Valentin Bondarenko, cosmonaut, born 1937

Valentin Bondarenko, born February 16, 1937 in Ukraine, was an ill-fated cosmonaut in the early years of the Soviet space program.  He attended an Air Force college and became a pilot, rising to the rank of Senior Lieutenant in 1959.

The next year, he was selected as a cosmonaut in 1960.  On March 23, 1961, Day 10 of a 15-day endurance test, Bondarenko was in a low pressure altitude chamber with an atmosphere of at least 50% oxygen.  He removed some monitoring biosensors attached to his body, and washed off his skin with a cotton ball that had been soaked in alcohol.  He threw the cotton ball away but it landed on a hot plate, which he was using to brew tea.  The cotton ignited.  Bondarenko tried to smother the flames but the sleeves of his coveralls were wool, and also caught fire in the oxygen-rich atmosphere.

It took the monitoring doctor almost half an hour to open the chamber because of the pressure difference.  By that time, Bondarenko's clothing had burned until all the oxygen had been depleted and he had suffered third-degree burns over most of his body, only the soles of his feet were spared, since his boots had protected them from the flames. 

Yuri Gagarin served as a 'deathwatch officer' for several hours until Bondarenko died of shock 16 hours after the accident.  Less than three weeks later, Gagarin made his his historic Vostok 1 flight.

The news and circumstances of Bondarenko's death were not released at the time and the Soviets even went so far as to air-brush him out of pictures, since he had already appeared in group photos and films.  Details of his death were finally made public about 1980.

There has been speculation that if the Soviets had released information surrounding Bondarenko's death in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, the same fate would not have happened to the Apollo 1 crew.  However, NASA was fully aware of the dangers of 100% oxygen atmospheres by 1966.

So if NASA knew about the dangers, why did they not do something to prevent it?  Did they gamble with the astronauts' lives?  Did they feel it wasn't necessary to change the atmosphere, because they thought something like that would never happen?

What do you think?

As with Chaffee, Apollo 1 astronaut whose birthday we celebrated yesterday, a crater on the far side of the moon has been named for Bondarenko.