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….

I have previously reported on Anatoly Perminov, head of Roskosmos (the Russian space program), caving in to superstitious people when it came to the numbering of missions.

After today’s Soyuz TMA-11 mission landed 400 km (250 miles) off course, with astronauts returning from the International Space Station aboard, Anatoly Perminov is at is again:

Perminov referred to a naval superstition that having women aboard a ship was bad luck when asked about the presence of two women on the Soyuz.

“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.

Challenged by a reporter, Perminov responded: “This isn’t discrimination. I’m just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behavior or something else occurs, that’s what I’m talking about.” He did not elaborate.

I guess it would just be too much trouble to engineer your vehicles to work right, and accept the occasional malfunction as both a design certainty¹ and a cost of doing business. I guess it is far easier to just blame the women.

Hat tip to Jeff Foust on the Space Politics blog.

1. One would, of course, expect the malfunctions to be held to a certain acceptable frequency, that critical systems have redundancy, etc. [↩]

Physorg reports that the head of the Roskosmos, Anatoly Perminov, supports renumbering Soyuz TMA missions to the International Space Station so that the next one is not numbered 13, but 14.

In Russia, many people have superstitious beliefs — black cats, Mondays, the number 13. That’s why I think that it is a good idea to change the number of the next space ship

Not just in Russia, buddy. Here in the US, a lot of hotels avoid having a 13th floor. This becomes a problem for me in elevators when my room is above the 13th floor. Apparently I tend to integrate the number of buttons instead of reading the button labels, and I hit the one that “should” correspond to my floor. Some hotels that lack a 13th floor lack a button for the floor. When that is the case I’m frequently one off on which button I punch. Since I believe that hotel elevators in hotels I’m spending money to stay in ought to be built for my convenience, I find this irritating.