Welcome home Commander.
This guy is personally responsible for getting people interested in space again. A hero. And the inspiration for my next 'tache come this Movember.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is back on Earth following a 144-day stay aboard the International Space Station, which ended on a high note when the crooning spaceman released an impressive high-altitude version of David Bowie's Space Oddity. Hadfield and fellow Expedition 35 'nauts Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko …
I wonder if he now knows if there really is "Life on mars" ? Did he ever get the change to meet "Lady Stardust" , was she really the "Prettiest Star", does he have any aspirations of joining the "Spiders from Mars" ?
He truly knows the meaning of going from "Station to Station", although he is probably glad that he didn't use a "V2-Scheider" to get there, whilst he was travelling "Across the Universe".
I am convinced that he would have made "Ziggy Stardust" proud and I hope that the paparzzi never got a pic of him "Loving the Alien".
Every time I see the ISS fly over (happens quite often whilst stargazing, I could even spot its overall shape with big binoculars), I just have to give quiet praise to the people up there, and the people who helped put them there. However we bemoan not doing enough space exploration, some people are dedicating and even risking their lives in the name of space exploration.
People like Cmdr Hadfield set a shining example in my book. Cheers to him and all like him
I did shudder when the BBC news described him as a celebrity - he is not a celebrity, he is an inspiration - the two are very different things.
Part of me does worry whether TPTB now try to repeat the process with each new commander, as this only really works because Mr Hadfield had the personal skills to present to the world without any jingoistic nonsense. Others may not be able to pull this off....
Apparently he updated his twitter status to 'in a field somewhere in Kazakhstan'. Which tickled me when I heard it on the radio this morning. He has a nice turn of phrase. And again, congrats for raising the profile of space when things weren't going wrong. Normally that's the main time the ISS gets media attention.
I'd like to dispute one thing though. In your article you say 'touched down'. I've seen some videos of Soyuz landings that make that look like a bit of a polite euphemism for ouch, bang, ouch. Still, any landing you walk away from I suppose...
.. do they still bring them down over solid ground! Every time I see a Soyuz landing I wince - talk about giving you a reason to not come home! Anyone know how many they have lost through mis-firing retro-rockets? I can imagine that in the old USSR such numbers would have been well hidden.
I don't believe they use rockets. I think it's just parachutes and probably extra bouncy seats. The Soviets went for return to land because they didn't have the fleet in the 50s to be able to keep several handy in different places. They also had no aircraft carriers.
I can't remember which of the early Cosmonauts died because of a parachute failure. Apparently he spent his last few minutes coming down making very rude comments about the engineers over the radio. Before hitting the ground at 100mph-odd. I also seem to remember they had one land on the side of a steep hill, and go for a big roll - which can't have been nice. And didn't they also have one land massively off course, which took several days to find?
SpaceX are apparently planning to land their Dragons on rockets though. I presume they'll have parachutes to slow the descent, but they want to come in on land so they can re-use the capsules, which is too expensive after you've dunked them in salt water. Plus they may not have free access to the US fleet. When they man rate it they're going to have re-ignitable rockets, which will act as an emergency escape system in caste the Falcon rocket goes kaboom at launch, and also be landing rockets. And I presume also for the de-orbit burn. I imagine that's going to take a lot of testing to convince the NASA safety people to man-rate it. But good luck to them if they can make it work.
I think I'll use the appropriate icon here...
They use rockets attached to the parachute bridle, activated by a simple altimeter just before touchdown. You can see the puff of smoke if the helicopters are close enough in time. If the rockets don't fire, it can be spinal injuries and chipped teeth, but they're pretty reliable.
Vladimir Komorov had major issues with his spacecraft, and ended up in a spin so his chutes immediately wound up when they deployed. He had a complete train of failures and misdesigned crap, so he was pretty pissed off.
I do remember there was one Soyuz that ended up surrounded by wolves, so they now carry knives & pistols.
Still, I'd ride a Soyuz, Shuttle, Dragon, or just about anything, even a Boeing product, to get into orbit. Boeing can't even keep their capsule from cracking during the pressure test though.
Gene Cash,
Thanks for correcting me on the rockets.
Like you, I'd pretty much ride any spacecraft if it got me up there, however risky. If it meant avoiding the million dollar price ticket then I'd go on something experimental - so long as it was at least plausibly non-suicidal.
I'm hoping current rises in life-expectancy continue, so that I can eventually get an affordable ticket to space, before I die. Even if I have to blow my entire pension on doing it. In which case I'd probably be grateful for a failure on re-entry, as an alternative to living on cat food for the rest of my life...
As said, some retro-rockets fire just before landing. If they fail, you'll live.
If you want to go for water landing then you need to launch over water in cause of an abort - look at a map of the USSR and you'll see that puts you way out East, which wasn't practical.
The thing about Komarov turning the air blue as he came in is essentially a load of cobblers. He would have been in radio blackout until just before the parachutes were supposed to deploy.
Soyuz 18a, 1975, had a launch abort and landed on the side of a hill.
A number of capsules have had ballistic re-entries so took a while to get to but I don't think it's ever been more than a few hours:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
what I learned is in space guitars and laptops float around in the air. yes IN THE AIR. Air works like water in space, things float in it even heavy things like people.
Also in space if you look outside it is always nighttime, even when it is 3pm it is still nighttime. so like Australia? no, even when it is 3am it is also nighttime. confusing. the sun is always out but the sky is still night. you just have to wake up and pretend it is day or you dont get anything done. if you step outside the spaceship without a rope you will fall upwards forever. the stars are all out there of course in the distance . fortunately they are quite far away from the spaceship but you have to keep an eye out on them because they move. you never know especially if you go to sleep. i dont trust space. around space there is a hole that is a ball which you cant go in without turning flat. the things living in the hole look like foam.