South Korea's first voyager into space got a rude awakening to the hazards of spaceflight Saturday, as the Soyuz capsule carrying her back to Earth descended much faster and rougher than planners had anticipated. Yi So-yeon, 29, who had flown to the International Space Station 10 days earlier as a guest of the Russian space agency, was subjected to severe gravitational forces when the vehicle went off course.
The Soyuz spacecraft, known as TMA-11, carried Yi and American astronaut Peggy Whitson, 48, and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko, 46, safely back to the surface of the Kazakhstan steppe, but it was a bumpy ride. For reasons currently unclear, the capsule's re-entry path followed a much steeper descent than astronautic engineers had programmed. Instead of a smooth approach to its landing zone, the Soyuz fell more like a cannon ball, in a so-called ballistic re-entry. This caused friction with the atmosphere to rattle the vehicle and surround it in flames.
Nonetheless, the space travelers survived the ordeal and were recovered by Russian authorities about 300 miles away from their rendezvous point, where they were whisked away to receive medical attention.
Even as of today, during a press conference at Russia's Star City spaceflight center, near Moscow, the three appeared to be still shaky, according to an account from the Associated Press.
Yi told the gathered media that she had been "really scared" by the unexpected re-entry.
"During descent I saw some kind of fire outside as we were going through the atmosphere," said Yi, a bioengineer who had won a contest to become Korea's first astronaut. "At first, I was really scared because it looked really, really hot and I thought we could burn."
Her panic subsided, though, when she observed that her veteran crewmates were calm and collected and that the temperature inside the spacecraft was unaffected by the heat outside.
So, she admitted, "I looked at the others, and I pretended to be okay."
(The BBC news service has a video excerpt of Yi's comments today here.)
Speaking on behalf of the Russians, Malenchenko said the cause of the malfunction was a technical unknown. "There was no action of the crew that led to this," he said. "Time will tell what went wrong."
A spokesperson for Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, noted that the trio had experienced gravitational forces up to 10 times those on Earth during the 3.5-hour descent. It was the second time in a row that a glitch of this kind had caused voyagers returning from the ISS to land off course in a Soyuz.
Meanwhile, the U.S. space agency chose to put a positive spin on the whole matter. In a brief account on its ISS Website, NASA emphasized that the TMA-11 crew was safe and sound, despite the flight's problems.
The Americans also noted with cooperative pride that the veterans on the Soyuz, a cosmonaut and an astronaut, had achieved some big milestones in the history of spaceflight. Whitson, who had commanded ISS Expedition 16, set a new record for an astronaut in space by completing 377 days in orbit. And Malenchenko, a Russian Air Force colonel, set a mark of 515 days in space over three long-duration missions, giving him the distinction of standing in fifth place among all humans to travel to the cosmos.
While the ongoing problems of the Soyuz capsules call for a major investigation into their re-entry systems, the mood among the world's two leading space agencies today seems to be more one of relief than anger that nothing worse occurred than a frightening fall from the heavens.
Especially, for one rookie space explorer.
[Editor's Note: Please see our previous entry New Space Station Crew Heads Into Orbit for additional info on the latest ISS expedition.]
