re: Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire

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Supposedly there is an audio recording of a Russian cosmonaught as he was falling back down to earth and he was cussing everyone out.

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Last month, I read a book that recounted the horrendous death in 1967 of Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. The story amazed me. I described it this way:

"So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die. The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, 'cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.'"

That's roughly the story I read in Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, a new edition of which was released last month in the United States. In my post, I said, "This version (of Komarov's death) — if it's true — is beyond shocking."

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