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Kazakhstan: Multinational Crew Returns Safely From Space Station

Posted on: Thursday, 28 April 2005, 15:00 CDT

Two of the three travelers had been in the orbiter for about six months. Two others are aboard it now.

ARKALYK, Kazakhstan -- A space capsule carrying a U.S.-Russian- Italian crew landed safely early Monday on the steppes of northern Kazakhstan, following a mission aboard the international space station.

Search-and-rescue helicopters spotted the Russian TMA-5 capsule as it floated toward its designated arrival site about 50 miles north of Arkalyk and made a soft landing, upright. It had undocked from the orbiting station less than 31/2 hours earlier.

Space officials and medical personnel traveled to the landing site to welcome the American, Leroy Chiao; Russian, Salizhan Sharipov; and Italian, Roberto Vittori.

Mission Control said Sharipov had reported that the three were feeling fine.

Vittori, a European Space Agency astronaut, had spent eight days on the station. Sharipov and Chiao had been on the orbiting lab since October.

Remaining behind on the station were the Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and the U.S. astronaut John Phillips, whose six-month mission is slated to include welcoming the first U.S. space shuttle flight since the Columbia shuttle disaster two years ago.

Russia's space program has been the only way of getting astronauts to the station since the Columbia disintegrated as it returned to Earth on Feb. 1, 2003, sparking a suspension of shuttle flights. The U.S. space agency hopes to renew shuttle flights next month.

Mission Control's spokesman Valery Lyndin said that even after the shuttle resumes flying, Russian Soyuz spacecraft will continue to travel to and from the station about twice a year because they will serve as escape vehicles.

The TMA-5 undocked at 10:44 p.m. Moscow time and entered the atmosphere about three hours later.

Its parachute opened 15 minutes before the scheduled landing time.

Russian space officials had hoped to avoid a repeat of the May 2003 return to Earth by the space station crew, when the Soyuz capsule went about 250 miles off course because of a computer error, prompting a frantic search over the steppes.

Russian helicopters and planes had been on call, along with a U.S. medical team, near Arkalyk. Engineers followed the capsule's journey through space on a map projected on a large screen at Russian Mission Control in Korolyov, outside Moscow, and periodically communicated with the crew.

The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Maj. Gen. Vladimir Popov, the head of the Russian Defense Ministry's Space Search and Rescue Department, as saying that Monday's landing could have been complicated by melted snow on the steppes.

"The soil is very moist in the landing zone," Popov was quoted as saying.

Source: Tulsa World

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