Soyuz capsule landing and retrieval photos | Hacker News Reader

Soyuz capsule landing and retrieval photos

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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.

I believe there is a backup parachute.

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.

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.

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/1966002...

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

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

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.

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...

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

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?

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.

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.

Seems like with -20C temps they would just stay inside the capsule and wait for the support team. They should be quite safe from the wolves inside.

I'm a little surprised they could actually defend themselves against wolves and fire rifles after prolonged freefall.

Also, pretty surprised that rifles are a standard thing that they have in space. I thought "no guns" was a pretty basic safety idea for space.

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".

"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.

There are multiple tiers of parachutes to decelerate the capsule, plus retro-rockets IIRC. The USSR developed and used retro-rockets extensively, including to land overweight armoured vehicles.

The landings are relatively rough, at least compared to something like the Space Shuttle. About 5G and if something goes wrong and Soyuz lands with its failsafe mode (which happened a few times in the past) G forces can exceed 8G.

It’s not very glamourous but compared to the Space Shuttle Shuttle it’s very safe. It has been safely returning humans for decades like clockwork.

As other's have noted, the landings are very rough when compared to the space shuttle. But let's not forget that these were designed at around the time of the Apollo program. Landing in the ocean at that speed is not much different from landing on the ground. In some ways I think this is much safer than a water landing, especially considering what happened with Liberty Bell 7 in the mercury program.

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

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

Ah, cryptome. The Wikileaks long before wikileaks existed.

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