astronauts, and launchpad accidents had killed at least 70 ground personnel.

About two percent of the manned launch/reentry attempts have killed their crew, with Soyuz and the Shuttle having almost the same death rates. Except for the X-15 (which is a suborbital rocket plane), other launchers have not launched sufficiently often for reasonable safety comparisons to be made. For example, it seems likely that Apollo would have eventually had a similar fatality rate if the program had continued to the present day.

About five percent of the people that have been launched have died doing so (because astronauts often launch more than once). As of November 2004, 439 individuals have flown on spaceflights: Russia/Soviet Union (96), USA (277), others (66). Twenty-two have died while in a spacecraft: three on Apollo 1, one on Soyuz 1, one on X-15-3, three on Soyuz 11, seven on Challenger, and seven on Columbia. By space program, 18 NASA astronauts (4.1%) and four Russian cosmonauts (0.9% of all the people launched) died while in a spacecraft.

If Apollo 1 and X-15-3 are included as spaceflights, five percent or 22 of 439 have died on spaceflights. This includes Roger Chaffee (who never flew in space) and Michael J. Adams (who reached space by the U.S. definition but not the international definition, see below) in the spaceflight total and Grissom, White, Chaffee (the crew of Apollo 1) and Adams in the killed total.

If Apollo 1 and the X-15-3 are excluded; four percent or 18 of 437 have died while on a spaceflight. This excludes Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, and Michael J. Adams from the killed total and Chaffee and Adams from the spaceflight total.

The Soyuz system is often considered to be more reliable than the Shuttle, because 14 have been killed in shuttle accidents (versus four killed in Soyuz accidents, however, there have only been two shuttle flight fatalities, and the number is higher because of the shuttle's greater people capacity). However, the overall safety appears to be similar. No deaths have occurred on Soyuzs since 1971, and none with the current design of the Soyuz. Including the early Soyuz design, the average deaths per launched crew member on Soyuz are currently under two percent. However, there have also been several serious injuries, and some other incidents in which crews nearly died.

NASA astronauts who have lost their lives in the line of duty are memorialized at the Astronaut Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Merritt Island, Florida. Cosmonauts who have died in the line of duty under the auspices of the Soviet Union were generally honored by burial at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow. It is unknown whether this remains tradition for Russia, since the Kremlin Wall Necropolis was largely a Communist honor and no cosmonauts have died in action since the Soviet Union fell.

Cosmonaut fatalities

The Soviet/Russian program has had two fatal missions for a total of four in-flight fatalities. One (Soyuz 1, 1967) due to parachute failure during landing (there were other problems, but this was the fatal failure), and the other (Soyuz 11, 1971) when a valve stuck open during separation of the descent module during reentry (see below for details). Of all fatal spaceflights by any country (as of 2006), only the crew of Soyuz 11 actually died in space.

In addition, the Soviet program suffered two mission-ending launch aborts that were potentially fatal.

In-flight accidents

File:Trosky Columbie.jpg
Columbia debris falling over Texas

There have been five fatal in-flight accidents. In each case all crew were killed.

Training accidents

In addition to accidents on spaceflights, astronauts and cosmonauts have been killed while in training.

  • 1961 March 23: fire on board: First space-related casualty. Valentin Bondarenko was in training in a special low-pressure chamber with a pure oxygen atmosphere. He accidentally dropped an alcohol-soaked cloth onto an electric hotplate. In the pure oxygen environment, the fire quickly engulfed the entire chamber. Bondarenko was barely alive when the chamber was opened, and died of his burns shortly after being hospitalized. At the time of the accident, Bondarenko's death had been covered up by the Soviet government and was not known about in the U.S. Many materials become explosively flammable in pure oxygen; modern spacecraft use mixtures of continuously replaced oxygen and nitrogen. It has been speculated that knowledge of Bondarenko's death might have led to changes that would have prevented the Apollo 1 fire.
  • 1964 October 31: birdstrike : Theodore Freeman was killed when a goose smashed through the cockpit canopy of his T-38 jet trainer. Flying shards of Plexiglas entered the engine intake and caused the engine to flameout. Freeman ejected from the stricken aircraft, but was too close to the ground for his parachute to open properly.
  • 1966 February 28: crash on landing: The Gemini 9 crew, Elliott See and Charles Bassett, were killed while attempting to land their T-38 in bad weather. See misjudged his approach and crashed into the McDonnell aircraft factory.
  • 1967 January 27: fire on board: A fire claimed the lives of the Apollo 1 crew as they trained in their capsule. An electrical fault sparked the blaze that spread quickly in a pure oxygen atmosphere, killing Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee. This fire might have been prevented if NASA had known of Bondarenko's death, above.
  • 1967 October 5: controls failed: Clifton Williams died after a mechanical failure caused his T-38's controls to stop responding. He had been assigned to the back-up crew for what would be the Apollo 9 mission and would have most likely been assigned as Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 12. The Apollo 12 mission patch has four stars on it: one each for the three astronauts who flew the mission and one for Williams.
  • 1967 8 December: plane crash: Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. was named the first African-American astronaut for the U.S. Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, but he never made it into space. He died when his F-104 Starfighter jet crashed at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
  • 1968 March 27: plane crash: First man in space Yuri Gagarin died when his MiG-15 jet trainer crashed while he prepared for the Soyuz 3 mission. An official report at the time blamed either birdstrike or that he turned too fast to avoid something in the air. But in 2003 it came to light that the KGB had found that the official report was false and that the truth was negligence by an airforce colonel on the ground, who gave an out-of-date weather report; the flight needed good weather, but the cloud base was nearly at ground level. Since Gagarin was a hero the Soviet propaganda engine at that time found it bad publicity to have him killed in a mere training accident and so several newspapers printed the report that he actually died heroically testing a top-secret prototype. This again led to speculation amongst western conspiracy-proponents whether Gagarin had not died in hushed-up spacecraft accident (see Lost cosmonauts- conspiracy theory)

Near-fatalities

Apart from actual disasters, a number of missions resulted in some very near misses and also some training accidents that nearly resulted in deaths. In-flight near misses have included various reentry mishaps (in particular on Soyuz 5), the sinking of the Mercury 4 capsule, and the Voskhod 2 crew spending a night in dense forest surrounded by wolves. Additionally:

  • 1961 April 12: separation failure: During a flight of Vostok 1, after retrofire, the Vostok service module unexpectedly remained attached to the reentry module by a bundle of wires. The two halves of the craft were supposed to separate ten seconds after retrofire. But they did not separate until 10 minutes after retrofire, when the wire bundle finally burned through. The spacecraft had gone through wild gyrations at the beginning of reentry, before the wires burned through and the reentry module settled into the proper reentry attitude.
  • 1961 July 21: landing capsule sank in water: After Liberty Bell 7 splashed down in the Pacific, the hatch malfunctioned and blew, filling the capsule with water and almost drowning Gus Grissom, who managed to escape before it sank. Grissom then had to deal with a spacesuit that was rapidly filling with water, but managed to get into the helicopter's retrieval collar before he drowned and was lifted to safety.
  • 1965 March 18: spacesuit or airlock design fault: Voskhod 2 featured the world's first spacewalk, by Alexei Leonov. After his twelve minutes outside, Leonov's spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum to the point where he could not reenter the airlock. He opened a valve to allow some of the suit's pressure to bleed off, and was barely able to get back inside the capsule.
  • 1965 August 29: computer programming error: Gemini 5 landed 130 kilometers short of its planned Pacific Ocean landing point due to a software error. The Earth's rotation rate had been programmed as one revolution per solar day instead of the correct value, one revolution per sidereal day.
  • 1966 March 17: equipment failure: Gemini 8: A maneuvering thruster refused to shut down and put their capsule into an uncontrolled spin. The g-force became so intense the astronauts were possibly within seconds of blacking out when they regained control. By some measures the closest to an in-flight fatality until the Challenger disaster.
Test pilot Stuart Present ejects safely from the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle. Neil Armstrong also made such an ejection. (NASA)
  • Three of the five Lunar Landing Research and Training vehicles (LLRV & LLTV) were destroyed in crashes near Houston, Texas:
  • 1969 January 18: separation failure: the Soyuz 5 had a harrowing reentry and landing when the capsule's service module initially refused to separate, causing the spacecraft to begin reentry faced the wrong way. The service module broke away before the capsule would have been destroyed, and so it made a rough but survivable landing far off course in the Ural mountains.
  • 1969 November 14: lightning: The rocket that launched Apollo 12 was struck by lightning shortly after liftoff. Most Command and Service Module onboard systems were temporarily disabled, including navigation and guidance. The launch vehicle survived because the Saturn V had its own separate navigation and guidance unit, which wasn't affected.
  • 1970 April 14: explosion onboard: In the most celebrated "near miss", the Apollo 13 crew came home safely after an explosion crippled their spacecraft en route to the moon. They survived the loss of most of their spacecraft systems by relying on the Lunar Module to provide life support and power for the trip home.
    • Apollo 13 also had a close call during launch that almost resulted in a launch abort. It was overshadowed by later events. The second-stage center engine experienced violent pogo oscillations that luckily caused it to shut down early. The two-ton engine, solidly bolted to its massive thrust frame, was bouncing up and down at 68g. This was flexing the frame 3 inches (76 mm) at 16 Hz. After three seconds of these pogo oscillations the engine's "low chamber pressure" switch was tripped. The switch had not been designed to trip in this manner, but luckily it did. This led to the engine's automatic shutdown. If the pogo had continued, it could have torn the Saturn V apart.
  • 1971 January 23: helicopter crash: Gene Cernan was flying a helicopter as part of his Lunar Module training as Backup Commander for Apollo 14. The helicopter crashed into the Banana River at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Cernan nearly drowned because he was not wearing a life vest and received some second-degree burns on his face and singed hair. According to official reports at the time, the crash was the result of mechanical failure. Later accounts, written by Cernan himself in an autobiography, admit he was flying too low and showing off for nearby boaters. The helicopter dipped a skid into the water and crashed. James McDivitt, an Apollo Manager at the time, demanded that Cernan be removed from flight status and not be given Command of Apollo 17. Cernan was defended by Deke Slayton and given the Apollo 17 command. James McDivitt resigned as an Apollo Manager shortly after the Apollo 16 mission.
  • 1975 April 5: separation failure: The Soyuz 18a mission nearly ended in disaster when the rocket suffered a second-stage separation failure during launch. This also caused an attitude error that caused the vehicle to accelerate towards the Earth and triggered an emergency reentry sequence. Due to the downward acceleration, the crew experienced an acceleration of 21.3 g rather than the nominal 15 g for an abort. Upon landing, the vehicle rolled down a hill and stopped just short of a high cliff. The crew survived, but Lazarev, the mission commander, suffered internal injuries due to the severe G-forces and was never able to fly again.
  • 1975 July 24: gas poisoning on board: During final descent and parachute deployment for the Apollo Soyuz Test Project Command Module, the U.S. crew were exposed to 300 µL/L of toxic nitrogen tetroxide gas (RCS fuel) venting from the spacecraft and reentering a cabin air intake. A switch was left in the wrong position. 400µL/L is fatal. Vance Brand's heart stopped and was narrowly resuscitated. The crew members suffered from burning sensations of their eyes, faces, noses, throats and lungs. Thomas Stafford quickly broke out emergency oxygen masks and put one on Brand and gave one to Deke Slayton. The crew were exposed to the toxic gas from 24,000 ft (7.3 km) down to landing. About an hour after landing the crew developed chemical-induced pneumonia and their lungs had edema. They experienced shortness of breath and were hospitalized in Hawaii. The crew spent two weeks in the hospital. By July 30, their chest X-rays appeared to return to normal.
  • 1976 October 16: landing capsule sank in water: The Soyuz 23 capsule broke through the surface of a frozen lake and was dragged underwater by its parachute. The crew was saved after a very difficult rescue operation.
  • 1983September 26: fire in spacecraft: A Soyuz crew was saved by their escape system when the rocket that was to carry their Soyuz T-10-1 mission into space caught fire on the launchpad.
  • 1985 July 29: STS-51-F: Space Shuttle in-flight engine failure: Five minutes, 45 seconds into ascent, one of three shuttle main engines aboard Challenger shut down prematurely due to a spurious high temperature sensor. At about the same time, a second main engine almost shut down from a similar problem, but this was observed and inhibited by a fast acting flight controller. Had the second engine failed within about 20 seconds of the first, the shuttle would have ditched in the Atlantic, likely with loss of all aboard. No bailout option existed until after mission STS-51-L (Challenger disaster). The failed SSME resulted in an Abort To Orbit (ATO) trajectory, whereby the shuttle achieves a lower than planned orbital altitude.
  • 1988 September 5: sensor failure: Soyuz TM-5 cosmonauts Alexandr Lyakhov and Abdul Ahad Mohmand (from Afghanistan) undocked from Mir. They jettisoned the orbital module and got ready for the deorbit burn. The deorbit burn did not occur because the infrared horizon sensor could not confirm proper attitude. Seven minutes later, the correct attitude was achieved. The main engine fired, but Lyakhov shut it down after 3 seconds to prevent a landing overshoot. A second firing 3 hours later lasted only 6 seconds. Lyakhov immediately attempted to manually deorbit the craft, but the computer shut down the engine after 60 seconds. After three attempts at retrofire, the cosmonauts were forced to remain in orbit a further day, until they came into alignment with the targeted landing site again. Even if they had enough fuel to do so, they would not have been able to re-dock with Mir, because they had discarded the docking system along with the orbital module. The cosmonauts were left for a day in the cramped quarters of the descent module with minimal food and water and no sanitary facilities. Reentry occurred as normal on September 7, 1988.
  • 1997 February 23: fire onboard: There was a fire on board the Mir space station when a lithium perchlorate canister used to generate oxygen leaked. The fire was extinguished after about 90 seconds, but smoke did not clear for several minutes.
  • 1997 June 25: collision in space: At Mir during a re-docking test with the Progress-M 34 cargo freighter, the Progress collided with the Spektr module and solar arrays of the Mir space station. This damaged the solar arrays and the collision punctured a hole in Spektr module and the space station began depressurizing. The on-board crew of two Russians and one visiting NASA astronaut were able to close off the Spektr module from the rest of Mir after quickly cutting cables and hoses blocking hatch closure.
  • 1999 July 23: STS-93: main engine electrical short and hydrogen leak: Five seconds after liftoff, an electrical short knocked out controllers for two shuttle main engines. The engines automatically switched to their backup controllers. Had a further short shut down two engines, the orbiter would have ditched in the ocean, although the crew could have possibly bailed out. Concurrently a pin came loose inside one engine and ruptured a cooling line, allowing a hydrogen fuel leak. This caused premature fuel exhaustion, but the vehicle safely achieved a slightly lower orbit. Had the failure propagated further, a risky transatlantic or RTLS abort would have been required.

Shuttle incidents generally look unspectacular, but are no less life threatening. Many of the Shuttle launches prior to Challenger arguably constituted near misses—partial burn through of the O-ring material in the solid rocket boosters had occurred many times. It is also unclear how close the Shuttle has come to disaster with foam shedding prior to Columbia, all of them could conceivably be considered near misses. On one flight, wiring faults threatened to prevent the main tank from separating. The very first Shuttle flight STS-1 suffered significant losses of thermal protection tiles, which could have caused a Columbia-type reentry disaster. Fortunately none of them were in a sufficiently critical area. On the same flight a different thermal protection breach allowed hot gas to weaken a landing gear strut, which buckled on landing.

Ground crew and On-ground Civilian fatalities

Many spacecraft and their boosters have been destroyed in accidents on launchpads.
During building of Launch Complex 39 at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, there were two deaths:

Other deaths include:

  • 1964 April 14: While technicians worked on the Orbiting Solar Observatory, in an assembly room at Cape Canaveral, a Delta rocket's third-stage motor had just been mated to the spacecraft in preparation for some prelaunch tests. Suddenly the rocket ignited, filling the workroom with searing hot gases, burning 11 engineers and technicians, 3 of them fatally. An investigation following the accident showed that a spark of static electricity had probably set off the fuse that ignited the solid propellant. See NASA - Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science SP-4211
  • 1973 June 26: Nine technicians were killed in a launch pad accident at Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia.
  • 1980 March 18: 48 technicians were killed by an explosion while fueling a Vostok-2M booster at Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia.
  • 1981 March 19: anoxia: During preparations for STS-1, at the end of the 33-hour-long Shuttle Dry Countdown Demonstration Test, Columbia's aft engine compartment was under a nitrogen purge to prevent the buildup of oxygen and hydrogen gases from the propulsion system. Six technicians entered the aft engine compartment and five of the six lost consciousness due to the lack of oxygen in the compartment. Two died. John Gerald Bjornstad, a 50-year-old Rockwell employee, was pronounced dead at the scene, and Forrest Cole was brought to the hospital where he later died. The other four workmen were treated and released.
  • 1995 May 5: anoxia: The European Space Agency (ESA) lost two workers in a fatal accident at the Kourou Space Centre, Guiana, at the Ariane 5 launch facility. Luc Celle and Jean-Claude Dhainaut lost their lives during an inspection in the umbilical mast of the launchpad. A later report said, "...the cause of death was asphyxiation through inhalation of air having an excessively low oxygen content; the reduced oxygen content was due to a major nitrogen leak into the confined structure of the umbilical mast on the launch table; the nitrogen leak originated in a nitrogen/iced-water exchanger, whose drainage plug was found to be missing."
  • 1996 February 15: crashed on takeoff: A Long March 3B rocket veered off course two seconds after takeoff from Xichang Satellite Launch Center, crashing into a nearby village. The Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that 80 homes had been damaged with six people killed and 57 injured, but unofficial reports and videotape from people who visited the scene suggested much greater devastation and a significantly higher death toll.
  • 2001 October 1: Boeing worker Bill Brooks was killed in an industrial accident at Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 37. He was a crane operator involved in construction of the new Delta IV launch complex. The Delta IV launch site is being built at the location of the old Saturn IB launch complex.
  • 2002 October 15: explosion: A Soyuz U carrying a science payload began disintegrating 20 seconds after launch from Plesetsk, exploded nine seconds later and showered debris around the launch site. The explosion killed 20-year-old soldier Ivan Marchenko, who had been watching the launch from behind a large glass window in a processing facility a kilometer from the launchpad. Eight other soldiers who were with Marchenko were injured, six being hospitalized. Rocket fragments fell in the woods in the same area starting a forest fire, and a Block D strap-on booster which came off during disintegration impacted the launchpad, causing structural damage.
  • 2003 August 22: explosion: An unmanned rocket set to carry two satellites into orbit exploded on its launchpad in Brazil killing 21 technicians. See Brazilian rocket explosion.

Fatal accidents in which ground personnel were killed

Date Place Deaths Kind of disaster
May 17, 1930 Berlin, Germany 1 Max Valier killed by rocket engine explosion
October 10, 1933 Deutschland 3 Explosion in rocket manufacturing room of Tilling
July 16, 1934 Kummersdorf, Germany 3 Ground test engine explosion
1944? Tuchola Forest, Poland ? An A4-rocket crashes at a test launch in a trench, in which multiple soldiers were located. Several were killed
October 24, 1960 Baikonur, Kazakhstan 126 Explosion of R-16 ICBM on launch pad (not space related) (see Nedelin catastrophe).
April 14, 1964 Cape Canaveral, USA 3 Rocket ignited in assembly room
May 7, 1964 Braunlage, Germany 3 Mail rocket built by Gerhard Zucker exploded and debris hit crowd of spectators
July 2, 1964 Cape Canaveral, Florida 1 Fall
August 3, 1965 Cape Canaveral, Florida 1 Lightning
June 26, 1973 Plesetsk, Russia 9 Launch explosion
March 18, 1980 Plesetsk, Russia 48 Launch explosion
March 19, 1981 Cape Canaveral, Florida 2 Anoxia
May 5, 1995 Kourou Space Centre, Guiana 2 Anoxia
February 14, 1996 Xichang, China 6 Rocket crashed in village
October 1, 2001 Cape Canaveral, Florida 1 Industrial accident
October 15, 2002 Plesetsk, Russia 1 Launch explosion
August 22, 2003 Alcantara, Brazil 21 Explosion during launch preparations

Other accidents

  • 1960, May 15: Robert A. Heinlein wrote in his 1960 article "'Pravda' means 'Truth'" (reprinted in Expanded Universe) that while travelling in the Soviet Union, he was told by Red Army cadets that the Soviet Union had launched a man into orbit, but that later that day it was denied by officials and that no issues of the Pravda national newspaper could be found in Vilnius, Lithuania, or reportedly, other Soviet cities. Apparently there was an orbital launch (later said to be unmanned) on that day but the retro-rockets had fired while the vehicle was in the wrong attitude, so recovery efforts were unsuccessful. About a week before Gagarin's flight in April, 1961, there were also reports about a manned launch that had returned an injured cosmonaut, Vladimir Ilyushin. (It was later revealed that Ilyushin had been injured in an automobile accident.) According to Gagarin's biography, Starman, rumours of these two failed cosmonaut flights were likely started from two Vostok missions, equipped with dummies and tape recordings of the human voice (to check if the radio worked), that were made in the period just before Gagarin's flight. Frank Edwards, in an article claimed almost a dozen fatal spaceflights in the period before Vostok 1 and after. The Soviets, in a rather unusual move for them, released information while Gagarin was still in orbit probably because of the earlier rumors and he was tracked by several non-Soviet sources. This is rather odd if there had been an earlier accident.
  • 1960, October 24: explosion: A rocket exploded on a Soviet launchpad killing 126 people in what is known in the West as the Nedelin catastrophe. While once thought to have been space related (based on the little information available outside the Soviet Union), it later emerged that the accident was connected with the development of a new ICBM.

See also

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