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.