| ""While this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected it would have led to erroneous thruster firing and uncontrolled motion during SM separation for deorbit, with the potential for catastrophic spacecraft failure," Hill said during the meeting." I guess some things just never get old, citing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_5 : "The flight was also memorable for its dramatic re-entry. The craft's service module did not separate, so it entered the atmosphere nose-first, leaving cosmonaut Boris Volynov hanging by his restraining straps. As the craft aerobraked, the atmosphere burned through the module. But the craft righted itself before the escape hatch was burned through." This actually happened three times so far with the Soyuz (in all cases without the loss of crew): "An incomplete separation between the Service and Reentry Modules led to emergency situations during Soyuz 5, Soyuz TMA-10 and Soyuz TMA-11, which led to an incorrect reentry orientation (crew ingress hatch first)." (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(spacecraft)#Service_mod...) One would kinda expect that past crewed vehicle emergencies would be studied in detail when designing a new one & that the developers would make extra sure they can't reasonably happen with their design. |