Nedelin disaster was a launch pad accident that occurred on 24 October 1960 at Baikonur test range, during the development of the Soviet R-16 ICBM. An explosion occurred when the second stage engine ignited accidentally, killing an unknown number of military and technical personnel working on the preparations. The disaster is named after Chief marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin, who was killed in the explosion.
About Nedelin catastrophe in brief
The Nedelin catastrophe or Nedelin disaster was a launch pad accident that occurred on 24 October 1960 at Baikonur test range, during the development of the Soviet R-16 ICBM. As a prototype of the missile was being prepared for a test flight, an explosion occurred when the second stage engine ignited accidentally, killing an unknown number of military and technical personnel working on the preparations. The disaster is named after Chief marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin, who was killed in the explosion. Despite the magnitude of the disaster, news of it was suppressed for many years and the Soviet government did not acknowledge the event until 1989.
The exact death toll of the explosion is not known. The first Western reporting of the accident via the Italian Continentale News Agency in December said that 100 people were killed, while The Guardian reported in 1965, citing information from spy Oleg Penkovsky who had passed information to the West, that as many as 300 had died. The most recent estimated death toll, released by Roscosmos on the 50th anniversary of the incident, was that 126 people had died, but the agency qualified the number by saying that the actual number could be anywhere from 60 to 150 dead.
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This page is based on the article Nedelin catastrophe published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 25, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
