- MOSCOW (Reuters) - Officials
played down on Monday a space emergency that saw a U.S.-Russian crew lose
radio contact on re-entry and land hundreds of miles off target in Kazakhstan,
triggering alarm in Moscow as rescuers combed the vast steppes.
-
- The crew, already stranded in space by the shuttle disaster,
came down some 500 km (300 miles) off target on Sunday. Rescuers in planes
and helicopters searched for two nerve-wracked hours before finding the
Soyuz capsule carrying Americans Ken Bowersox and Donald Pettit and Russia's
Nikolai Budarin.
-
- "The task of the rescuers is to find the crew within
four hours. They found them in two hours and 20 minutes. So while this
is not quite standard, it is within the norm," Sergei Gorbunov, spokesman
for Russia's Rosaviakosmos, said.
-
- "Of course we were worried, especially because radio
links were lost," he added. "We should not have been worried
though, because we had maintained radio contact up to the last minutes
and we knew the parachute had opened."
-
- Any hitch in Sunday's landing, only three months after
the Columbia tragedy which left seven astronauts dead, would have been
a crippling setback for the international space program.
-
- Landing off target has become rare in modern space flight,
with automatic settings. In Soviet space exploration, however, capsules
landed some 3,200 km off target, with one crew waiting three days for rescuers
to cut through thick Urals forest.
-
- "It's not normal, but it's not that unusual either,
let's put it that way," Sergei Puzanov, a NASA spokesman, said.
-
- NASA and Rosaviakosmos officials said the three men were
doing well despite the sharper, ballistic reentry. During this type of
landing astronauts feel up to twice as much impact.
-
- "They are getting back to normal life, the usual
procedures," Puzanov said in Moscow.
-
- U.S. flight engineer Pettit, the only astronaut not to
greet officials on landing, was in good health, he added. Officials said
on Sunday Pettit had felt queasy and weak on landing.
-
- "He is OK. He's just getting used to gravity,"
Puzanov said.
-
- The three had been forced to extend their stay in space
to almost six months after the Columbia tragedy grounded NASA's shuttle
fleet, leaving the International Space Station dependent on Russian craft
to ferry fuel, food and crews to the outpost.
-
- The two U.S. astronauts were the first Americans to return
to earth on a Russian craft. The reduced two-man crew currently aboard
the ISS is also due to come back aboard a Soyuz.
-
- But NASA head Sean O'Keefe, in talks with the Russian
space officials, said the shuttle could be back in action in a year.
-
- After the Challenger disaster in 1986, NASA grounded
its shuttle fleet for almost three years.
-
- "He said it would take between one and two-and-a-half
months to gather all the information on the on shuttle accident,"
Gorbunov quoted O'Keefe as saying during talks. "He said they would
be able to fly considerably sooner than after Challenger. He said it could
be within between six months and a year."
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