The catastrophe is named for the Chief Marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin, who was the head of the R-16 development program and perished in the explosion.

People near the rocket were instantly incinerated; those farther away were burned to death or poisoned by the toxic fuel component vapors.

Andrei Sakharov described many details: as soon as the engine fired, most of the personnel there ran to the perimeter, but were trapped inside the security fence and then engulfed in the fireball of burning fuel.

[3][2][4][1] Missile designer Mikhail Yangel survived only because he had left to smoke a cigarette behind a bunker a few hundred metres away, but nonetheless suffered burn injuries.

[11] Among other things, the commission found that many more people were present on the launch pad than should have been—most were supposed to be safely offsite in bunkers.

[16] The delay to the R-16 spurred the USSR toward the development of more effective ICBMs and sparked Khrushchev's decision to install intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) in Cuba.

Before the disaster Yangel had ambitions to challenge Sergei Korolev as leader of the Manned Space program, but he was directed to focus on the R-16.

[citation needed] A memorial to the victims of the test was erected in the first half of the 1960s in the Park of Baikonur and is still visited by RKA officials before any manned launch.

[18][19] The Italian news agency Continentale first reported on 8 December 1960, from undisclosed sources, that Marshal Nedelin and 100 people had been killed in a rocket explosion.