Soyuz Ballistic Re-entry 300 Miles Off Course

call-me-kenneth writes "Soyuz TMA-11, carrying a crew of three returning from the ISS, unexpectedly followed a high-G ballistic re-entry trajectory and ended up landing 300 miles off-course. The crew, including Commander Peggy Whitson and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, are reportedly in good health. Soyuz capsules have previously saved the lives of the crew even after severe malfunctions that might have led to the loss of a less robust vehicle."

How far exactly?

According to the first paragraph of the article, the distance by which they were off was 400km, which Slashdot claims is 300 miles.

Perhaps the calculations were done by the same person who worked out the re-entry trajectory?

Re:How far exactly?

It says 420km, which gets rounded down to 400 in the headline paragraph.

420km in miles is 260, which gets rounded up to 300 for the Slashdot article.

sort of off-topic

This is one of the reasons that material/websites are listed as inaccurate sources of data. Rounding is good when you are talking about 1.300056000 billion dollars as 1.3billion. But in the case of simple math that the reader can do on their own rather quickly, it is imprudent to do any rounding.

A professional news reporter would know that there have been trouble with the US space program regarding conversions to and from metric units. Therefore it is professionally prudent to make sure you are not lumped in with the same idiots who made those mistakes.

It's not that hard, really. Such things are the stuff of journalism classes from the 50's or sooner. How not to look like an idiot when reporting the news!

Re:sort of off-topic

Out of curiosity, how does that statement make me a foreigner?

You've made an intelligent point without threatening anyone.

That's downright unamerican.

Re:sort of off-topic

That's right, we Europeans are above randomly threatening people. And if anyone disagrees I'll smash his face in with a brick!

Re:How far exactly?

Story submitter here... I used 300 miles because the NASA press release (the second link in the story) says:

"The landing was approximately 295 miles from the expected landing site"

...which I rounded to 300 to try to make the story sound more exciting than it really is, just in order to flatter my inadequate sense of identity and self-esteem. Little did I reckon on the elite mental arithmetic of the Slashdot readership! I hang my head in shame.

Full Manual Re-entry is Possible in Soyuz

There is an interesting article [space.gc.ca], written by a Canadian, in which he discusses the manual descent training that he received as part of cosmonaut training. Apparently, one of the back up computer systems is your brain itself (i.e. full manual control or renentry with analog controls and instruments). Queue the Soviet Russia jokes now...In Soviet Russia the re-entry computer is YOU!

From TA: "Under nominal end-of-mission situations, an automatic re-entry system will return the Soyuz vehicle and crew from space safely back to the ground. However, the crew must be familiar with the several backup modes that exist in instances when the automatic system fails. One of the backup re-entry modes is the crew themselves! For certain hardware and software malfunctions, the crew will be required to manually fly the Soyuz back to Earth through the atmosphere."

Re:Full Manual Re-entry is Possible in Soyuz

I would think that once you're experiencing 10G, your course has already been set. It is a space capsule, not a maneuverable atmospheric vehicle. The only control I could imagine is the decent burn, just prior to "falling out" of orbit. Once that happens, it is like going over the hump on a roller coaster, gravity takes over from there.

Re:Full Manual Re-entry is Possible in Soyuz

Addendum:

According to this link: http://www.astronautix.com/flights/mireo23.htm [astronautix.com] the landing rockets failed anyway, which resulted in a hard, but survivable landing.

And according to this: http://www.jamesoberg.com/soyuz.html [jamesoberg.com] the crew has no control over the parachute deployment. (This is written in entry 6 B under "Special Questions)

Re:Heavyside Layers

Alan Shepard hit over 11g during re-entry, and he didn't pass out and could still hit switches.

Yeah? Well Chuck Norris could hit 12G and wouldn't need to hit the switches, he'd just look at them and they'd switch themselves out of pure fear.

Genie in a Bottle

They didn't come back with any beautiful, belly-buttonless genies, did they?

I'm impressed

They came down in a space capsule on a ballistic trajectory - in other words, dropped like a rock.

The fact that they survived the experience is amazing. Say what you want about Soviet technology, this was a very, very neat trick.

I'm not impressed.

The fact that they survived the experience is amazing. Say what you want about Soviet technology, this was a very, very neat trick.

When it comes to Soviet technology only one thing needs to be pointed out: This brings the re-entry failure rate of the current mark of Soyuz to 20% and trending upwards. (This report [jamesoberg.com] on Soyuz landing safety with the older marks is sobering reading.)

Re:I'm not impressed.

Of course, this is still a lot better than what happens to a space shuttle that has problems on re-entry.

Re:I'm not impressed.

This is incorrect. The reentry was successful. Using a fallback mode is not a failure of reentry, it is a failure of the primary mode of reentry. For example, burning up in the atmosphere or "lithobraking" (slowing down only when you leave a smoking crater in the ground) are failures of reentry. Reading through Oberg's report, he indicates that there were few actual reentry failures and most of these occured early in the program. Further you seem to be counting things like a capsule landing on its side as a "failure". I'm not interested in playing semantics games with the several posters here who claim otherwise. But a failure in a reentry system isn't automatically a failure in the process of reentry. The capsule and crew arrived intact. In my book, that makes the reentry successful no matter how many systems failed on the way down.

Something is missing from this story...

Mr Perminov said the craft followed the back-up landing plan, a so-called "ballistic re-entry" - a plunge with an uncontrollable, steep trajectory

He said the crew missed the target because they changed their landing plan at the last minute without telling mission control.

Astronauts don't just don't go changing re-entry profiles willy-nilly. If they did it, there was a reason they needed to.

Remember the collision between the Progress supply ship and Mir during the manual docking? The first thing the Soviets did was blame it on the Russian cosmonaut. It turned out the whole operation was poorly planned, rehearsed and was an accident waiting to happen.

There's a lot more to this story than we've heard yet.

Re:Ballistic trajectory?

The article also says
"He said the crew missed the target because they changed their landing plan at the last minute without telling mission control."

So most likely it was not a steering malfunction.

Re:Ballistic trajectory?

I'd take that report with a grain of salt. The first impulse of many bureaucracies is to blame all problems on the flight crew.

Re:Ballistic trajectory?

According to the voice data recorder, the last comment before the course change was:

"Screw you guys, I'm going home."

Re:Ballistic trajectory?

A capusle can "sort of fly" during reentry. You can use thrusters to change the attitude of the craft which changes the direction. This requires guidance. You usally use this because it's less stressful on the crew and you have pretty good accuracy. The ballistic trajectory is just like you said. Uncontrolled so you fall like a rock. So you spend less time slowing down in the upper atmosphere. You get to the thicker atmosphere sooner and when you do you are going faster which causes very high G deceleration. Not fun but the craft is designed to do it.

Re:Ballistic trajectory?

The "ballistic trajectory" seems to be an euphemism for coming down like a rock.

It's not really an euphemism. The definition of "ballistic" literally means to fall like a rock.

Re:"less robust"

Well, maybe.

The US hasn't had a man-rated traditional stack since the last Apollo in 1976, but the next-gen Ares launcher will be a traditional inline design with the payload at the top. That, plus the lack of enormous asymmetrical control and lifting surfaces required for (some value of) atmospheric flight pretty much eliminates the sources of danger caused by the shuttle design.

OTOH, the somewhat... controversial? decision to make the Ares first stage an adaption of the existing shuttle solid rocket boosters is proving rather problematic, owing to the well-known pogo oscillation modthrusterse problems of SRB [flightglobal.com]s. (that's just a random story that popped up on google, no doubt there are much better overviews elsewhere.) Basically as designed the vehicle would crush the crew to jelly with high frequency +/1 70G vertical oscillations (shortly before the entire stack shakes itself to pieces.) (This wasn't a problem on the shuttle because there are two SRBs coupled through the external tank.)

Anyway, in a few years' time we'll be able to start comparing the safety of like with like.

No-one outside the space geek community seems to have noticed, but the Ariane-V launched ATV cargo vessel (payload: ~20 tons) has now launched human flight-rated hardware (the ATV, now docked to ISS), albeit without humans in it when it went off. I suspect there are some interesting things being doodled on napkins at cafes and bars all over Darmstadt.

Re:China

With the Dollar getting so low (I won't go into the politics of it) even Walmart is getting expensive.

I think what is happening is goods from China are price correcting. If you think Wal-mart is getting expensive, maybe you should try shopping there on the pay scale of the people who make the clothes you are buying. For many years now the Yuan has been kept artificially low, giving China a strong advantage in international trading. They kept their currency values (read labor cost) low by buying up US debt, which kept the dollar high, Japan may have done the same thing. [treas.gov] In effect, Asia has been subsidizing US consumerism for decades. So the western world moved a huge amount of their manufacturing to China. In 2005 China stopped their policy of keeping the Yuan fixed at 8.28 yuan to the dollar, now it's up to 7 yuan to the dollar so everything made in China costs 18% more. China still maintains some trade advantage as they now have a much better manufacturing infrastructure and labor pool, but the now rising yuan is going to slingshot the standard of living in China up to that of the western world in short order. That means that "Made in China" is soon going to cost just as much as "Made in the USA". Which really just means that the people making it are getting paid a fair living wage, and the item actually costs what it is worth.

Re:Astronauts.

Stories like this remind me of the huge BALLS it takes to strap yourself onto a rocket and fly straight into orbit, and then come back down again.

Maybe you should say huge nads or something else that's more unisex, considering both of the astronauts in this case were women. :)

Re:Nice Spin

Taken from a web forum, but I've seen similar stuff before:

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/military/read.main/54404/ [airliners.net]

Soyuz (1967-Present)
Flights: 95
Failures: 4 (2 non-fatal)
Failure Rate: 4.21%

Cosmonauts Flown: 228
Fatalities: 4
Fatality Rate: 1.75%

Shuttle (1981-Present)
Flights: 116
Failures: 3 (1 non-fatal)
Failure Rate: 2.59%

Astronauts Flown: 692
Fatalities: 14
Fatality Rate: 2.02%

This is a statistical dead heat. There is simply not a big enough sample size to distinguish between a 1.75% and a 2.02% fatality rate. And the "who had an accident more recently" does not establish it either.

Both are good systems, each has respective advantages (simplicity and low-cost vs. a lot of on-orbit assembly and payload capability). It's good the world has both, and we may never know which would be safer with infinite flights.