NASA historian and gadfly James Oberg wrote up a very detailed and very interesting report on the near-disastrous re-entry of a Soyuz carrying three astronauts back from the space station. This is really an epic tale; it looks like there was a system malfunction that would normally have doomed the crew. However, a similar problem occurred decades ago, and apparently Soviet engineers redesigned the re-entry vehicle to account for it should it happen again. The redesign worked quite well, and saved the lives of the crew.
I highly recommend reading this, even if you hadn’t read the original reports. I’m still very unhappy about how this played our politically, but I’m very glad that sensible engineers, whoever they may have been, were in the loop all those years ago.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Is it just me or we didn’t hear that much about this? It sorta went by nearly unoticed. In a “Well the astronauts are back! By the way, they almost died. Now in other news, here’s a puppy.”
May 8th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Here in the UK this story got some coverage but perhaps in the US the shenanigans of Britney or Paris took precedence. Very interesting report. Good job to the Engineers!
May 8th, 2008 at 9:51 am
As I understand it, almost the very same thing happened to ISS Expedition 6 (Ken Bowersox, Don Pettit, and Nikolai Budarin), when they returned to Earth in a Soyuz capsule in May of 2003 after being stranded aboard ISS longer than expected following the Columbia disaster. Their capsule made an abnormally “ballistic” descent also, subjected them to very high g-forces. Expedition 6 was the topic of Chris Jones’ book, “Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space,” which I thought was an excellent read.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Wait! I want to see the puppy!
May 8th, 2008 at 10:33 am
A puppy? (madge goes all gooey eyed : )
Thanks for the book recommendation Chuck (madge adds it to her ever growing list : )
May 8th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Maybe they were too busy staring at the scrape on that guy’s knee and forgot to jettison the retros.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Yes, and it seems like they had sensible managers overseeing their Space Program that actually listened to their sensible engineers. Something NASA could have learned from in January of 1986 and again in February of 2003.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
[...] narrowly avoided: IEEE Spectrum: Internal NASA Documents Give Clues to Scary Soyuz Return Flight. (Pointage from [...]
May 8th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Any landing you walk away from -
I, personally, am amazed people are so freaked out about this.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Thanks for the Oberg article Phil. I had no idea the re-entry module could make aerodynamic lift. I thought all re-entries of wingless craft were “ballistic”!
May 8th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Now THAT is a Volvo
May 8th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Chris -
Gemini and Apollo also used lift to alter (control) their courses and to reduce g forces. I think Gemini capsules could have survived reentry without it, but Apollo really needed this when returning from the moon.
May 9th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Most of us who are still alive after the “Old Days” are amazed and grateful that there were not more people killed. Back then, every flight was experimental and something always happened no one thought could happen.
We have graduated by virtue of time to the early days. Now things are much more complex. A reentering a spacecraft returning from the moon at 25,000 mph is still a big problem – a lot faster than a returning orbital vehicle. So, it looks like we’re going “back to the future.”