An explosive bolt was yesterday safely removed from the Soyuz capsule attached to the International Space Station.

Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko’s space walk to remove the bolt took over six hours, but it is now hoped that engineers will find out why Soyuz capsules keep coming down too fast and off target (NASA press release, video on Reuters).

The bolts are designed to fire before re-entry, separating the module that brings cosmonauts home from an at-that-point redundant storage module. It is suspected that misfiring bolts delayed the separation, causing the re-entry mishaps.

AP says that disabling bolts in a ‘suspect location’ should ensure there will be no repeat of the problem. So why were the bolts needed in the first place if everything works without them?

Astronaut Greg Chamitoff spent the six hours inside the Soyuz, so if anything went wrong he wouldn’t be cut off from the escape pod.

Image: NASA TV