22.04.1967

Vladimir Komarov is the first cosmonaut in the history of mankind who died during a flight. In April 1967, he became the pilot of the Soyuz-1. The new spacecraft was unfinished, engineers counted 203 technical problems in it. The haste of the launch was explained by the desire of the USSR leadership to reach the Moon before NASA and to time the achievement to the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. Komarov, among other things, volunteered to pilot Soyuz-1, so that his life was not risked by his best friend and understudy in the preparation of the flight - Yuri Gagarin. The novel will focus on the date of April 24, 1967, when Vladimir Komarov crashed while returning the spacecraft to Earth. The tragic events surrounding the flight will be told from different perspectives. Each chapter will have a new protagonist: Vladimir Komarov himself, his eight-year-old daughter Irochka and wife Valentina, as well as Yuri Gagarin, Leonid Brezhnev, the head of the space program Nikolai Kamanin, a random Soviet citizen, one of the American astronauts, and so on. The task of "24.04.1967" is to detail the circumstances of the life, flight and death of the first man who did not return from space. An epilogue and three chapters - about Vladimir Komarov's eight-year-old daughter Irochka, about the head of training of the first Soviet cosmonauts Kamanin and about Yuri Gagarin - are provided as a master's thesis.