This cheery article is brought to you by Charlie Schneider

Several thousand feet above the Earth, a single cosmonaut is trapped in his nineteenth orbit of the planet, spinning wildly. He tries to navigate by orienting his craft towards the Sun. The module – ‘Soyuz I’ – is destined to fail in every way imaginable: the shoddy solar panel has not extended, and the cosmonaut – a Soviet named Komarov – knows his craft runs desperately low on fuel.

He is not aware of this yet, but the parachute will not work. Upon descending, this will send him hurtling towards the ground at eight hundred and ninety miles per hour. When the Soviet officials find him, they will discover the searing heat has melted his corpse.

After the USSR launched a man – Yuri Gagarin – into space and successfully retrieved him in one fully-functioning not-dead piece, he became regarded as a national hero. This legendary feat made him a figurehead for the Soviets, who proudly showed him off as the first human to be sent up and sent down from space end survive the experience. The United States watches with envy. Their Cold War enemy has scored a victory against them.

Four years later, President John F Kennedy announces before Congress the intentions of the US to plant a man on the moon before the decade was out. The Space Race was on.

In those early years of pioneering space exploration, no ‘side’ showed any sort of technological advantage over the other. Whilst the Soviets struggled to design capsules with the same efficiency as the one Yuri Gagarin used (but make them go further), the USA mourned the deaths of the Apollo I astronauts who died when a fire ripped through their module during a ground test.

However, in the USSR, the cosmonauts and flight engineers who toiled to make their missions work (the spacemen themselves often working 14 hour days) formed very close bonds. Death in space exploration was – at this time – not just common but expected. The intense stress of their occupation solidified these platonic relationships.

One of the cosmonauts working on these missions was Vladimir Komarov, whose resume featured a distinguished career flying in the Soviet Air Force and as a cosmonaut on Voskhod I. He and Gagarin became close friends, the two overseeing the preparations for Voskhod II.

In 1967, the leader of the Soviet Union – Leonid Brezhnev – decided to stage a spectacular in-orbit display of the technological prowess of the USSR to celebrate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The plan was this: Soyuz I – with a man inside – would ascend to an orbital height near to midnight. Following this, Soyuz II would meet it, they would dock, the cosmonauts would then exchange places and return to Earth

Komarov inspected the Soyuz I capsule. He pointed out the size of the module hatch – it was too small for a person to pass through safely. Nothing was done. Komarov and the other cosmonauts became increasingly anxious about the lack of response to their fears.

Later the same year, Vladimir Komarov was appointed the commander of the Soyuz mission. The flight engineers taught him what he had to do.

Before the flight, Russian hero and close friend of Komarov’s Yuri Gagarin inspected the capsule. He spotted no fewer than 203 problems with the capsule. When he told the commanders, nothing was done. So he wrote a ten-page memo to the Soviet leader, Brezhnev, asking to postpone the flight, and gave it to his friends in the KGB. Nothing was done. The people who saw it were diplomatically isolated or demoted, and the note never made its way up the chain of command to Brezhnev.

One month before the launch, Komarov realised cancellation was impossible. He met with his now-demoted KGB friend, Russayev, and said, “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.”

“Why not simply refuse?” Russayev replied.

“If I don’t make this flight,” the cosmonaut replied, “they’ll send the backup pilot instead.”

And who was that backup pilot?

Yuri Gagarin.

“We have to keep him safe,” Komarov promised. He broke down in tears.

On the launch day of April 23rd 1967, Soyuz I left Earth with Komarov on board.

Problems began as soon as the module entered orbit. One solar panel did not deploy, and the craft lost power. Soyuz started spinning wildly, and Komarov made an attempt to control it. He reported, “Conditions are poor. The cabin parameters are normal, but the left solar panel didn’t deploy. The electrical bus is only at 13 to 14 amperes. The HF [high frequency] communications are not working. I cannot orient the spacecraft towards the Sun.”

On his nineteenth orbit of the Earth – after spinning for almost five hours – Komarov was ordered to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. He did this successfully. The parachute, however, did not deploy. At almost nine hundred miles an hour, Komarov hurtled towards the ground. At a nearby NSA listening post, radio engineers reportedly heard Komarov descending, cursing the Soviet scientists who killed him and Brezhnev who, ultimately, put him in the most difficult position it was possible to be put in: kill your friend, or die in his place.

His last words, according to some sources, were, “Heat is rising in the capsule.” The temperatures were so high that, when the Soviets recovered his fragmented remains, his body was molten, giving his corpse a dark, shrivelled up appearance.

If you are brave enough, you can listen to the eerie alleged recordings of Komarov plummeting towards to surface in his hectic descent, or see the blackened lump of nothing placed in an open casket. The charred thing the prominent Soviet officials parade around, fascinated, looks no more like a human body than a soot-stained rock or roasted wooden log. That is Komarov.

During this turbulent time in space history, death was so frequent that, two years after Komarov’s death and one year after Gagarin’s – in 1969 – the Nixon White House released a copy of the speech due to be given by the president in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became stranded on the moon and there was no hope for their recovery.

Even so, it is poignant that the last thing the Apollo astronauts did on the lunar surface was dedicate a plaque of remembrance to those who died so they may reach the moon – Grisson, White, Chaffee, the Apollo I astronauts – but also to the Soviets: Gagarin, who died in a plane crash the year previously, and Vladimir Komarov, the man forced to die in space.