Space capsule crew safe and well after touchdown
After landing in their capsule way off-course in an alarming end to their return from the international space station, the three-man Russian-American crew opened the hatch today and emerged in good health, officials at Russian Mission control said.
Russian spotters found the capsule north of the Aral Sea after a more than two-hour air search. After the announcement was made in Mission Control just outside Moscow, the room erupted in applause.
The landing ended a mission already severely shaken by the Columbia space shuttle disaster, which led to the grounding of the entire US shuttle fleet and forced a change in travel plans for the astronauts left stranded in space.
Rather than gliding to Florida in a shuttle, Kenneth Bowersox, Donald Pettit and their Russian colleague Nikolai Budarin rode in a Soyuz TMA capsule, just over two meters by two meters in size.
Russian mission control announced the capsule’s landing at 6.19am local time (3.19am Irish time), about three-and-a-half hours after it undocked from the space station.
It landed just north of the Aral Sea, mission control said. The landing site was some 250 miles west of the target.
“We are all very happy. It just took a little longer than we anticipated,” said Allard Beutel, a Nasa official at mission control.
Mr Beutel said the capsule had landed on a steeper trajectory than expected. A Russian ballistic researcher, Nikolai Ivanov, said such a descent would have increased the force of gravity to G-9, well above the planned G-7 but still within an acceptable range the astronauts could tolerate. He also said that the so-called ballistic descent could have adversely affected the capsule’s communications system, hampering the search and rescue efforts.
The crew’s return was more tense than usual. In addition to being the first since the Columbia disintegrated over Texas, killing its seven astronauts, this new Soyuz model had never gone through a descent before.
Because of Columbia, “the eyes of the American public and Congress and everyone are going to be on this landing”, said Dr JD Polk, one of two Nasa flight surgeons who headed to the landing site with two helicopter loads of medical supplies, along with US Air Force medical personnel – just in case.
The scheduled landing site was a remote spot about 250 miles south west of Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana – on hard ground, not in water as was the US space programme’s practice in the pre-shuttle days.
Ten search helicopters carrying Nasa doctors, Russian space agency and military officials and journalists set out from Astana to find the capsule. Crew members listened in to radio updates on the progress of the descent, and everything appeared to be going well aboard the Soyuz.
But at the appointed time of touchdown, no parachutes or capsule could be seen in the clear sky or on the flat, brown barren steppe that stretched to the horizon. In one helicopter, two Russian air force officers huddled together, each holding half of one headset to an ear.
As the minutes wore on, they gestured to the others on board that nothing had been heard from the spacecraft or seen on the ground. A half-hour went by, then an hour. The helicopter and at least four others finally headed back to Astana - leaving the spotting to other aircraft.
Because the Soyuz is so cramped, Bowersox, Pettit and Budarin were bringing back very little – mainly just a few small personal items, film, water and other environmental samples, and a handful of science experiments.
Bowersox and Pettit spent five-and-a-half months aboard the space station with Budarin. That was two months longer than planned because after the Columbia accident extra time was needed to bring their replacements aboard another Soyuz.
Astronaut Edward Lu and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko checked in last week for a six-month stay that promises to be a challenge, given the reduction in crew size to conserve supplies until shuttle flights resume.
Russian cosmonauts regularly descend in capsules – most recently in November when two Russians and a Belgian returned to Earth.
In a linkup to the station broadcast live on Russian state television yesterday before the undocking, Budarin played down the risk of returning in a Soyuz that has not landed before, saying the differences from the previous model were ”only modifications”.
“I have made two descents in a Soyuz and there were no problems at all, and I think there won’t be any problems this time,” he said.
Nasa pulled out all the stops for the touchdown, sending Dr Polk and his fellow Nasa flight surgeon along with a defibrillator, heart monitor, and trauma and resuscitation equipment. US Air Force doctors were also deployed for the landing, along with a miniature operating room, and some major hospitals in Europe were on alert.
“Even that much medical force is pale compared with we normally have” in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for shuttle landings, Dr Polk said. “It probably is overkill, but you never want to say, ‘If only’ in the spaceflight business.”
The Russians, who typically have just a handful of doctors present for a Soyuz landing, have been understanding, he said.
“Probably, medical support will shrink after this, once we become comfortable with this vehicle and comfortable with the situation,” he said.
