Three Cheers For The Sturdy Soyuz!

We had a hunch Russian officials and their counterparts at NASA may have downplayed the severity of this weekend's less-than-optimal reentry of the Soyuz space capsule carrying a South Korean 'tourinaut' and two members of the Expedition 16 crew. After all... what images does the phrase "ballistic trajectory" conjure up in your mind?

According to at least one report, the three people onboard the TMA-11 spacecraft did indeed come very close to an untimely end. Russia's Interfax news agency reports the capsule entered the atmosphere on its side -- with its egress hatch taking the brunt of the heat from reentry, instead of the ellipsoidal capsule's heat shield.

Interfax cited an unnamed official with Roskosmos, the Russian space agency. No one with that agency, or NASA, has publicly confirmed the scenario was so severe.

As ANN reported, South Korea's first astronaut, Yi So-yeon, Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson, and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko experienced reentry forces in excess of 10-g's, far above normal levels.

The crew was forced to wait an additional hour for recovery crews to arrive at their landing site early Saturday morning, after the capsule landed nearly 300 miles away from the planned site. Communications with the crew were also compromised, as an antenna on the capsule's exterior burned off during reentry.

It was the second time in a row a Soyuz reentry didn't go as planned, and the third since 2003. In all three cases, the automated reentry system onboard the Soyuz put the capsule into sub-optimal attitudes to travel through Earth's atmosphere.

Despite the glitch, Saturday's rocky reentry also served as an endorsement of sorts for the sturdy TMA-11... a much-modified version of the earliest Soyuz capsules that first saw service for the Soviet Union in the late 1960s.

"The fact that the entire crew ended up whole and undamaged is a great success," one official told The Associated Press, adding the incident rated a "3" on a five-point scale of severity. "Everything could have turned out much worse. You could say the situation was on a razor's edge."

All three spacefarers are reported to be in excellent health, despite the frightening trip home. At a news conference Monday, Yi said she knew immediately something was very wrong as the capsule fell to Earth.

"At first I was really scared because it looked really, really hot and I thought we could burn," she said.

FMI: www.nasa.gov, www.roscosmos.ru