Soyuz 24S Returns Home

Last night I stayed up well into the wee hours to watch the Soyuz 24S undock and return. It wasn’t so bad — I slept from 8-10, watched the undocking at 11:30, slept for another hour, and watched the deorbit burn and the eventual successful landing just before 3 am. Alexander Kaleri, Oleg Skripochka and Scott Kelly are all back on Earth after 6 months on the space station. Kaleri is now the 2nd most traveled space explorer EVER; he’s spent 770 days in orbit. More than two full years. Incredible.

I’m enjoying my rotation to Safety quite a bit right now, but as a Safety person I find myself in the odd position of needing to know a lot of information but not always having good means to obtain it. Take last night: I’m not essential to a Soyuz undocking at all, because in this job I’m not a flight controller. But if something had gone wrong or they had any trouble, I would have been answering a LOT of questions today from various interested parties about what happened, what caused it, and what the impact might be for upcoming Soyuz missions. To get information, I watch the operations, I listen to the loops, and I do a lot of “spying” on notes and reports from the flight controllers and from the Houston Support Group personnel stationed in Russia. It’s a little strange, for sure.

This video shows the crew getting into the Soyuz and the ISS crew closing the hatch, plus highlights of the undock and landing:

The conditions at the landing site in Kazakhstan were pretty insane. There were inches of snow on the ground and the wind was blowing it all over the place. The temperature was reported to be around 0 degrees. It cracks me up every time to see the huge difference between how NASA operates and how the Russians operate. I can’t imagine the shuttle EVER coming down in conditions like that; it’s just not designed to handle it. But the Soyuz can just plop down at any time in basically any weather. Can you imagine the shock the crew must have felt, after 6 months in a climate controlled spacecraft, to be pulled out of the Soyuz into freezing weather and blowing snow? As usual, they were lifted into chairs and just sat there for a bit, encased in sleeping bags and covered in blankets as the snow swirled around them. I can’t help but giggle at what they must have been thinking.