Space crew weathers a scare during re-entry

Further details emerge unofficially
A more detailed account of the incident was provided via e-mail from another NASA worker who requested his name not be used.

“Undock occurred about 6 minutes late because of a larger than expected pressure drop when performing the leak check between the descent and habitation modules of Soyuz,” he related. “Moscow eventually decided that the leak check was nominal considering oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide removal.”

After separation and the firing of the craft’s rocket engine, the problem returned. “Pressure decay was also noticeable during descent,” he said, with pressure falling 12 percent.

“That's where Moscow told the crew to start cabin atmosphere repress[urization] with [oxygen]”. This seems to have worked, because once voice communication was restored, the cabin pressure was halfway back to normal. Russian officials reported that they had no idea “why the decay happened” but would be examining on-board recorders, the worker said.

When one cosmonaut was asked about the incident this week during a visit to the United States, he said the entire incident may have been a "possible instrumentation problem," another source told MSNBC.com. The cosmonaut was reportedly reluctant to talk further about the problem.

Ghastly space precedents
On at least three previous occasions, breathing problems during descent threatened the lives of returning space crews, so any alarm felt in Moscow over this latest incident would be entirely understandable.

In June 1971, cosmonauts Georgy Dobrovolksky, Vadim Volkov and Viktor Patsayev suffocated during the return from their pioneering three-week visit to Salyut 1.  As the spacecraft jettisoned unneeded modules prior to hitting the upper atmosphere, a pressure equalization valve intended for activation much nearer to the ground was jarred open. Over the next minute — as the crew desperately tried to locate and stop the leak — all the cabin air was released to space.

Their Soyuz 11 spacecraft landed on autopilot, and recovery crews, puzzled but not alarmed over the lack of radio communication, rushed to open the hatch. The inert bodies of the three men were quickly extracted and resuscitation was attempted, but to no avail.

In 1975, during the landing of the last Apollo spacecraft, a procedural error caused by communications confusion led to noxious gas from the capsule’s thruster system being sucked into the cabin, almost incapacitating astronauts Thomas Stafford, Deke Slayton and Vance Brand. Aside from the threat of poisoning from the chemical, the crew came close to losing consciousness and not being able to deploy the capsule’s parachute system — which would have been a fatal development.

In 1977, during an emergency night landing after a botched docking at a military space station, cosmonauts Vyacheslav Zudov and Valeriy Rozhdestvenskiy landed by bad luck on a salt lake in their desert recovery zone. Fouled parachute lines turned the bobbing capsule on its side so that its air vents were blocked.

The recovery team was ill-equipped for cold-weather water operations, and it took half a day of frantic effort to retrieve the capsule. Space officials assumed that the cold and suffocation must have killed the two men trapped inside. When the capsule was finally beached, workers gingerly opened the hatch and expected to find dead bodies. Instead, the cosmonauts waved weakly to them — barely alive.

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