Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

Soyuz spacecraft rendezvous, docking system
Vladimir Komarov's loyal comrades laid his remains to rest in the Kremlin Wall two
days later. It was a sombre and chilling occasion, an unwelcome reminder of the real
costs of the moon race. As the bands played the haunting Chopin funeral march the
grim-faced and tight-lipped cosmonaut corps, now diminished to nine men and one
woman, swore that the programme must go on relentlessly.
The consensus afterwards was that the whole mission had been rushed before
Soyuz was really ready. It was apparent that Komarov had behaved masterfully in
steering Soyuz successfully through reentry against all the odds. The failure in the
parachute system was quite unrelated to the many problems that had arisen in the
flight up to that time. The system for sealing the parachute container was defective,
making the parachute likely to stick as it came out. This left the investigators with the
chilling conclusion that if Soyuz 2 had been successfully launched, it too would have