A Soyuz capsule carrying a US space tourist and two Russians bumped down safely in Kazakhstan yesterday, ending a string of mishaps on previous landings that have raised concerns about its safety.
“I feel great. I feel very good. Re-entry was perfectly smooth,” a smiling Richard Garriott, who paid US$35 million for his 12-day journey into space, said after a Russian recovery team extracted him from the capsule.
Charred black from its fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, the craft slowed its descent with a large parachute and fired special gunpowder engines to cushion its landing.
PHOTO: AP
“The team reported that they felt fine,” the mission control’s spokesman Valery Lyndin, adding that a helicopter accompanied the capsule as it landed.
Garriott and cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko landed in Kazakhstan’s steppe at 7:34am before being extracted from the capsule.
It came to rest in a puff of dust in a field 80km north of the town of Arkalyk as planned.
A NASA Television live feed from a mission control center in Moscow described it as a flawless on-target landing.
Its success was a relief for Russian and US officials who have been worried about the landings after the capsule malfunctioned twice over the past year, subjecting crews to dangerous “ballistic” re-entries.
A ballistic landing is steeper than a normal one and subjects crews to massive gravitational forces. A South Korean astronaut said she feared death during such a landing in April.
“I don’t recall such a perfect landing as this one,” Anatoly Perminov, head of Russia’s space agency Roskosmos, told reporters in Moscow. “We did everything that was possible and more, and the landing was just ideal. The crew feel fine.”
After the touch down, recovery teams surrounded the capsule, opened the hatch and extracted the cosmonauts as the first rays of the morning sun lit up the barren steppes of Kazakhstan.
Garriott, a US video game magnate, came back from the International Space Station alongside Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.
The American, son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, and Volkov, whose father Alexander was in space when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, are the first second-generation spacemen to fly together — a symbolic act at a time when US-Russia relations are particularly tense.
“This was a pinnacle experience and the ride up on Soyuz was phenomenal — what a beautiful machine,” said Garriott, as his father came over and shook his hand at the capsule.
‘HYANGDO’: A South Korean lawmaker said there was no credible evidence to support rumors that Kim Jong-un has a son with a disability or who is studying abroad South Korea’s spy agency yesterday said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who last week accompanied him on a high-profile visit to Beijing, is understood to be his recognized successor. The teenager drew global attention when she made her first official overseas trip with her father, as he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts have long seen her as Kim’s likely successor, although some have suggested she has an older brother who is being secretly groomed as the next leader. The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) “assesses that she [Kim Ju-ae]
In the week before his fatal shooting, right-wing US political activist Charlie Kirk cheered the boom of conservative young men in South Korea and warned about a “globalist menace” in Tokyo on his first speaking tour of Asia. Kirk, 31, who helped amplify US President Donald Trump’s agenda to young voters with often inflammatory rhetoric focused on issues such as gender and immigration, was shot in the neck on Wednesday at a speaking event at a Utah university. In Seoul on Friday last week, he spoke about how he “brought Trump to victory,” while addressing Build Up Korea 2025, a conservative conference
DEADLOCK: Putin has vowed to continue fighting unless Ukraine cedes more land, while talks have been paused with no immediate results expected, the Kremlin said Russia on Friday said that peace talks with Kyiv were on “pause” as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin still wanted to capture the whole of Ukraine. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that he was running out of patience with Putin, and the NATO alliance said it would bolster its eastern front after Russian drones were shot down in Polish airspace this week. The latest blow to faltering diplomacy came as Russia’s army staged major military drills with its key ally Belarus. Despite Trump forcing the warring sides to hold direct talks and hosting Putin in Alaska, there
North Korea has executed people for watching or distributing foreign television shows, including popular South Korean dramas, as part of an intensifying crackdown on personal freedoms, a UN human rights report said on Friday. Surveillance has grown more pervasive since 2014 with the help of new technologies, while punishments have become harsher — including the introduction of the death penalty for offences such as sharing foreign TV dramas, the report said. The curbs make North Korea the most restrictive country in the world, said the 14-page UN report, which was based on interviews with more than 300 witnesses and victims who had
RSS