Sudden landing on Earth by Beata Novomeska

Over this weekend the Russian space capsule unexpectedly landed on Earth. On the board were three astronauts: south Korea's first astronaut Yi So-yeon, a 29-year-old bioengineer, American astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko. They didn't know what was the reason to steep descent to Earth. Yi So-yeon said that she was really scared because she saw a fire outside and she thought they could burn. But then she founded that inside the capsule wasn't warm. She looked at her colleagues and pretended to be OK. The technical difficulties caused that craft landed off-course about 260 miles from its target. The news conference took part in Star City, outside Moscow, on Monday, April 21, 2008. All three members of the crew went slowly and unsteady on their feet. The main questions were connected with sudden landing of the crew and its reasons. It was said that there was no obvious cause for steep descent and crew didn't anything that led to this. Only time will tell what was wrong. It is the third time since 2003 that Soyuz landing went awry. The crew experienced extreme physical force – gravitational forces were up to 10 times those on Earth during the descent which lasted for 3 ½ hours. Yi traveled to the international space station together with cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko and they have replaced Whitson and Kononenko. South Korea paid Russia $20 million for Yi's flight. Whitson and Malenchenko spent approximately half year at the international space station, performing experiments and maintaining the orbiting station. According to NASA Whitson created new American record for cumulative time in space – 377 days. It is interesting for us to see the landing of another Soyuz space ship. It is new experience for Korea and now they can say that they have a their first astronaut, actually it is a brave woman. Steep descent to Earth and technical problems connected with it can be solve only during a period of time as was said in news conference. At the moment no one knows the reason. The finding of reason could solve problems connected with landing and save the difficulties to crew and all people involve in it.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080419/sc_nm/russia_space_landing_dc

by Beata Novomeska for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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edited by Beata Biskova