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.
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