We cover a lot of coolNASAspace birdie stuff here at Gizmodo , but we ’d be neglectful if we did n’t note an of import milepost for that other lively spacecraft , out of Russia , the Soyuz .
That milepost happened on Friday , when the Soyuz program celebrate the 40th anniversary of an historic event : The first orbital docking between two craft where human existence left Earth in one slyness , and returned in another .
To say the event went smoothly would be , well , a total frickin ’ lie , as cosmonaut Boris Volynov would experience one of infinite flight ’s most torturesome reentries on this most historical trip .
After his craft , the Soyuz 5 , failed to separate from its inspection and repair faculty , it began the descent facing the wrong way . As the heat cuticle drive an unparalleled sentiment of the cosmos , the thin entranceway hatch , with its one - inch of detachment and a window , incur the brunt of reentry . Things begin to unfreeze and reek and fume , and the hatch itself bulged inwards from the stress of reentry . If the craft had not miraculously right itself , poor Volynov would have cooked to dying in temperatures reaching 5,000 degrees .
But that was n’t the terminal — the chute still had to partly go wrong , and there was the escape landing spot to worry about too . The former only resulted in broken teeth and a taste of blood ( phew ! ) . The latter almost killed him for a third time in 30 minutes , as the Ural Mountains were -40 degrees when he bring down there , some 2,000 km short of the LZ .
Lucky for Volynov , some nearby peasants kept him warm in their hut until supporter arrived . As a souvenir of their perceptiveness , the Soviet governance then forbade him from talking about the incident because of the ongoing space slipstream with the U.S. News of the result only surfaced relatively recently in 1997 .
Seven years after the “ landing , ” Volynov was the air force officer of the Soyuz 21 commission , which see him back in electron orbit aboard the Salyut space station . And to think , I in reality had the audacity to plain about my snow-covered ride to work the other day . [ James O BergviaWired ]
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