Soyuz misses its mark but still finds Earth safely
By Traci Watson, USA TODAY
HOUSTON The first U.S. astronauts to ride from orbit to Earth in a Russian spacecraft touched down so far off course late Saturday that searchers couldn't find them for 2 ½ nerve-racking hours.
Search teams combed the area around the intended landing zone before locating the Russian Soyuz space vehicle at 12:30 a.m. ET Sunday. It fell to Earth nearly 285 miles from its predicted landing site in Kazakhstan. (Related site: NASA details mission)
When rescuers spotted them, the two Americans and one Russian who landed in the Soyuz had popped the capsule's hatch and were waving. All three crewmembers were safe. Astronaut Don Pettit had an injured shoulder. It wasn't clear how he was injured.
Astronaut Ken Bowersox, a Navy test pilot, said on NASA television that the trip home was "fantastic. It's something I've always dreamed about, to have a test flight in a vehicle like that." He said the crew's eyes "got very wide" when they realized they weren't going to land quite as expected, but "before we knew it, we were on the ground."
The astronauts will stay in Russia for two weeks.
Unlike the space shuttle, which lands on a runway like a plane, the Soyuz has no wings. That means it plummets to Earth, then thumps to a landing. If all goes as planned, it will come down somewhere in a 25-mile-wide landing zone.
Its fall is cushioned by parachutes and small rockets that, at the last minute, fire toward the ground to slow the vehicle.
Bowersox, Pettit and their Russian crewmate, Nikolai Budarin, had been living aboard the International Space Station since late November. They originally expected to fly home in a space shuttle in early March. But the destruction of Columbia on Feb. 1 grounded the shuttle fleet.
It was unclear Sunday why the Soyuz strayed so far from its intended landing site. Russian space officials speculated that the craft entered the atmosphere at a slightly steeper angle than planned, which would have changed its path.
During a normal landing, Soyuz passengers feel forces equal to 41/2 times the weight of gravity. In Saturday's landing, those forces could have been as much as nine times the weight of gravity. Crews landing in a shuttle usually feel 11/2 times the force of gravity.
This was the first flight of a new version of the Soyuz designed to provide a smoother landing. Russian and NASA officials will start an investigation next week into why it strayed off its intended path.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.