Associated Press
NASA yesterday said it wasn't too worried about the turbulent, off-course landing of a Russian Soyuz space capsule on Saturday—the second straight problematic reentry for a Soyuz capsule returning from the International Space Station.
William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, downplayed suggestions that the ship was in trouble during the agency's first comments about the landing.
NASA wasn't aware of any danger, although it didn't ask if the crew was at risk, Gerstenmaier said in a Tuesday news teleconference.
"I don't see this as a major problem," Gerstenmaier added. "But it's clearly something that should not have occurred."
A Russian space official had told the Russian news agency Interfax that the crew was in serious danger during the descent.
Rough Reentry
The capsule's three-person crew was subjected to gravity forces of about eight times Earth's gravity for up to two minutes. Normal Soyuz returns have G-forces of about five.
They felt "a kind of general jostling in their seats that they have not felt before," Gerstenmaier said.
U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson described her descent to Earth in the wayward capsule as "a little more dramatic than I was expecting" in an audio recording released yesterday by NASA.
"I saw 8.2 G's on the meter and it was pretty, pretty dramatic. Gravity's not really my friend right now, and 8 G's was especially not my friend. But it didn't last too long," Whitson said in the recording, apparently referring to the difficulty of readjusting to Earth's gravity after spending a prolonged period of time in space.
Gerstenmaier, who was at Moscow Mission Control when the Soyuz landed 300 miles (480 kilometers) off-course in Kazakhstan, relayed additional details about the landing.
After the landing, it took about 30 minutes before Soyuz flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko called Moscow on a satellite phone to say the crew was OK. But no one was worried because it often takes an entire hour for this to occur, Gerstenmaier said.
