NASA chief relived Columbia tragedy during Russian capsule's scary descent

MOSCOW (AP) - It was a sickening feeling the NASA chief hoped never to experience again, least of all three months later.

But when communication was lost just minutes before the touchdown of the Russian capsule returning three men from the international space station, Sean O'Keefe relived the morning of the Columbia disaster all over again. He shuddered just thinking about it Monday.

"God, it was just unbelievable is what it was," O'Keefe told The Associated Press.

Unlike the Columbia accident in February, when NASA knew within minutes the shuttle had broken apart over Texas and all seven astronauts were dead, Sunday's gut-wrenching search dragged on for two hours.

"It was high anxiety, there's no doubt about that," said O'Keefe, who watched the events unfold from Russia's Mission Control outside Moscow.

O'Keefe was overcome with emotion when astronauts Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin finally were found safe in Kazakhstan, nearly 500 kilometres from where the Soyuz spacecraft should have landed.

NASA will participate in the investigation into why the Soyuz capsule went into a steep ballistic entry, exposed the crew to twice the usual gravity forces and landed so far off target. A commission of mostly Russian aerospace engineers was created Monday to look into the matter.

"It appears to have been some technical issue" with the new version of the Soyuz spacecraft, O'Keefe said after meeting with his Russian counterpart, Yuri Koptev. "But not anything that was outside of the normal."

This new Soyuz model, made roomier at NASA's request to accommodate larger astronauts, was making its first test flight for re-entry.

It was launched to the space station six months ago as a lifeboat. The Columbia accident and subsequent grounding of the shuttle fleet forced the space station crew to return in the docked Soyuz, instead of the shuttle Atlantis, following a 5½-month mission.

On Sunday, the head of Soyuz maker Energiya, Yuri Semyonov, said on Russian television that one of the Americans on board hit the wrong button.

Then on Monday, Semyonov was quoted as saying that one version of the account had Budarin, an experienced flight engineer but not a pilot, pushing the button that engaged the ballistic entry. He said the cosmonaut assured him he did not touch anything. A Soyuz descent is almost entirely automated.

Bowersox said the computer readouts shifted suddenly from a normal re-entry to a ballistic one. The only way to manually trigger that is to press a button on a handle, and Budarin had that button covered so that it would not be pressed accidentally, the astronaut said.

"We don't think we did anything to cause that to happen," Bowersox said in a NASA interview broadcast Monday.

O'Keefe agreed that it does not appear the crew is to blame.

Semyonov said he expects a finding by June. As soon as the Soyuz arrives at Energiya in Moscow, engineers will examine it, he said.

O'Keefe said he wants to send a Global Positioning System satellite receiver and some type of phone to the men now living aboard the space station, astronaut Edward Lu and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko. That way, if their Soyuz goes off course when they return in October, they can pinpoint and report their location.

Sunday's blackout began right after Budarin reported the main parachutes had deployed 16 minutes before touchdown as planned.

That was the last call from the Soyuz. By coincidence, that was also the time of Columbia's final communication.

Silence followed, then more silence. Touchdown time came and went, and still no word from the spacemen. An hour went by, then another hour, with no one knowing with certainty whether the crew was dead or alive. Helicopters and recovery planes scoured the flat, barren steppes of northern Kazakhstan.

Everyone was overjoyed when word finally came that the capsule had been found and the crew was out of the tipped-over spacecraft and waving at the pilots.

"You're obviously not horribly traumatized if you're out and waving at the plane," said Dr. J.D. Polk, a NASA flight surgeon.

Perhaps most ecstatic were Bowersox's and Pettit's wives, who, along with one of Bowersox's younger brothers, huddled together in Russian Mission Control throughout the ordeal.

"They were just the most courageous people you can imagine, I mean, just amazing," O'Keefe said. Annie Bowersox was especially stoic, while "the rest of us were all hanging on for dear life."

Annie Bowersox said in a NASA interview: "We just knew it would take a little while."

On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

Glitch Suspected of Sending the Soyuz Off CourseBy Simon Saradzhyan
Staff Writer

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