[anymouse]

The rest of the story, about the wayward Soyuz capsule.

[anymouse]

Space ping

[Noslrac]

I think i'd rather fly on the shuttle any day.

[Nick Danger]

[Brad C.]

Wait, don't tell me some engineer mixed his measurement systems together again.

[El Gato]

They are very lucky to be alive. They pulled around 9 Gs, when the profile was only 4 1/2 or so. A little steeper approach and they'd be dead. I wonder if they blacked out? I would expect that they did, since 9 G is about the limit for a fighter pilot, with a G suit and utlizing straining techniques. They probably had no G suits, and had been in zero G for a long time, which would reduce their G tolerance considerably.

[Centurion2000]

A mysterious software fault in the new guidance computer of the Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft was the cause of the high-anxiety off-course landing over the weekend, NASA sources tell MSNBC.com

Thank you Microsoft for allowing the piss poor software design philosophy / controls in programs that SHOULD be beta or alpha copies get exported to the rest of the world as finished product.

Remember when programs worked perfectly the first time you bought/wrote them ?

[El Gato]

Naturally the Russian technocrats tried to blame it on the Americans. I guess managers are managers no matter were they are located. How do you say cover your a$$ in Russian?

There was also the real possibility of crew error, and on Sunday, the head of the corporation that builds and operates the Soyuz spacecraft, Yuriy Semyonov, suggested that “one of the Americans” had pushed the backup-mode activation button. Bowersox was the only American who had any active role in the descent (it was astronaut Donald Pettit’s job to follow the checklists), and he denied touching the button — which, he joked, was being guarded carefully by Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin. “We don’t think we did anything to cause that to happen,” he later said to a NASA press official.

[Russian Sage]

It's a good thing that software bugs are so rare.

[greasepaint]

The Russians were smart enough to build some reserve-safety
into their decent vehicle.
Nasa, for whatever reason, didn't.
The space shuttle is a deathtrap.