THE crew of the Soyuz space capsule that landed in Kazakhstan at the weekend after an unexpectedly severe descent was in serious danger.
The Russian news agency Interfax quoted an unnamed space official as saying that the capsule entered the atmosphere improperly, with the hatch first, instead of with its heat shields leading the way. As a result, the hatch suffered significant damage
.
The official also says the TMA-11 capsule's antenna burned up during the descent, and as a result the crew couldn't communicate properly with Russian mission control.
"The fact that the entire crew ended up whole and undamaged is a great success. Everything could have turned out much worse," the official was quoted by Interfax as saying. "You could say the situation was on a razor's edge."
Alexander Vorobyev, a spokesman for the Russian space agency, confirmed that the descent had problems, saying the Soyuz hatch and the antenna did suffer partial burn damage, but he said that was a common occurrence when the capsules re-enter the Earth's atmosphere.
Mr Vorobyev said investigators looking into Saturday's landing had classified it as a "3" on the five-point scale of seriousness, where "5" would be a critical level. Russian officials were still investigating what went wrong, he said.
The crew, which included South Korea's first astronaut, was returning from the international space station and endured severe gravitational forces because it took a steeper-than-usual re-entry, called a "ballistic trajectory".
The capsule carrying the South Korean bioengineer Yi So-yeon, a US astronaut, Peggy Whitson, and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko, ended up landing some 260 miles off-target and 20 minutes late.
On Monday, Ms Yi told a news conference at the Star City cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow that she was frightened by the descent.
"At first I was really scared because it looked really, really hot and I thought we could burn," she told reporters.
The incident was the second time in a row – and the third since 2003 – that a Soyuz landing had gone awry.
Despite the mishaps, the Russian space programme has long had a reputation for reliability.
The single-use Soyuz and Progress vehicles have long been the workhorses of the space station programme, regularly shuttling people and cargo to the orbiting outpost.
They assumed a greater importance following the grounding of the US space shuttle fleet in the wake of the Columbia disaster in 2003.
The full article contains 414 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
