Haaaa!
Posted on 05/06/2003 2:15:49 AM PDT by weegee
Spacemen joke about landing
Other capsules ended up in lake, surrounded by wolves
MOSCOW -- It could have been a lot worse for the two Americans and one Russian whose landing ended up nearly 300 miles off course and their recovery hours late.
In 1976, a Soyuz spacecraft came down in a freezing squall and splashed into a lake; the crew spent the night bobbing in the capsule.
Eleven years before that, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 2,000 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That's when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft.
Astronaut Kenneth Bowersox said with a smile that he didn't need the gun in the Kazakh steppes where he landed Sunday: "There was nothing out there but grass and us."
On Monday, Russian space experts met to discuss what went wrong with the Soyuz capsule carrying Bowersox, astronaut Donald Pettit and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin back from the international space station. The spacecraft was a new model that had never gone through a re-entry before.
"I'll call it an interesting test flight experience," Bowersox, a Navy captain and former test pilot, said several hours after touchdown.
It was the first time NASA astronauts had returned to Earth in a foreign spacecraft and to a foreign land. The switch from a shuttle to Soyuz landing came after the Columbia disaster in February, which resulted in the indefinite grounding of the entire shuttle fleet.
The cockpit computer displays abruptly switched from a normal re-entry to a ballistic one just minutes before touchdown, and the three men knew they were in for a considerably steeper and rougher ride than usual.
They came in short of their targeted landing site, and two hours passed before recovery forces spotted them. Two more hours went by before helicopters arrived for them, and another two hours before NASA personnel reached the scene.
Bowersox, who commanded the 5 1/2-month space station mission, said he and his crewmates enjoyed having some time by themselves to get their land legs back and savor nature.
"It was the most beautiful dirt I've ever seen," he said.
By late afternoon, Bowersox, Pettit and Budarin had landed in the Kazakh capital of Astana, and a few hours later, they reached Star City, outside Moscow, where they were greeted by a crowd including their wives.
During the flight from Astana to Star City, Bowersox said he thought the crew had notified Russian Mission Control about the computer indications for a ballistic entry, but couldn't be sure. It's also possible communication was lost at that point, he said.
. . . and the pilot of a 747 has trouble getting permission to carry a beanbag around for protection . . .
Guns in the cockpit, Russian style. LOL!
Haaaa!
I can argue with that. I'm releaved they made it back, and I'll bet they are too.
Reminds me of NASA's invention of the "zero gravity" pen that could write when held upside down. The Soviet's solution was to use a pencil.
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