Valentin Bondarenko - Aftermath

Aftermath

News of Bondarenko's accident and death was not published at the time. Bondarenko had already appeared in group films and photos of the first cosmonaut group, and his unexplained disappearance sparked rumours of cosmonauts dying in failed launches. In 1980 the details of this incident were at last published in the West, and in 1986 Izvestia published an article by science writer Yaroslav Golovanov, detailing the incident for Soviet readers.

James Oberg, in his book Red Star in Orbit, wrote how the Soviet government airbrushed out the cosmonaut's image from an official 1961 photograph of the first six cosmonauts selected for training, while British researcher Rex Hall showed that five people had been erased from an earlier group photograph of 16 cosmonauts. Clumsy attempts were later made to further doctor the historic photographs, with the insertion of imaginative but nonexistent photo details to account for the absence of the original members of the group.

Bondarenko's death was caused by fire in a sealed, high-oxygen environment, which also befell the crew of Apollo 1. There was some later speculation that, had the Soviets been open about the Bondarenko tragedy, NASA might have been alerted to the hazardous design of the early Apollo command module and would have made changes which could have prevented the 1967 deaths of the three Apollo 1 crew members. However, by 1966 the lethal hazards of a high-pressure 100-percent-oxygen environment such as Apollo 1's had been thoroughly described in American scientific publications.