No Worries for NASA—Not So For Passengers In Soyuz’s Superfast 8 G Re-entry

The Russian Soyuz TMA-11 capsule did return to Earth on schedule, but not exactly as planned, per the dramatic re-entry on April 19th for the crew—Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko, American astronaut Peggy Whitson, and South Korea’s first astronaut Yi So-yeon. The hatch door that is supposed to be maneuvered so that it is at the backside of the capsule’s fast, and hot re-entry was, this time, facing in the reverse direction, to the front. The heat insulation around the hatch isn’t as protective as the backside insulation designed to protect against re-entry. This made for a very dramatic — both bumpy and very fast — touch down. Not to mention that the excessively speedy return to Earth was also off base by about 420 kilometers (260 miles) from its targeted landing on Kazakhstan’s barren plain. The rescue helicopter found the crew after Malenchenko placed a call using an Iridium sat phone as to their landing location.

The normal re-entry speed in the Russian capsule is 5 G’s. When translated to a 200 lb. person, such would feel as if they weighed 1,000 lbs. Instead, the bullet like re-entry registered as much as 8 G’s for a duration of two-minutes, or what surely seemed like an eternity. This was after astronaut Whitson had been in 0 gravity for more than six months at the International Space Station (ISS). No wonder the astronauts still appeared wobbly at their press conference two days later. This was the first time U.S. astronauts had returned on a Russian craft.

NASA‘s Associate Administrator for Space Operations William Gerstenmaier stated that there was nothing to worry about. The Russian’s explanation given by Nikolai Zelenshchikov, who heads the investigative commission, said that the difficult descent was due to a malfunction in the control system, as the instrument that had been used for 25 years to control the spaceships’ descent failed. This made for more jittery nerves when on May 4th of last year, Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin and American astronauts Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit landed in the barren Kazakh plain almost 300 miles short of their planned arrival site. They, too, experienced severe gravitational overloads, and it took more than two hours to locate them.