April 23, 2008

The root of the problem......Grrrlz in teh capsuel

That wayward Soyuz capsule ferrying crew from the International Space Station entered the atmosphere HATCH END FIRST burning off the radio antennas and pointing the heat shield and retro rockets in the wrong direction!

Holy crap!

Despite the harrowing entry, the capsule somehow did not incinerate on reentry (w00t!) but landed hundreds of miles off course with no working radios and had a very rough landing.

Fortunately, all three crewmembers, American Peggy Whitson, Korean Yi So-yeon, and Russian Yuri Malenchenko were safe.

But then there is this... (HT Rand Simberg)

The Russians chastised the crew for not radioing...(I refer you to the 'melted off antennas' bit) and....as a precaution to ensure that this sort of thing never happens again...

" "You know in Russia, there are certain bad omens about this sort of thing, but thank God that everything worked out successfully,'' he said. "Of course in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of women will not surpass'the number of men.  "

Saydowhahuh?

So the problems have been identified as Peggy Whitson, who was the first female commander of the ISS and currently has the American record for number of cumulative hours in space and Yi So-yeon who is the first Korean in Space.


Oh good....I was worried they'd waste money on something silly like the attitude control system or GPS...but that was no doubt my cynical nature talking.





An accurate representation of what female astronauts reentering the atmosphere do not look like.
      
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Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:11 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 It is really astounding it survived reentry like that.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thu Apr 24 00:10:19 2008 (+rSRq)

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