The Landing Was Rough
A special commission probing into the reasons of Soyuz TMA-11 ballistic landing sets to work in Energia Corp. today, April 21, 2008. The crew suffered gravity of double extent and TV showed astronauts only in a few hours after touching the ground.
The landing of Soyuz TMA-11, which carried Russia’s Yuri Malenchenko, U.S. Peggy Whitson and South Korean first astronaut Yi So-yeon, followed the unfavorable scenario. During it, the capsule unexpectedly shifted from control to ballistic mode, and touched down 2 minutes before the schedule (at 11:28 a.m. MSK instead of 11:30 MSK a.m.) April 19 and 420 kilometers off course, 278 kilometers to the east of Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan.
The Mission Control Center leant about the landing in 31 minutes after the scheduled time. The locals were the first to reach Soyuz. They saw Yuri Malenchenko elbowing his way out of the capsule and helped him.
An Air Force helicopter landed in a few minutes and the rescues helped Peggy Whitson and Yi So-yeon out of the capsule. Only the Korean astronaut, who spent just 11 days in the space, was feeling relatively well, while the condition of Malenchenko and Whitson was said to be satisfactory. The crew suffered gravity loads of eight units instead of three to four units during the ordinary landing.
“The main thing is that the crew is safe and healthy,” said Anatoly Perminov, who heads the Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos). The definite reasons are yet unknown and Perminov recalled superstitious belief about the presence of a woman on board and ill luck as a result of it – they had two women simultaneously on board of Soyuz, Perminov reminded.
This interpretation of the causes of ballistic landing wasn’t ignored by NBC News and The Associated Press that immediately lashed out at the official, blaming the women discrimination on him. But all views on women as the omen of misfortune notwithstanding, of 11 landings, it was the third ballistic landing for Soyuz TMA.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 21, 2008
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