Re: Peggy Whitson

On Apr 20, 7:18 pm, "alana7...@xxxxxxx" <alana7...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
In the video released by NASA yesterday she was conspicuously absent
form welcoming ceremonies...has there been any word on her physical
condition after the rough landing (I mean besides the official
statement that everyone is ok)????????

Never mind...the mystery has been solved

Scary landing tests "beginner" S.Korean astronaut
Mon Apr 21, 2008 10:05am EDT
By James Kilner

STAR CITY, Russia (Reuters) - Only the cool composure of her crewmates
calmed South Korea's first astronaut when she saw flames swirling
around their capsule during an unusually steep descent to Earth, she
said on Monday.

Yi So-yeon, a nanotechnology engineer from Seoul, returned to Earth on
Saturday after 11 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS),
along with Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and U.S. astronaut Peggy
Whitson.

A technical glitch turned a routine return to Earth into a sharper
than usual descent that tested the crew members' stamina and nerve.
They landed in the Kazakh steppes about 420km (260 miles) wide of
their target.

"During the descent there was some kind of fire outside the Soyuz
capsule because we were going through the atmosphere," Yi said.

"At first I was scared, but the two other guys looked okay, so I tried
to look okay too."

Yi smiled and joked her way through a 30-minute news briefing at Star
City, the wooded, Soviet-era cosmonaut training centre on the edge of
Moscow.

By contrast, Malenchenko and Whitson looked tired and thin after
nearly six months in space. Their answers were short and Whitson
needed support to balance when she walked.

The 29-year-old Yi has become a sensation in South Korea since take-
off but she brushed this aside and said she has had little contact
with friends or family since returning.

"In fact, they are the heroes right now," Yi said, referring to
Malenchenko and Whitson. "I'm just a beginner and a little ashamed to
say that I am a hero."

She did, though, relate a more light-hearted incident on the

ISS.

"I sang 'Fly Me to the Moon'," Yi said about the 1950s pop song. "It's
my favorite song from university although at that time I didn't know I
would be an astronaut."

The capsule's so-called "ballistic" re-entry exposed the crew to twice
the usual gravitational forces. The flames Yi described may have been
caused by friction heating the capsule as it fell through the
atmosphere.

Whitson told reporters that Saturday's ballistic landing, was
irregular but not an emergency.

"The Soyuz has been through its history very reliable, there has
obviously been some issue in the last couple of descents which went
ballistic, but I'm sure the engineers will determine what the problems
are and get them fixed," she said.

In October, a Soyuz capsule carrying Malaysia's first space tourist
touched down about 200 km (125 miles) off course in a similar
ballistic landing caused by a technical glitch.

The Soyuz is the world's longest-serving manned space capsule. An
early version of the craft, the Vostok, carried the first person into
space in 1961.

Whitson, 48, has become the American with the longest amount of
cumulative time in space with 377 days.

.

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