Soyuz 7K-OK

Mission Profile

Soyuz 7K-OK was the original production variant of the Soyuz crewed spacecraft, the foundational design from which all subsequent Soyuz variants descended. First launched unmanned on 28 November 1966, it suffered a catastrophic failure on Soyuz 1 in April 1967 when the parachute system malfunctioned and killed cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, becoming the first human spaceflight fatality in flight. Despite this tragedy, the 7K-OK design was refined and successfully conducted the first automatic docking of two spacecraft with Soyuz 4 and 5 in January 1969. The 7K-OK established the three-module architecture — orbital module, descent module, and service module — that all Soyuz variants retain to this day.