

Soyuz capsule landing and retrieval photos - hristov
http://cryptome.org/info/soyuz-tma18/soyuz-tma18.htm

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jacquesm
That's a lot of faith to put in a single parachute.

Funny to see everybody walking around as though it is overcast but one guy
wears really dark sunglasses.

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pvg
There's a backup parachute, they've had them since the beginning.

<http://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok1.html>

 _The main parachute deployed successfully, however the backup chute came out
later as well, but deployed with some delay. As a result, Gagarin approached
the Earth surface under two parachutes._

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jacquesm
Yes, I understand. I meant that as in contrast with the apollo craft which had
3 parachutes but could still land safely if one of the them failed.

Here, with the backup parachute 'undeployed' until needed you'd presumably
have a window where the craft was too low to deploy another chute but high
enough for the occupants to suffer injuries or worse.

Anyway, I'm not trying to second guess the engineers here, they obviously seem
to know what they're doing it's just that I found the contrast between the two
strategies remarkable.

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pvg
_I meant that as in contrast with the apollo craft which had 3 parachutes_

Yeah that's an interesting question. I don't have a definitive answer but we
can make some semi-educated guesses by googling about.

I think the failure mode designers worried about was not the parachute just up
and ripping off - the forces involved and component strengths and safeties
required could be computed. They were concerned about parachutes failing to
deploy at all or failing to deploy effectively, which is harder to model and
predict.

Both Soviet and early US landing capsules (Mercury, Gemini) had single
parachute systems. The Soviet safety design choice from the beginning was a
fully redundant main parachute system. I don't know what the setup was for
Mercury, Gemini capsules had ejection seats in case the main parachute failed.

Apollo Command Modules, designed to go to the Moon, were both heavier than the
other capsules of the time and had stricter weight constraints. It seems like
NASA determined two parachutes failing was extremely unlikely. So three
parachutes, one of which can fail seems like the right choice given the
constraints of weight and safety.

The actual recorded failures appear to confirm the difficulties were about
deployment, more than anything else.

In 1967, Soyuz 1's main parachute failed to deploy, the backup parachute
deployed but got tangled in the drogue and was ineffective. Cosmonaut Vladimir
Komarov was killed on impact.

In 1971, Apollo 15 splashed down safely with two functional and one failed
main parachute.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_15>

[http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1973006...](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19730062665_1973062665.pdf)
[http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1966002...](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660020968_1966020968.pdf)

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ja27
All that and it ends with going down a slide too?

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huhtenberg
I doubt they actually let them _slide_ down that slide though :)

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huhtenberg
That Req Square shot near the bottom - they are standing next to the so-called
"Kremlin Wall", which was _the_ honorary burial place back in Soviet times.
Slightly over 100 people are buried there, lots of politicians obviously, but
also scientists, war heroes and, notably, cosmonauts - Gagarin, Komarov
(killed in crash-landing in '67), Dobrovolski/Patcaev/Volkov (killed when the
landing capsule vented air while still in space), and I think several more.

That's the reasons for the photo. Paying tributes to those died in space
expeditions.

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harshpotatoes
Both Russia's space program and ours are very impressive, and I can't wait to
see the next 50 years of space exploration. Here are some related photographs
of the Cosmodrome (Russia's equivalent of JFK launch facilities in Florida) on
the big picture from about 2 years ago.

[http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/the_baikonur_cosmod...](http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/the_baikonur_cosmodrome.html)

Anybody have good collections of photo's of other space programs?

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zrail
It's astounding that they just land in random fields, and have since the
beginning of the program. How rough are those landings, I wonder?

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njharman
Don't think the field is altogether random. They __do __know orbital mechanics
and math.

But, I came here to say that landing looked pretty dang hard.

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ovi256
The variance in Soyuz landings is pretty large, to the point that the crew has
a survival kit in case the ground crew cannot find them fast enough. The
survival kit contains a hunting rifle, not for hunting (they have rations) but
for defense against wolves and bears. At least one crew used that, in the '60s
I think, spending a night in cold weather, some -20 C, with wolves circling
and stalking them - the wolves are extra aggressive in winter. Some other
crews landed in lakes, but fortunately the capsule floats pretty well and has
its own oxygen supply. What with being a space capsule and all.

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saintamh
I believe you're thinking of the Voskhod 2 mission. They landed in deep snow
in the Urals and had to camp the night out in their spacecraft until the
rescue party could reach them the next day.

Alexei Leonov's 1st-person account can be read here:
<http://tinyurl.com/voskhod2> (taken from the book "Two Sides of the Moon",
co-authored with Apollo 15's Dave Scott)

I'd tend to agree with my above sibling that bringing guns in a spaceship
sounds like the opposite of safe, but according to Leonov they had a pistol,
and "plenty of ammunition".

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jerf
"bringing guns in a spaceship sounds like the opposite of safe"

After the millions of pounds of propellant spent on getting them to and from
orbit, you're going to sweat a few grams of gunpowder? Everything in space is
an explosive if you consider the kinetic energy involved. The gun is one of
the few things in the spacecraft we can honestly say we have centuries of
experience with; if that even shows up on your top 100 list of risks and
concerns, you've got a pretty damn safe space program.

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carlosedp
Is the capsule reuseable? It looks pretty beat up from the outside.

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icegreentea
Soyuz reentry vehicles are non reusable. They're similar to the original
Apollo capsules (originally designed roughly the same time as well).

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njharman
Ah, cryptome. The Wikileaks long before wikileaks existed.

