Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Hatch Burn-Through danger on Soyuz re-entry revealed, 'crew's lives on razor's edge'

Again, we're indebted to Ian O'Neill and UNIVERSE TODAY for continuing investigation into what UT has called the "emergency landing" of Expedition XVI, returning to Earth by way of a Soyuz TMA previously docked and powered-down on ISS for six months.

It appears the Russian Federal Space Agency is becoming gradually more forth-coming about how close a call the re-entry came to claiming the lives of American commander Dr. Peggy Whitson, Flight engineer and Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko and So-yeon Yi of South Korea, who returned home 295 kilometers off target, April 19 in central Kazakhstan after a "ballistic" re-entry.

"Considering that this situation has repeated itself, it is obvious that the technological discipline in preparing space equipment for a flight is declining. There is no guarantee that the crew of a Soyuz spacecraft landing a half a year from now would not face the same difficulties." - Anonymous Russian space official

"First, Russian space officials tried to cover up the emergency landing of the Soyuz descent capsule on Saturday. Then they blamed the crew for changing their flight plan without communicating with mission control. Compounding the problem, an official cited a bad omen as a contributing factor to the hard landing. Within a couple of days, the truth behind the Soyuz "ballistic re-entry" began to come to light. Today, even more shocking revelations are being reported, including how the escape hatch nearly failed during the uncontrolled, fiery re-entry..."
Read more HERE.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Joel! I've only just stumbled across your review of my Soyuz stories! Thanks for the support! Loving the site by the way, I'll be adding a link to my site www.astroengine.com :-) I hope you are well. Ian