Relieved Space Crew Shrugs Off Their Ordeal
Tue May 6,10:57 AM ET
STAR CITY, Russia (Reuters) – A U.S.-Russian space crew marooned in orbit by the shuttle disaster then lost in the Kazakh steppes on their return, shrugged off the ordeal on Tuesday and told how they cheered as they landed.
U.S. astronauts Kenneth Bowersox, Donald Pettit and Russia’s Nikolai Budarin said it was too soon to say what disabled the automatic settings of their Soyuz capsule and brought them down some 390 miles off target after a violent re-entry.
“All the way, literally up to the moment we entered the atmosphere, we were on an automatic setting, expecting a controlled re-entry,” veteran Budarin told a press conference at Russia’s cosmonaut training center outside Moscow.
“Then one minute before entering the atmosphere the automatic regime stopped functioning…It is not yet clear why.”
The crew lost radio links with mission control minutes before landing and rescuers took two tense hours to spot the crew’s tiny capsule in the steppe.
But the three men said they had been glad to be left to soak in the Central Asian scenery after almost six months in orbit.
…Bowersox, the mission’s commander, said the crew had been trained for the sharper ballistic landing and for its impact on their bodies — almost twice as powerful as normal re-entry.
“There is a lot of pressure on your chest,” he said. “It is hard to breathe and your tongue slips to the back of your head.”
Any hitch with the Soyuz would have spelled the end for the International Space Station (news – web sites), dependent on Russian crafts after the Columbia disaster grounded the U.S. shuttles in February.
It would also have left the two American and Russian astronauts currently on board the station without a lifeboat.
“For a moment, it felt like I was Atlas, and I had the weight of the whole world on my shoulders,” Pettit said.
