Death
23 March 1961 was the tenth day of a 15-day endurance experiment in a low pressure altitude chamber at the Institute for Biomedical Studies in Moscow. The chamber's atmosphere was at least 50% oxygen. Bondarenko, having completed work for the day, removed some monitoring biosensors from his body and washed his skin with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball, which he then carelessly threw away. The cotton ball landed on an electric hot plate which he was using to brew a cup of tea. The cotton ignited and Bondarenko tried to smother the flames with the sleeve of his woolen coveralls, which caught on fire in the chamber's oxygen-rich atmosphere.
Because of the pressure difference, it took a watching doctor nearly half an hour to open the chamber door. Bondarenko's clothing burned until almost all the oxygen in the chamber was used up and he had suffered third-degree burns over most of his body. The attending physician at Botkina Hospital, surgeon and traumatologist Vladimir Golyakhovsky, recalled in 1984 that while attempting to start an intravenous drip, the only blood vessels he could find for inserting a needle were on the soles of Bondarenko's feet, where his flight boots had warded off the flames. According to Golyakhovsky, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin spent several hours at the hospital as "deathwatch officer" and Bondarenko died of shock 16 hours after the accident, less than three weeks before Gagarin's historic spaceflight. Manned orbital flight program director Nikolai Kamanin blamed Bondarenko's death on the Institute's poor organisation and control of the experiment.
Bondarenko was buried in Lipovaya Roshcha in Kharkiv, where his parents were then living. On 17 June 1961 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR posthumously awarded Bondarenko the Order of the Red Star. After his death Bondarenko's young wife Anya stayed on for a time at the cosmonaut centre in an undisclosed job. Bondarenko's only child Aleksandr (Sasha) was five years old when his father died and later became an air force officer.
Read more about this topic: Valentin Bondarenko
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“The death clock is ticking slowly in our breast, and each drop of blood measures its time, and our life is a lingering fever.”
—Georg Büchner (1813–1837)
“If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“We often see malefactors, when they are led to execution, put on resolution and a contempt of death which, in truth, is nothing else but fearing to look it in the face—so that this pretended bravery may very truly be said to do the same good office to their mind that the blindfold does to their eyes.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)