Soyuz 5 – Russia’s Apollo 13

The heroic stories of America’s space race have been etched in our collective history: the moon landing, the miraculous story of Apollo 13 and the tragedies of Apollo 1, Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia to name but a few. However, the stories behind the Russian space program have been hidden from sight, particularly those that do not reflect well on Soviet technological superiority. Today marks the 40th anniversary of perhaps the most extraordinary story of a Russian cosmonaut beating the odds against him.

Soyuz 5 was launched on January 15th 1969. It is remembered from that time as part of the first successful docking of two spacecraft in space, when it successfully linked up with Soyuz 4. Of the crew three man crew of the craft, cosmonauts Alexei Yeliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov transferred to Soyuz 4 and returned to Earth without a hitch, leaving Boris Volynov to bring back Soyuz 5 by himself. This is all anyone in the West knew of the mission until 1997 when the secret broke of Volynov’s remarkable return home.

On January 18th 1969, Volynov prepared for the return to Earth. A crucial stage of the process was jettisoning the equipment module of the spacecraft. Volynov completed the procedure, firing the explosive bolts which were meant to detach it, but to his horror it remained attached to his tiny descent module.

As we know from the fate of the Columbia space shuttle, re-entry to earth’s atmosphere generates so much heat, around 5000 degrees centigrade, that without a fully intact, specially designed heat shield, burn up of the spacecraft is inevitable. Unfortunately for Volynov, the heat-shield was located between the still-connected descent- and equipment-modules. There was no way of separating the two, and Volynov had already taken the irreversible steps towards re-entry. Knowing the inescapable fate of the pilot, the team in the Soviet Mission Control HQ started a collection for Volynov’s wife. Volynov, however, did not give up hope. He continued to go through the re-entry protocol as per his training, making meticulous notes as he did so.

As the craft came into contact with the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere it settled into position with the wrong end of the descent module, the thinnest part of the shell, taking the brunt of the heat generated from re-entry. It stood no chance of withstanding the enormous stresses, and as it heated up the fuel tanks exploded and the heat started to melt the seals on the hatch, filling Volynov’s cabin with noxious gases. As the door distorted inwards towards him, he knew he only had a matter of seconds to live.

Fortunately for Volynov, the effects of the extreme temperature were also being felt elsewhere on the spacecraft. Just before the hatch would have given way, the flames licking around the descent module caused the equipment module to be dislodged. Instantly, the craft righted itself, with the heat shield taking the brunt of the heat of re-entry as it was designed to do.

This was just the start of Volynov’s misadventures, however. The fuel from the the thrusters to control his descent had now been lost, and the lines of his parachute had become tangled. He was heading for a landing hundreds of miles off course at a dangerously high speed. The parachute engaged just enough to slow his landing, but not enough to prevent him being ejected from his seat and crashing into the opposite wall of his craft head-first and at such a speed that he lost all his front teeth upon impact.

No better news awaited him as he opened his hatch. He had crashed into the icy heights of the Ural Mountains. In temperatures of around minus thirty degrees centigrade without cold weather wear he would not last long. He knew he was so far off course that he could not rely upon rescue crews to find him before he perished from the cold. Surveying the horizon, he observed a column of smoke, and decided to head for it. Only a few kilometres away, he arrived at a cottage, where the peasants fed and took care of him until the rescuers, following the tracks and spits of blood in the snow, found him.

Remarkably, Volynov was not put off by this experience and returned to space in 1976 on board Soyuz 21 to spend 18 days in space station Salyut 5. This mission was also not without incident. His fellow cosmonaut Vitaliyi Zholubov was taken ill early on in the mission, and the decision was taken for the craft to return to earth. When Volynov completed the protocols to detach Soyuz 21 from the space station, the craft did not budge. He received emergency procedures from Mission Control, but still it refused to detach from the space station. For one entire orbit of the earth the two cosmonauts waited for the final set of emergency procedures to be received. They followed the necessary steps and the craft disengaged. Because of the unexpectedly early return, the conditions for landing were not optimal and Volynov had to endure another bumpy landing, but nothing as bad as his previous return.