On this day in space: March 18, 1980: Soviet rocket explosion kills 48 people

On March 18, 1980, a Soviet rocket exploded on the launchpad and killed 48 people.

Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. (Image credit: Roscosmos)

It wasn't until three years after the explosion happened that the Soviets admitted that this secret spaceport existed. They continued to keep the deadly explosion a secret until 1989. State officials blamed the explosion on human error. But a later investigation determined the cause to be a design flaw with the rocket.

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Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.

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