Why Soviet Soyuz 11 Came Back With a Dead Crew

Soyuz 11 landed perfectly on the Kazakh steppe in 1971 with a world-record crew aboard, so why did the recovery team open the hatch and find all three men dead? It starts with the first space station, Salyut 1, and a crew swapped three days before launch. Then comes a record 23-day stay, a flawless automatic landing, and a descent where twelve explosive bolts fired at once and shook a small valve open 168 kilometres up. The three men were not wearing pressure suits. You come away knowing the three links in the chain, why the cabin lost its air in under two minutes, and what the Soviet Union changed afterward. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Perfect Landing 0:35 Three Things Came Together 1:24 Salyut 1, the First Space Station 2:11 The Crew Swap 3:13 Launch From Baikonur 3:40 Life on the Station 5:06 Undocking and the Return 5:50 Separation at 168 Kilometres 6:52 Under Two Minutes 7:30 Problem One: No Pressure Suits 8:09 Problem Two: The Bolts 8:33 Problem Three: The Valve 9:21 Landing and the Silence 10:16 The State Funeral 10:57 Bad Luck or Design Flaw? 11:52 What Changed Afterward 12:46 Why It Happened ARCHIVE FOOTAGE Retro Space HD, AP Archive, British Movietone, PeriscopeFilm, Rocket Science (Roscosmos TV). MUSIC Music from Mixkit. KEYWORDS soyuz 11,soyuz 11 disaster,soyuz 11 crew,soyuz 11 depressurization,why soyuz 11 crew died,salyut 1,first space station,georgy dobrovolsky,vladislav volkov,viktor patsayev,soviet space program,cosmonauts died in space,only deaths in space,pressure suits,explosive bolts,ventilation valve,cold war space race,space disasters,failed machines,machines that failed,engineering disasters,engineering documentary