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NASA Astronaut Details Fall To Earth After Failed Soyuz Launch (cnet.com)
After surviving an aborted launch to the ISS, NASA astronaut Nick Hague details his fall to Earth and shares what it was like inside the capsule. CNET reports: In his first interviews since surviving the largely uncontrolled "ballistic descent" back to Earth that followed, Hague told reporters on Tuesday that the launch felt normal for the first two minutes but that it became clear "something was wrong pretty quick." "Your training really takes over," Hague said, adding that he and [Russian Cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin] had practiced what to do in case of just such a launch-abort scenario. Hague also credited years of flight training, going back to his days as a U.S. Air Force pilot.
The escape procedure has been compared to being launched sideways out of a shotgun -- but while the shotgun is rocketing upward. Hague described the side-to-side shaking inside the capsule as "fairly aggressive but fleeting." "I expected my first trip to space to be memorable," he said. "I didn't expect it to be quite this memorable." Because of the combination of rocket-fueled ascent and the sudden sideways escape maneuver, the crew experienced a higher level of g-forces than during a normal flight. Once the Soyuz reached the top of its arc and began to descend, Hague said, what followed was really the same as a normal Soyuz landing, but with one major difference: The pair couldn't be certain where they were. "My eyes were looking out the window trying to gauge where we were going to land." Luckily, the capsule deployed its parachutes and landed on smooth, flat terrain where Hague and Ovchinin were met by rescue helicopters and whisked off for medical evaluations.
The escape procedure has been compared to being launched sideways out of a shotgun -- but while the shotgun is rocketing upward. Hague described the side-to-side shaking inside the capsule as "fairly aggressive but fleeting." "I expected my first trip to space to be memorable," he said. "I didn't expect it to be quite this memorable." Because of the combination of rocket-fueled ascent and the sudden sideways escape maneuver, the crew experienced a higher level of g-forces than during a normal flight. Once the Soyuz reached the top of its arc and began to descend, Hague said, what followed was really the same as a normal Soyuz landing, but with one major difference: The pair couldn't be certain where they were. "My eyes were looking out the window trying to gauge where we were going to land." Luckily, the capsule deployed its parachutes and landed on smooth, flat terrain where Hague and Ovchinin were met by rescue helicopters and whisked off for medical evaluations.
I totally parsed that as "astronaut's documentation falls to the ground, is found by bystander".
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Going down...
QA has deteriorated to the point where Soyuz could fail like this. That means further errors in construction were possible.
However, the US system had no real escape after launch. The shuttle scrapped its after-launch escape system to satisfy Congressional budget constraints and Apollo was very limited.
Both had superb launch-site escape systems, from rockets that could rip the command module clear for Apollo to zip wires for the Shuttle.
Failure may not be an option, but it is a possibility and it's often cheaper to replace a crew than to build correctly.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"... but while the shotgun is rocketing upward"
you mean the projectile..right?
the shotgun - the thing your holding that shoots the projectile....essentially goes nowhere.
NEED ANOTHER 7 ASTRONAUTS
This sort of thing is best done using giant wings of fire.
100s of millions of us born & raised right here? a landslide of civilizationers.. as for massacring the original settlers.. we still owe for that? you can leave here for 10 days in space...
i had no idea this had even happened. january 2021 can't come soon enough.
This should not be viewed as a failure, but as a great achievement. Correctly designed and functioning safety systems and protocols saved human life. This is infinitely more important than any space mission.
The fact that the Russian safety mechanisms kicked in and let them both return safely to earth is nothing short of an engineering miracle.
Compare to the fate of the Challenger launch, and then make up your mind which one was a failure, and which one was a successfully aborted launch.
All this space "exploration" bullshit, finally something new!
Such an exercise is bO-ring.
on how reliable as a whole Soyuz system is. The successful healthy recovery of astronaut and cosmonaut when they literally fell from space, without any propelling cushion one would expect more cheer in the crowd. But no, since it is made by evil Soviet and Russian governments, let's just ignore the fact that this is one of the most astonishing events of the international space program in years.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Had the Soyuz rocket exploded, which is what happened with Challenger, NO "safety mechanisms" would've helped and they would have died in the same manner.
The system is actually not too expensive, because a parachute is not an expensive technology. I wonder why there is still not such a system on passenger planes?
I do not need an "inflight entertainment", I read a book usually, or an ultra modern transformer-armchair, or any other similar frills. I would like however to arrive to a destination in one piece, knowing that if there is a failure, someone thought of a plan B.
Someone commented on something on another board...said "to post"? So being funny I found a photo meme of "a random post". The next day the response was ??? I don't get it. Then I checked and the person was from the Scandinavian region of Europe. There, as it is in many places, "to post" means to stick it in the mail. Here in the states we say "mail it". Language can be a confusing thing. I know many of the service manuals I get, are translated from Japanese, to German (the firm that does all the translations), then, to whatever language is required. The "00" first versions of the manuals sometimes leave you scratching your head as to what they really mean.
That both astronauts were not taken to a Saudi embassy
PRE. That is all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Ejection seats were not further developed for the shuttle for several reasons: Very difficult to eject seven crew members when three or four were on the middeck (roughly the center of the forward fuselage), surrounded by substantial vehicle structure. Limited ejection envelope. Ejection seats only work up to about 3,400 miles per hour (3,000 kn; 5,500 km/h) and 130,000 feet (39,624 m). That constituted a very limited portion of the shuttle's operating envelope, about the first 100 seconds of the 510 seconds powered ascent. No help during a Columbia-type reentry accident. Ejecting during an atmospheric reentry accident would have been fatal due to the high temperatures and wind blast at high Mach speeds. Astronauts were skeptical of the ejection seats' usefulness. STS-1 pilot Robert Crippen stated: [I]n truth, if you had to use them while the solids were there, I don’t believe you’d—if you popped out and then went down through the fire trail that’s behind the solids, that you would have ever survived, or if you did, you wouldn't have a parachute, because it would have been burned up in the process. But by the time the solids had burned out, you were up to too high an altitude to use it. ... So I personally didn't feel that the ejection seats were really going to help us out if we really ran into a contingency.[12]"
100 years from now spaceflight my become commonplace but it still won't be routine. The fact that a safety system that was largely based off of a US design, has been used to safely recover astronauts from a doomed ship, two or more times, in differing scenarios, is statistically awesome. In my opinion... I figure, anytime that you get people back alive, after kicking them into space (or almost) on top of glorified pyrotechnics, should go into the "win" column. As far as capsule verses shuttle is concerned, while I do feel that it's a step backward, maybe we did push the envelope a bit with the Shuttle. It was a heck of an achievement though for mid 1970's tech. With the advances in reusable, fly-back boosters, reliable (statistically) engines, safety systems and flight controls, maybe we'll be able to get more done in space with less grief. More commonplace.