Penloom History · The stories they left out
Baikonur, 24 October 1960
He did not die in a plane crash. He was sitting twenty metres from a fuelled intercontinental missile when it fired downwards.
The Soviet Union was rushing the first test of the R-16 intercontinental missile so it would fly before the November anniversary. It stood fully fuelled with nitric acid and hydrazine fuel, which ignite on contact. Faults were found; draining and refuelling would have cost weeks.
So Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces, ordered the repairs done on the pad with the propellant aboard, some 250 people around the rocket, and sat down twenty metres away to watch. A programmed switch was reset with the power live. The second stage fired straight down through the first stage's tanks.
Disputed — automatic pad cameras filmed it. The 1994 Russian state commission put the dead at seventy-eight; other accounts run as high as 126. We give you both because nobody has reconciled them.
At the time the Soviet government announced that Marshal Nedelin had died in an aircraft accident. The truth was not printed anywhere until 1989.
Part of this story is labelled DISPUTED above, in the paragraph it belongs to. We label rather than cut: a claim the record does not carry is still part of how the story was told, and you are entitled to know which part is which.
Penloom History — dark history you can trust. Every claim traced to a named archive, monograph, report or paper, and everything the record does not carry labelled where it sits. How we check a history fact before we repeat it →