Blue Collar Scientist

Due to my interest in astronomy and space sciences, I’ve been following the story of the way-off-course landing of Soyuz TMA-11 - which now appears not only to have been way off course, but also to have entered with an incorrect, and dangerous, attitude. The whole story, I’m sure, will come out in the coming weeks - this sort of thing is sure to attract high-level attention from NASA and maybe even from Congress. In the meantime, I’ve already reported on Roskosmos head Anitoly Perminov blaming the problem on women.

Today, though, it was pointed out to me that there have been assurances that this will not happen again:

“There is very little probability of another ballistic landing,” said General Vladimir Popov, who heads the team responsible for Russia’s space search and rescue operations.

There is a bit of a problem, though. That comment is from 2003, after the similarly flawed landing of another Soyuz mission to the ISS.

Sigh. Yes, I know this stuff is hard - it is literally rocket science. But still….

Tags: landing, malfunction, Roskosmos, soyuz, TMA-11

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under astronomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.