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Space

Space Station Crew Lands Safely In Kazakhstan 119

Posted by Zonk from the yay-for-earth dept.
loid_void writes "It's being reported on CNN that a space capsule carrying a U.S.-Russian-Italian crew has landed safely in northern Kazakhstan, following a mission aboard the international space station. Search-and-rescue helicopters spotted the capsule as it floated toward its designated arrival site and made a soft landing, upright. It had undocked with the orbiting station less than 3 hours earlier. Mission Control said the crew reported feeling fine. Remaining behind on the space station are Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and American astronaut John Phillips."
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Space Station Crew Lands Safely In Kazakhstan More

Space Station Crew Lands Safely In Kazakhstan

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  • Yay! they're back (Score:4, Funny)

    by nounderscores ( 246517 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @02:29AM (#12334245)
    But I wish they'd hit the taco bell target on one trip home.

    Sure, I won't get a taco, but the thing's been built. It really should be used.

    Well, here's to their safe return and the many long months of eating spinach, drinking milk and taking calcium pills as they rebuild their strength.

  • I told uI was hardcore (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Monday April 25, 2005 @02:30AM (#12334247) Journal
    Gotta love how those Russians are willing to drop their space heros onto hard ground.

    None of that fancy schmancy airplane lookalike space vehicles for them!

  • Its terribly sad.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @02:32AM (#12334251)
    That we pretty much pull out of the space program and 'invest heavily' into fighting the bugaboo of the day.

    Its now to the point that we're literally afraid to "fly" in space. Thanks to the shuttle entry-blow up, that's retarded apace-flight by how long? 2 years? 4 years? "Until it's safe?"

    The russians have a damned good idea there. They actually fly, knowing the risks. They also are MORE CAPITALISTIC as they actually accept chaperoned flights from 'thrill seekers'.

    Just think, what kind of tech did they have back in the Apollo moon landing? Computers? Hardly. Look what we have now, and look how we ignore to use it. They didnt.
    • where to start... let me start with your last one...

      "Just think, what kind of tech did they have back in the Apollo moon landing? Computers? Hardly. Look what we have now, and look how we ignore to use it. They didnt."

      They DONT NEED faster computers to run the space ships, what they need is redundant computers.

      "The russians have a damned good idea there. They actually fly, knowing the risks. They also are MORE CAPITALISTIC as they actually accept chaperoned flights from 'thrill seekers'."

      Sure, they do h

    • Re:Its terribly sad.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Adrilla ( 830520 ) * on Monday April 25, 2005 @02:43AM (#12334294) Homepage
      That's why privatizing space missions is clearly the answer. Our government has dropped the ball and it's time for some enterprising corporation(s) to pick it up and run with it. I look forward to seeing what more open-minded people can come up with (if they can get past all the red tape).
      • It's definetly not the answer. The answer involves everyone, not just the private industry.

        More open-minded people are good, but theres always a balance that needs to be taken when making decisions that cost billions and billions of dollars.
        • please elaborate

          • Re:Its terribly sad.... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Mandoric ( 55703 ) <mandoric@sover.net> on Monday April 25, 2005 @04:28AM (#12334521) Homepage
            Just because private shipbuilders can do fine cranking out cargo barges, cruiseliners, and yachts doesn't mean there's no use for battleships, icebreakers, and submarines.

            While a strong private presence in space will certainly increase the level of traffic, the fact remains that when it comes down to building the largest ships, those designed for the longest hauls, and those with arcane research purposes, only "national interest" and "national security" can drum up the funding even on the Earth's oceans.

            That said, what's an "arcane research purpose" can change drastically with time... Columbus once undertook a research voyage funded by Spanish royalty, that's today a routine cruise or cargo shipment. As human presence beyond the Earth increases, clear, safe profits will open up, and businesses will go for them.

            It's just that any man landing on the moon today will be there to plant a flag. His sucessor will be there to build a home. And then, after that, comes room for the enterpreneur offering the comforts of Earth shipped up and cheap vacation fares back.

            • Re:Its terribly sad.... (Score:5, Insightful)

              by robertjw ( 728654 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @10:52AM (#12336491) Homepage
              Columbus once undertook a research voyage funded by Spanish royalty

              That's an interesting example. The difference between Columbus' voyage an NASA's work is that the Spanish royal family was interested in making money. In fact, I can't think of one of the early exploration voyages to the Americas that was motivated primarily by research or national security. Magellen, Cortez, Hudson, Drake, they were all motivated to find a way to India, or to take riches from the new world. Some of that exploration may have been funded by the governments, but much of it was private, and nearly all of it was motivated by money.
              • One could argue that, especially in those days, "money" and "prestige" were synonymous with "security". Certainly, Spain's high position in Europe rose and fell on the back of exclusive trading with the colonies. Of course, I'll grant that such things were nowhere in the motives of the explorers; only those that funded them.

      • Maybe they will in 20 years, there is no profit right now for the type of things the government does and the initial costs are too great for any sane investor. If you're going to complain about how much the Shuttle incident has "set us back" then private space companies are not the answer. You can't have it both ways.
      • I can't imagine a corporate risk and cost analysis that would give the thumbs-up to space exploration. Space tourism, maybe, but even if it only cost $1000, what's the point? The only point of manned flights is to research manned space flight to make way for what...Mars landings? Colonizing Alpha Centari? Not to disparage those purposes, but what profit would private enterprise possibly see in those ends? That would be like waiting 30 years (at least) for the return on the investment, which no company is wi

        • Re:Its terribly sad.... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Adrilla ( 830520 ) * on Monday April 25, 2005 @04:47AM (#12334595) Homepage
          How about this: Instead of paying the gov't tax dollars to plunder natural resources, we decide where our "surplus" income goes to? What if the tax form included a checklist where you decided yea or nay on things like social security, defense spending, paying back national debt, NASA's budget and so forth?

          The problem with this is a lot of important programs will be underfunded.

          Perfectly healthy people could end up not caring about disability, and that leaves disabled people without enough money for their healthcare. Rich people wont care about Social Security (they fund a significant amount of it currently) because they'll never need it, so your mom won't have that money to fall back upon when she retires if a few years.

          Little, yet important programs that you never think about get no money because no one will think they're worthy (music in schools, homeless iniatives, public libraries, could be anything).

          Not to mention the extra work of having to read a thousand+ page book every tax period that explains all the programs you'll be voting on, I'm sure after you've done all your taxes and deductions, (adding line C to line E, subtract section 12) you wont be wanting to have to read about and pick from thousands of programs so you can choose which deserves your money.

          It's simply not the answer.

        • Re:Its terribly sad.... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @04:50AM (#12334609) Journal
          Even better, how about some Non-governmental, non-profit space agency that gets funded by a bunch of geeks with nothing better to spend their money on? (and by the way, avoid paying taxes altogether) I bet there's already a web site...

          Like the Planetary Society? On May 31, they'll be launching Cosmos 1 [planetary.org], the first solar sail spacecraft. Here's a Nature article [nature.com]. According to the page, it'll be "the first space mission ever flown by a non-governmental advocacy group."

          Another interesting philanthropic project was Elon Musk's Mars Oasis project [spaceref.com] to put an experimental greenhouse on the surface of Mars. He hired a team to do some preliminary designs and cost analysis, and found that actually building the thing was pretty affordable for him. However, the launch costs weren't as affordable as he wanted (they would've been the most expensive part of the entire project), so he decided to redirect his efforts towards SpaceX [wikipedia.org] to lower those costs. I suspect the Mars Oasis project is still on the back-burner, and he may pursue it again once he gets launch costs low enough.

    • Re:Its terribly sad.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bleckywelcky ( 518520 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @03:32AM (#12334390)
      It's a bit more complicated than that. You can't just grab a P4 chip and throw it on a satellite or the shuttle. There are 2 immediate problems.

      First: technology readiness level (TRL). In order for a P4 chip to be put into space, it would need to go through about 1000x more testing than Intel currently puts it through. The last thing you want is the guidance chip on a satellite to produce a single error during a trajectory manuever and have the thing come crashing down to Earth or fly out on some highly elliptical orbit. TRL rates from 0 (concept/prototype) to 10 (repeatedly flight-proven hardware). A P4 chip would be somewhere around 2 - production capable, but no flight testing or flight experience. The space shuttle uses stuff in the 6 or 7 and above range.

      Second: operating environment (included in the above TRL, but of particular concern due to the nasty conditions of space). Intense radiation from the Sun and space, inability to easily radiate heat away, etc. RAD-hard components are needed for anything going into space.

      For current space-ready equipment, we're talking on the order of 6 MFLOPS ... aprox 30 MIPS at 20 MHz. You are not going to run Doom or Quake on this stuff.
        • Cubesats are 10cmx10cmx10cm, or sometimes three of such blocks connected together. You don't use a P4 on such a satellite for obvious reasons.
        • Yeh, because when you have mission critical applications and astronaut's lives at stake you go with a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm amateur satellite developed over the course of a year or two by university students in their spare time. I looked around at their testing documents and see no mention of RAD testing at all.

          Don't get me wrong, I think CubeSat is awesome, but it's a hobby project for university students. There's only so much you can do in that type of environment. And it can't match the work of 1000s of se
      • For current space-ready equipment, we're talking on the order of 6 MFLOPS ... aprox 30 MIPS at 20 MHz. You are not going to run Doom or Quake on this stuff.

        I dunno, you should be able to run Doom on that. Wouldn't get much of a graphics display out of it, but who cares? Quake might be pushing it, but not by much. It's not like trying to run Half-Life.

      • Re:Its terribly sad.... (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Pentium II processors and Pentium processors have been "Space Rated" for a long time now. What do you think is driving around those rovers on mars? an old Intel 4004?

        Shielding tech nowdays, espically in a craft reduce the needs for hardened chips. A 3 mm of aluminum can block most of the gamma crap even in the van allen belts. (one of the "reasons" the we did not go to the moon wack-jobs use... that the van-allen belts are full of horribly lethal radiation.. they gloss over the fact that it is not hard
      • I think the complaint has to do with that very same state of the art that you're talking about. Nobody wanted to throw a P4 into the shuttle and have it do all kinds of crazy things. The problem is that the technology we're using doesn't seem to be improving over time. NASA is dumpster diving and/or paying top dollar for old 486 systems, because that's the best thing they're allowed to use.

        I, and probably a lot of other people, would love to see this state of the art move forward. Get a few more processors
        • i highly doubt they are dumpster diving for kit that actually goes into space (i belive they have been known to do it for fixing old ground support systems though)

          a 486 that goes into space isn't going to be a normal 486 its going to be a version with rad hardening and possiblly other changes
          • Good point. It's probably not for machines that they send into space. I guess you read the same article as I did (can't find the link for it). But I recall that they needed those old 486 systems because they needed machines on the ground that were equivalent to the ones they were sending up. Otherwise, why not just use modern hardware? (Actually, I think it might have been because their software was written improperly and depended on the clockspeed of the processor it was written for...)

            Anyhow, that's old
      • As I write this I am watching a compilation of clips about the return trip on NASA TV. While Sergei Krikalev was closing the hatch, you could hear John Philips explain that his work was going slow, because he was using floppy disks to transfer data on. He also said something about needing USB (solid state?) disks, I did not quite catch that. Would these work on the ISS?

        BTW, it is fairly trivial to see for yourself what they are using up there, as NASA publish hi-res photos of the interior of the ISS.

        Now N
    • I think you're confusing entreprenourship with desperation. The Russian space agency isn't putting millionaire tourists in space because they want to. They do it because they need the money. The Russian space agency (who's name I forget) is made up of real scientists who want to be doing serious science, not monitoring joyrides.

  • template journalism (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This article must have been written before the landing took place. The capsule landed on its side. Futhermore, the crew were transferred to Arkalyk where medical staff awaited them, not the other way around.
  • Would be if the astronauts landed during a gunbattle in Falluja. Ok, so maybe not THAT funny...but still...

  • In my country there is problem... (Score:5, Funny)

    by charlie763 ( 529636 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @02:40AM (#12334282)
    And that problem is the shuttle.
    Throw the shuttle down the well
    And my country will be free
    • The shuttle isn't the problem... Not to mention, the shuttle is getting retired in 5 years right after it finishes getting the ISS "Core Complete(all the US stuff up there basically)"

      The problem is the gap between 2010 and 2014 when there won't be a shuttle or a man rated CEV to get us into space. Thankfully the new NASA administrator Michael Griffin is fully aware of that problem and is working his butt off to eliminate that problem. That's why I love the new NASA administrator and whoever is president
      • Reprinted formt the HBO web page

        Borat Sagdiyev is Kazakhstan's sixth most famous man. A leading journalist from the State run TV network, Borat has been sent to the United States to report on all aspects of American life. From baseball to Broadway, Borat asks the questions no westerner would dream of in his tireless quest for knowledge, telling dating agencies he will 'crush' women who are unfaithful, touching the penises of Vietnam veterans in Atlanta, urinating on trees with new age gurus in Sedona. Bor

    • Yegshamesh!

      http://www.boratonline.co.uk/

  • Kazakhstan Television (Score:5, Funny)

    by DNAspark99 ( 218197 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @02:41AM (#12334288)
    Where they interviewed by Borat [boratonline.co.uk] ?

    "first we have a party...then we shoot dog!"

  • The saddest part for me... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FireballX301 ( 766274 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @02:43AM (#12334292) Journal
    ...is that this was an actual news event.

    Seriously. Before Columbia, the 'successful' missions were always tucked away in some 'World Update' column on page 10 inside the paper, or never got a second glance by most readers. The fact that this is both on CNN and .\ is kind of unnerving to me.

    How long will it take before we can clear the aura of fear surrounding space missions?
    • When they clear the aura of fear living in a world of terrorism, felons, druggies, people with dark skin, and people who do not accept Jesus as their personal savior and GW as His chosen one.
    • Ummmm these things were always in the news, you just never paid attention to them...

      What fear?, seems to me your the only one afraid of space.

    • Re:The saddest part for me... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @02:51AM (#12334311) Journal
      How long will it take before we can clear the aura of fear surrounding space missions?

      Indeed. I look forward to the day that a spacecraft landing or taking off is as routine and non-newsworthy as an airplane landing or taking off.
    • No kidding. This U.S. has become the equivalent of a dog with its tail between its legs. Space Shuttle tragedies and terrorism didn't stop us before, but nowadays every shuttle is destined to explode and the next Osama Bin Laden is lurking in every shadow.

      At this rate, newspapers might as well start running "Sun rose this morning" on the front page to lull us into safety from the deadly evil things waiting at every bend.

      On the one hand, maybe it's relatively major news because they came down in a Russian
      • The parent post is a little confrontational, but makes a good point.

        Really, people need to get to grips with the idea that bold actions are inherently risky. We should do what we can to reduce risk, but can't let it paralyze us into inaction. When failure isn't an option, success becomes absurdly difficult.

    • Re:The saddest part for me... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @04:32AM (#12334530)
      Call me crazy, but I like it this way. Previously people complained that no one cared about space and that all these missions. This was a very valid complaint. I've heard way too many people say stuff like "What are we wasting our taxes on?"

      And no, I'm not saying that its lucky that NASA lost another batch of astronauts as much as I'm saying space-travel is dangerous and these kinds of things will happen. We do space-travel and space mission because they are important. The important of space means risk taking and spending money.

      Not to mention, when events are in the news frequently they become more important to people. They talk about them. They might get a better understanding of the issues, the science, etc. Considering space isn't very politicized outside of missile defense, you can usually get some decent information from the mainstream media.

      Thanks to things like Hubble, the Mars rovers, the Chinese manned orbit, Rutan, etc space certainly feels more real and important to me, and I assume to many others. I hope it never goes back to page 10 of the World section.
      • The problem is that the media is portraying this as FUD, not as the betterment of science/spaceflight/etc. The only reason it is getting press is because it is 'shock news' - granted, in this case it was a success, but it is just a platform for them to spring from when something else goes wrong down the line. I enjoy things like this getting press, I just don't want to to be because they can say things like 'disaster averted'.
    • > ... and .\ is ...

      Is that a slashdot mirror?

  • Forgiv me ..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by NegativeOneUserID ( 812728 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @03:06AM (#12334342)
    In Soviet Russia, space station crew lands safely you!

  • and (Score:5, Funny)

    by GoatPigSheep ( 525460 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @03:16AM (#12334363) Homepage Journal
    As a sign of kazakh hospitality, the crew were each given one donkey and a jar of insecticide.
  • This is a RUSSIAN capsule! The rockets are also reliable, since they are the ones that hold the nukes..... Then once they're about to reach their "expiration date" they're launched off into space. Just think what will happen to us if WWIII starts one day :(.
    • that rockets are modernized versions of the first russian icbms made in 1950ies. but those old icbms weren't used for decades.

  • The problem with the U.S. program (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eastshores ( 459180 ) on Monday April 25, 2005 @04:18AM (#12334483)
    Is that NASA is not afforded the opportunity or direction to involve the hearts and minds of the average American in their missions. They are forced to rely on outside help for that (e.b. KSC Visitors Complex) The truly appealing quality of the early missons were that it was NOT safe and was far from routine. That's what brings out the crowds.. thats why Nascar is the fastest growing sport in the U.S. Yet, the primary focus of the NASA mission is Safety!

    Safety is no different than security, there is a point where it is a limiting factor. It has to be balanced reasonably to achieve the primary objectives, otherwise it's value is lost.

    Return to flight will draw a good portion of Americans back into the program. For that mission everyone will waive their flags and cheer upon success. Shortly thereafter shuttle launches will again be routine and Americans will not involve themselves as much as would please me. But then what government program can't you say that about?
    • Combines the best elements of both? Seriously, though, we just lost a shuttle crew last time it was up and you're complaining that it focuses too much on safety?

  • Geez, guys, it's just a return capsule (Score:4, Informative)

    by Alex Belits ( 437 ) * on Monday April 25, 2005 @05:09AM (#12334680) Homepage
    And yes, Kazakhstan is a country (formerly USSR member), where the Baikonur Cosmodrome is located -- this is where Russian ISS-related flights are launched.
  • I wonder if Borat Sagdiyev [tvtome.com] will interview them.

  • The greeting (Score:1, Informative)

    by Mike Farooki ( 85314 )
    U, S, and A! U, S, and A!
  • What does a soyuz look like (on the outside) after it makes bumpdown?

    We tend to see pictures of the cosmo/astronauts whenever one of these things lands, but I'm curious about how the vehicle withstands the head of re-entry and what it looks like when it's all over.

    Can anyone point me to some decent pictures?

    Thanks

  • This is good news even without the "Space Station Crew".
  • An American, a Russian, and an Italian landed just outside of Kazakhstan.

    The (pick one of the nationals) says: (what?)

    The (pick one of the remaining nationals) says: (what?)

    The (insert remaining national here) then says: (punch line).

    Anyone???

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