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Soyuz 7K-T No. 61

INSIDER CONTENT

Soyuz-14

Cosmonauts escape a close call at launch

On April 5, 1975, a Soviet crew went through a near-death experience when their rocket failed just short of orbital velocity, triggering dangerous fall back to Earth and a risky recovery operation in the mountainous terrain near the hostile border with China.

Previous chapter: Soyuz-17 mission

Soyuz-18-1 mission at a glance:

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The successful return of the first expedition from the Salyut-4 space station on Feb. 9, 1975, opened the door to the second crew to visit the station. At that time, three pairs of cosmonauts were training for the flight:

• Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov;
• Petr Klimuk and Vitaly Sevastyanov;
• Vladimir Kovalenok and Yuri Ponomarev.

Simultaneously, the two-seat Soyuz 7K-T No. 39 transport ship was being prepared for carrying the fresh expedition to the station. (231)

After a months-long passive flight, Salyut-4 maneuvered on March 22, 1975, to a 343 by 356-kilometer orbit. Between, March 31 and April 1, the station's orbit was further fine-tuned, clearly hinting to the watchers of the secretive Soviet space program at an imminent launch to the outpost. Based on the launch date of April 5, 1975, an independent analysis showed a landing window for the mission between May 26 and June 7, 1975, which would make an expedition lasting between 51 and 63 days. (50)

Second expedition to Salyut aborted during orbital ascent

Customary for the Soviet period, Soyuz 7K-T No 39 lifted off without any prior announcement on April 5, 1975, at 14:04:54 Moscow Time, from Site 1 in Tyuratam. Inside the Descent Module, cosmonauts Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov initially experienced a normal ride uphill, including the separation of the first stage, which they felt with some drop in acceleration force. Both were well familiar with the feels and sounds of the launch after their ride to orbit aboard Soyuz-12 just 1.5 years earlier.

One Russian source, quoting Lazarev, later claimed that he felt increasing oscillations during the second stage burn which he did not remember from his first launch. Lazarev was reportedly convinced that something was wrong at least 10 seconds before the problem manifested itself on the control panel in the cockpit. (245)

Then, around five minutes into the flight, as the cosmonauts were expecting the ignition of the third stage and the separation of the second stage, Makarov remembered hearing a sudden engine shutdown, followed by the sound of a siren, along with the "launch vehicle failure" signal coming on the control console. The cosmonauts felt a sharp jolt and saw a flare of sunlight rushing across the cockpit.

According to Makarov, it took him and his commander a few seconds to realize that some kind of failure in the rocket had prompted the emergency separation of the spacecraft. The cosmonauts attempted to contact ground control but heard nothing. As they learned later, the crew calls had been received in mission control and Petr Klimuk, Lazarev's backup then sitting at the microphone on the ground kept calling them back, but for some reason, the uplink communications were not going through.

On top of their concerns about the situation with their spacecraft, Makarov and Lazarev now had to worry about landing in hostile territory, because an abort at this point in the ascent meant a potential touchdown in China, with whom the Soviet Union had tittered on the brink of war since the 1960s. While the cosmonauts were trying to figure out their situation, the weightlessness in the cabin transitioned to the onset of g-forces, as the Descent Module reentered the dense atmosphere and began deceleration. The cosmonauts were trained for heavy loads, but not those they were about to experience. The escalating pressure on the body caused them to start losing eyesight and they were near unconscious when after several long minutes in a state of a delirium, g-loads started subsiding. As instructed during training, they were trying to scream to relieve pressure, but "our screams were resembling groaning," Makarov remembered.

As the cosmonauts were getting back to their senses, they heard the activation of the parachute system and then the touchdown, followed by some shaking of the capsule, before it finally came to rest. They quickly opened the hatch and climbed out of the vehicle and found themselves on the slope of the mountain covered with 1.5 meters of snow. Around half an hour earlier, they had lifted off from Tyuratam at +25 degrees, and now they were in severe winter conditions.

Recovery operations

Mission control established that during the ignition of the third stage, the safety monitoring sensors aboard the rocket issued the "Avariya" (emergency) signal at L+295 seconds into the flight. This command activated the escape sequence, which separated the spacecraft from the third stage and then split the Descent Module with the crew from the Habitation Module and the Aggregate Module. The Descent Module was then put into a normal reentry routine for landing.

The touchdown site was projected to be in the Altai Mountains near the intersection of the Soviet, Chinese and Mongolian borders, but it was up to the search and rescue teams to pinpoint the exact landing location and to evacuate the crew. (52)

Routinely for Soyuz missions, around an hour before liftoff, several An-12 aircraft of the search and rescue service took into the air and climbed to around 10 kilometers. Then, around 20 minutes before liftoff, several helicopters joined in at lower altitudes. As remembered by veteran of rescue service Iosif Davydov, who was aboard a Mi-6 helicopter that day, to the surprise of his search teams, the time of the launch came and went, but the order to return to the base had not come as expected around 20 minutes later. After some circles over the Kazakh city of Karaganda downrange from the launch site, the helicopters were instructed to head to Semipalatinsk, further east from the launch site. It was clear to everybody onboard that there had been some kind of launch accident, but nobody among rescuers knew exactly what had happened.

After around an hour of flight eastward, the pilot of the helicopter with Davydov onboard stuck his head into the passenger cabin and shouted, " They are alive, hanging at the edge of a cliff in the mountains."

By the time the helicopters approached Semipalatinsk, the weather worsened, with heavy snow restricting visibility. When the rescuers landed at the military airfield in Semipalatinsk, they were met with temperature of –17C degrees. Here, they found out that the spacecraft had made an emergency landing near the town of Aleisk, some 320 kilometers from the Chinese border.

By that time, the crew of the An-12 rescue aircraft had established and maintained radio contact with the crew, relaying the communications to the make-shift headquarters of recovery operations established at the Semipalatinsk airfield.

According to the cosmonauts, the Descent Module landed at the very edge of a canyon and did not roll down the slope only because the canopy of its parachute was tangled in the trees. The cosmonauts reported that they had removed their suits, changed into the TZK-10 rescue suits and donned Forel hydro-suits.

Using their emergency kit, they made a fire on a piece of thermal shielding which had fallen off from their capsule.

As dusk approached, the circling An-12 aircraft began preparing their rescue teams, which included doctors, for parachuting into the landing area. However, Vasily Lazarev, himself a parachute instructor, vehemently objected to the operation, citing strong wind that he estimated at 15 meters per second, and extremely difficult terrain for parachute landing. "Nobody will make it to us and somebody might also die... We will make it somehow until morning, when it will be possible to climb into a helicopter," he argued.

The rescue operation was cancelled until the next day, but throughout the night, An-12 planes were taking turns over the landing site, watching the cosmonaut's small fire near the capsule, periodically communicating with the crew and relaying information to Moscow, while officials at Semipalatinsk were plotting various extraction scenarios. Davydov and his colleague doctor Anatoly Chikanov were preparing to use a helicopter to winch themselves down to the landing site to assist the cosmonauts with climbing to a hovering chopper.

By the morning of April 6, the chief inspector of helicopter piloting from the Air Force arrived to Semipalatinsk from Moscow to lead the rescue teams to the landing site, which was determined to be at an elevation of 1,200 meters, near a point called Teremok-3.

As the helicopter was making passes over the site, Makarov fired an orange flare signal which helped pilots with determining the wind direction.

When the lead pilot attempted to hover over the site, his aircraft experienced a sudden drop in altitude and he had to quickly climb, canceling all further attempts. Instead, a decision was made to deploy a rescue group with equipment on the ice of the Uba River at the base of the mountain. That operation was successful, but the subsequent attempt for a direct assault of the maintain slope nearly ended in disaster. The inexperienced climbers caused an avalanche which immediately buried the entire group. Fortunately, a second group of rescuers, still remaining on the ice, came to the rescue and dug out everybody alive.

In the meantime, a smaller Mi-4 helicopter from a near-by geological survey group hovered without much trouble over the landing site, however, its crew was categorically prohibited from letting the cosmonauts to climb into their hovering helicopter. Instead, a forest ranger aboard the helicopter descended to the ground, though he could do little besides offering the cosmonauts a cigarette from a cigarette case in his jacket.

After apparently some hot deliberations at different levels of the military and the Communist Party hierarchy, a helicopter from the Siberian Military District appeared over the site and successfully winched up the forest ranger and the cosmonauts aboard. The crew then flew back to Tyuratam. (245)

Failure analysis

The post-accident investigation found that at L+288.6 seconds in flight, the nominal engine cutoff on the second stage of the Soyuz rocket was accompanied by a premature signal from the flight control system of the launch vehicle to open the cross-section interface between the third stage and its aft skirt. (Normally, the aft skirt would split into three sections and separate from the third stage moments after the separation of the second stage, not before). The erroneous command was sent to only three out of six locks holding the tail section and (the still-attached second stage), but as the main engine of the third stage began developing thrust, the still-locked latches were broken by structural loads and at L+290.6 seconds and the two boosters separated. The unscheduled parting of the second stage violently pushed the third stage with the attached Soyuz. The telemetry registered the roll motion at a rate of 20 degrees per second and five degrees per second in two other axis. As a result, the vehicle exceeded the allowable attitude control limits and, as soon as the pre-programmed blockage of the emergency command was lifted after the stage separation, it triggered the emergency landing sequence. (52)

The 6,830-kilogram spacecraft reached a peak altitude of 192 kilometers, before starting reentry and, when landed, it reached a distance of 1,574 kilometers from its liftoff point. (50, 2)

The official history of RKK Energia characterized the culprit in the premature separation command as a "podrabatyvanie" (underworking) of the relay switch within the flight control system, which can be interpreted as a some kind of stray or unintended operation of the device. The device was urgently upgraded.

The post-accident analysis also revealed that the crew experienced g-loads reaching 21.3, far more than the acceptable maximum of 15, because the chaotic rotation of the vehicle turned the Descent Module into such a position that it was reentering the atmosphere with a downward aerodynamic pressure, instead of the lifting force it was designed to generate. Due to the potential risk associated with such a failure, the Soyuz flight control algorithms were updated to put the capsule into a ballistic mode (without lifting force) in case of faulty orientation of the Descent Module at reentry. (52)

On April 6, 1975, or around 24 hours after the accident, the Soviet TASS news agency issued a statement with an unprecedented admission of the Soyuz launch failure. It said that during the third-stage operation, the rocket had deviated from its prescribed path triggering an automated separation of the spacecraft for the return to Earth. The statement also disclosed that the Descent Module had made a soft landing near the town of Gorno-Altaysk in Western Siberia and that cosmonauts Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov were returned to the cosmodrome in good health. (50)

It is not exactly clear why the Soviet authorities decided to make the fact of the accident public, since a suborbital ballistic flight could easily be concealed unlike any orbital mission which would almost universally be tracked by foreign radar after its first full orbit. According to one hypothesis, Soviet officials were concerned that during ongoing preparations for the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission, involving multiple contacts between the American and Soviet space officials, rumors could start circulating, souring the atmosphere around the upcoming historic flight. A complete denial of the accident could lead to a lack of trust between the two sides especially when it involved the performance of a system directly involved in the joint flight.

Despite this significant disclosure, the failed Soyuz launch was never assigned an official number, creating a confusion for the history books. (52) The aborted launch was sometimes referred to as Soyuz-18-1 in some Soviet sources or as Soyuz-18A in mostly Western publications to distinguish it from the subsequent successful launch, which was officially named Soyuz-18. (2)

Next page: Soyuz 7K-S

The article by Anatoly Zak; Last update: April 9, 2025

Page editor: Alain Chabot; Last edit: April 5, 2025

All rights reserved

Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Maakarov during training.

A traditional meeting of the State Commission on the eve of the Soyuz-18-1 launch.

Vasily Lazarev reports to the chairman of the State Commission about the crew's readiness for flight on the launch pad on April 5, 1975.

Makarov and Lazarev inside the Soyuz-18 spacecraft before launch.

Soyuz-18-1 lifts off on April 5, 1975.

A possible view of the Soyuz-18-1 landing site.