Space ship crash landing - April 21, 2008
A Russian Soyuz capsule landed nearly 500 kilometres off course on Saturday.
Most reports say American Peggy Whitson, Ukrainian Yuri Malenchenko and Korean So-yeon Yi were unhurt. However the Korea Times later reported that Yi had been taken to hospital to recover.
The Soyuz seems to have come into Earth’s atmosphere at a steeper-than-planned angle, a so-called ballistic descent. According to Space.com such ballistic descents are not unknown. Soyuz experienced similar problems before, for example in last year and in 2003. A number of reports note that this would have subjected the astronauts to higher than planned G-forces and caused the capsule to land way off target (eg PA, NASA press release).
It also meant it took rescuers a while to get to the crash site, where a Reuters cameraman described seeing a smoking capsule with its side 30 cm deep in the earth and its parachute aflame.
“Don’t be late next time, please,” Yi said (Korea Times).
Exactly what caused this problem, and the similar previous problems, is not entirely clear. With all the money spent on space you’d think they could land on target. It’s not exactly rocket science. Oh, wait...
Image: the Soyuz shortly after undocking / NASA TV
Comments
The Russians need to step back a bit and re think or at least re calculate their approach and landing technique. This should be a wake up call to their space program.
Posted by: Tom OBrien | April 21, 2008 06:38 PM
i felt so bad for Peggy after hearing about this, i can only imagine what it must have been like for hewr, speccially after spending so much time in space and then to be subject to this type of crash landing. It would be nice if the Americans would at least sell the old shuttles to Russia and let them work on using them as return vehicles from the ISS Arthur C Clarke. (Yeah thats the name i choose for the space station), but after all i suppose the best thing is at least they arrived alive.
Posted by: F6 | April 21, 2008 07:30 PM
As the old pilot's adage goes: Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.
;-)
Even so, I agree with Mr. O'Brien. I hope the Russians will take a good hard look at what went wrong and try to fix it.
Posted by: Curt Coman | April 22, 2008 03:15 PM
Our Sapce Program Is Directed By Logical Visionaries?
I have a great idea, let's close down the US Shuttle program 5 years before we have a replacement space vehicle and depend sole on the Soviets and Europeans to get us to and from the Space Station safely.
We will then save a few dollars by laying off 8000+ highly technical engineers and support personnel prematurely.
If you don't agree, e-mail your senators and congressmen.
Posted by: Jonathan Schuman | April 23, 2008 05:28 AM