This is a truly tragic story that illustrates a key problem of presidential advising (though it involves decision making in the Soviet Union). Leonid Breznev, the Soviet leader, wanted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Communist Revolution with an ambitious space flight, but the technicians involved in the flight - including the cosmonaut that would eventually die in it - were aware of literally hundreds of problems with the spacecraft. But no one in the leadership wanted to hear it, so the flight went on as scheduled, with the predicted result.
The plan was to launch a capsule, the Soyuz 1, with Komarov inside. The next day, a second vehicle would take off, with two additional cosmonauts; the two vehicles would meet, dock, Komarov would crawl from one vehicle to the other, exchanging places with a colleague, and come home in the second ship. It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen.
The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.
The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, "I'm not going to make it back from this flight."
This is not that unusual a story when it comes to presidential decision making. Sometimes they just make up their minds and shut themselves off from contrary opinions.
