He Knew He'd Die - April 24, 1967

On April 24, 1967, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov climbed into Soyuz 1  , a spacecraft engineers had flagged with 203 documented faults  , and did not come home. Most accounts call it a parachute failure. The fuller story is about a safety report that was buried, a political calendar that couldn't be moved, and a man who may have flown a doomed mission to protect his best friend. This episode examines what courage looks like when the system has already made its decision and why the pattern that killed Komarov kept killing people for decades afterward.