Soyuz Capsule Return Marred By Mystery Communications Blackout

astroengine writes "An unexplained communications loss left flight controllers unable to speak with three space station crew returning to Earth over Kazakhstan during the last 15 minutes of their descent Thursday night. The first indication that the capsule survived its fiery plunge through the atmosphere was a series of beeps signaling components of the Soyuz had been jettisoned as planned. Later, ground controllers picked up signals that the Soyuz's parachutes had deployed, but it wasn't until a Russian recovery aircraft established two-way radio communications with the crew that flight controllers knew all was well."

Comments

Communications failure?

[girlintraining]

Wait, you're telling me that plunging through super-heated plasma at mach 17 for several minutes can cause communication problems? HOLY CRAP! :\

Re:Communications failure?

[MozeeToby]

On the other hand, if you're expecting to have communication and communication drops out, that means something is wrong. And something being wrong on a manned vehicle is what you might call "a bad thing".

Re:Communications failure?

[Technician]

Hmm.. Reminds me of the Apollo program except they expected the plasma issue. Maybe they thought another frequency would be immune to the issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_blackout

For Apollo missions, the communications blackout was approximately three minutes long.[3] For Apollo 16, for example, pre-advisory data (PAD) for re-entry listed the expected times for re-entry communications blackout to be from 0 minutes 16 seconds after entry interface to 3 minutes 33 seconds after entry interface (a total of 3 minutes 17 seconds).[4] For the Apollo 13 mission, the blackout was much longer than normal because the flight path of the spacecraft was unexpectedly at a much shallower angle than normal.[4] According to the mission log maintained by Gene Kranz, the Apollo 13 re-entry blackout lasted around 6 minutes, beginning at 142:39 and ending at 142:45, and was 1 minute 27 seconds longer than had been predicted.[5]

Re:Communications failure?

[Dunbal]

Although arguably they make better trolls.

Re:Communications failure?

[n5yat]

Tweet about life without facebook?

Check their DNA

[KingSkippus]

They should make sure to check the crew's DNA very carefully and make sure they're still human. A lot of really bad things in the movies have started exactly like this.

Soviet engineering FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Their radio broke. This isn't the first time that something has failed on a Soyuz capsule, and it won't be the last. Twice, the explosive bolts holding on the service module failed to fire. They had that 3rd stage failure a few months ago. They've had capsules land so far off course it has taken hours to get the helicopter there. And so on and so forth.

Do you know what all of these accidents have in common? They haven't lost a crewmember in 30 years...

Re:Soviet engineering FTW

[SpiralSpirit]

Only by accident. If that third stage failure had a soyuz carrying astronauts in it, they'd all be dead. Same is true for a half dozen other incidents at least - soyuz TMA-11, Soyuz TMA-1, June 1997 a module of the mir space station was punctured and depressurized during a mid space collision between mir, spektr, and progress, etc etc. The US suffered some catastrophic tragedies with Columbia and Challenger, losing 7 astronauts per incident. It doesn't mean soviet engineering is at all better.

Re:Soviet engineering FTW

[SpiralSpirit]

no it wouldn't, because the soyuz second stage ends after 290 seconds into flight, and the escape system can only be used until 157 seconds into the flight. They'd be dead.

Re:Write the script... Blockbuster here!

[Lumpy]

There is 15 minutes of silence recorded on all their recorders!!!!

LightSquared

[dietdew7]

In other news, my LightSquared broadband is working great!