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Here's a look at space accidents that have affected astronauts or other spaceflight-related personnel. Accidents involving unmanned spacecraft are not included.
October 24, 1960 – The first space-related deaths occur when a rocket explodes at the Soviet Union's Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan, killing 165 people, including Air Marshal Mitrofan I. Nedelin, head of the Soviet rocket forces. The accident was officially denied until 1990.
March 23, 1961 – Russian cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko dies during a routine training exercise. Bondarenko is in a pressure chamber for a routine eight-day isolation test when he discards a cotton ball used to rub a sensor on his body. The cotton ball hits a hot plate used for cooking and catches fire in the oxygen-rich atmosphere. The fire is not revealed to the public until 25 years later.
July 21, 1961 – USAF Captain Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom's Mercury capsule sinks in an ocean landing after an explosion destroys the escape hatch prematurely. Swim safely from the capsule.
January 27, 1967 – Three American astronauts die in a fire during a US Apollo 1 launch rehearsal: USAF Lt. Col. Gus Grissom, USAF Lt. Col. Edward Higgins White, and USAF Lt. Commander Roger B. Chaffee . The fire causes a 20-month delay in the first manned Apollo flight. It is believed to have been caused by a spark from faulty electrical wiring.
April 1967 – Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies while returning to Earth after a successful orbit of Earth with Soyuz 1 when the main parachute fails to open.
February 1969 – The Soviet Union's N1 lunar booster explodes during its first test flight, killing 91 people on the ground. The accident was not made public until 1995.
April 13, 1970 – The US Apollo 13 lunar mission loses the use of an oxygen tank needed to supply air and power. The three-man crew successfully uses the lunar module as a lifeboat, orbits the Moon, and then returns safely to Earth. This is the first in-flight failure of the US space program.
June 1971 – Soviet cosmonauts Georgi Dobrovolsky, Victor Patsayev and Vladislav Volkov are found dead in their Soyuz 11 spacecraft after an apparently normal landing. It is later determined that a depressurization caused the cosmonauts to suffocate.
March 1980 – Fifty-one engineers are killed when a Vostok rocket explodes on the Soviet Union's launch pad.
March 1981 – Two workers die in a nitrogen-filled compartment of the space shuttle Columbia during a launch rehearsal.
April 1981 – Columbia's first test launch, in April 1981, stops in the final seconds of the countdown and is delayed two days due to a software problem. Once it takes off, everything works except the bathroom, which becomes a chronic problem.
September 27, 1983 – A Soviet Soyuz T-10 booster rocket explodes shortly after takeoff. Crew members evacuate using an emergency rocket that parachutes back to Earth.
January 28, 1986 – Seven crew members aboard the space shuttle Challenger are killed when the spacecraft explodes shortly after takeoff. Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Dick Scobee, and Michael Smith die in the explosion, caused by the failure of O-rings in the right solid booster of the shuttle rocket.
January 26, 1995 – A Chinese Long March rocket explodes on its launch pad, killing six people and injuring 23 others. The accident is later determined to have been caused by wind shear.
April 8, 1997 – The space shuttle Columbia interrupts its mission 12 days early due to equipment problems. One of the shuttle's fuel cells showed signs of malfunction.
June 25, 1997 – During a docking exercise, an unmanned cargo ship crashes into Mir, disrupting the station's power supply and partially depressurizing the living quarters. The three crew members, two Russians and one American, were not injured.
February 1, 2003 – The space shuttle Columbia detours about 38 miles over east Texas on its return to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Seven astronauts die. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board determines that the cause of the accident was a piece of foam insulation that broke off and opened a hole in the leading edge of the left wing less than two minutes into the flight.
July 25, 2007 – Three Scaled Composites, LLC employees die in explosion during routine test for Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, a commercial spacecraft. Virgin Galactic is the space tourism start-up founded by Richard Branson.
July 16, 2013 – During a spacewalk outside the International Space Station, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano reports a failure in the carbon dioxide sensor in his suit. Between 1 and 1.5 liters of water accumulate inside the suit and helmet, especially near the eyes and ears. He is able to return to the airlock and emerges unharmed.
October 31, 2014 – Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashes during a test flight in the Mojave Desert, killing co-pilot Michael Tyner Alsbury and injuring co-pilot Peter Siebold, employees of Scaled Composites, LLC.
October 11, 2018 – A Soyuz rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin to the International Space Station experiences an emergency landing following a booster failure. Investigations later revealed that damage to a sensor during rocket assembly caused the malfunction that forced the spacecraft to make a ballistic landing.
