The World : Soviet Space Accident Told

The Soviet Union ended decades of secrecy by opening the Plesetsk Space Center, the world’s busiest spaceport, to foreign journalists and revealing one of the worst disasters of the space age--the 1980 explosion of a rocket during refueling that it said killed 50 people. Moscow-based correspondents were invited to the military facility 530 miles north of the Soviet capital to observe back-to-back launches of a Soviet television satellite and an East Bloc research probe. The previously unreported disaster occurred in March, 1980, when a Vostok rocket exploded while being fueled on the launching pad. Forty-five people, mostly Soviet army inductees, were killed at the scene. Five other men, who suffered burns over 90% of their bodies, died after being hospitalized.