Why The USSR Had Plans To Land Spacecraft in The USA During Emergencies.

hallo it's scott manley here in snot 79s soyuz 33 launched an omission to Salyut 6 with cosmonauts and nikolai rukavyshnikov the first civilian to command a Soviet spacecraft he was joined by Georgi Ivanov a Bulgarian cosmonaut as part of the inter cosmos program the launch had been delayed due to high winds at the launch site but it took flight two days late on April 10th it would take a day to rendezvous and dock with the station where they planned to meet the long-duration crew of Soyuz 30 to spend a week in space and swap over the Soyuz spacecraft leaving the long-duration crew with a newer fresher Soyuz however on approach the spacecraft suffered an engine failure that forced the docking to be aborted and ultimately it was decided to bring the spacecraft home at the next opportunity the return could be accomplished using the backup engine but problems resulted in a deorbit burn that ran too long and a steep ballistic re-entry that was rough on the crew but this isn't the story of that failed mission and the dangerous return to earth it's about the contingency plans which were shared and which were overheard by a group of amateur radio operators in Europe the Kettering group had begun at Kettering grammar school in the UK and it had grown to be an international affair including Spain gran in Sweden who deserves all the credit for writing up this little bit of history the listeners had been expecting to hear the docking in progress instead what they heard was the crew reading lists of orbit numbers times and the phrase Google Passat key that is angle of landing they were sure that these might be landing instructions for orbits being relayed to the crew there was some uncertainty about the meaning of landing angle but if these were instructions for subsequent orbits then some of these would not have allowed the crew to land on the plains of Kazakhstan a few years later they had the chance to ask a cosmonaut about a landing angle vladimir shatalov who you might remember as the commander of Soyuz 4 he explained that the angle was the expected distance that would be traversed along the orbit line between the retrofire and the landing site the landing instructions would be calculated on the ground and delivered to the cosmonauts when they were in range of the Soviet ground stations for much of the orbit the spacecraft would not be in range and would not make passes for several hours so they had to have all the eventualities planned ahead of time so now they knew the meaning of landing angle the space sleuths returned to their recordings and pieced together the landing instructions from the orbit number the timing of the deorbit burn and the landing angle this allowed them to locate the emergency landing sites that would have been used if the crew needed to return to the earth early the Soyuz needs wide open flat areas of land to safely touch down and it seemed like the most suitable alternate locations were in the prairies of North America one of the landing sites was about 20 miles northwest of Fort Worth Texas which no doubt would have caused something of a stir during the Cold War coincidentally one of the amateur spacecraft trackers was based in Fort Worth other sites were in Canada and curiously in the seas around Japan and Russia now the amateurs understood the meaning of these details they looked for other examples and soon they found the same communications during Soyuz 19 better known as the Soviet half of the apollo-soyuz test project Soyuz 19 had a much wider range of emergency landing sites on top of the sites in North America some of the landing coordinates pointed to northern France and sites in the Ukraine now I can give you an idea of how the crew would have used these numbers there was a device called the Soyuz space navigation display this is from an old Soyuz capsule at the Chabot spaces and Science Center in the bottom right you see the control saying Google passat key which can be set to the value expectant following the deorbit burn and then if you switch this control up here the display mode will show the location of the landing site on the globe so the a deorbit burn can be triggered when the landing site location is somewhere that you want it to be also you might remember I talked about Australia being a possible for a landing site the reason why none of these sites shown here were in Australia even although the spacecraft passes over Australia is that to align the spacecraft for landing and to land they wanted to do that in daylight and a spacecraft had been launched into an orbit where its maximum latitude was achieved during the middle of the day that meant that it would be in the middle of the day in daylight and over the Soviet Union when they were performing all the critical docking operations but equally that meant that all their landing sites for these short missions had to be in the northern hemisphere this daylight requirement is an important constraint on Soyuz operations at the international space station even today and of course nowadays the possibility of a Soyuz having to land in North America is very much part of the space station plans there are actually documents that NASA has published that you know contingency plans for local rescue operators so that they know what to do should a Soyuz land in the middle of Idaho for example immediately after landing the capsule is far from inert it will deploy these antennas swiftly enough to injure someone so you're supposed to remain at a distance to allow those to deploy then once you approach the capsule try to stay away from the under site just in case some of the landing motors haven't fired and also because the landing motor sensor is a low level radiation source and of course is suggested that you help get the crew out of there after all they have been in zero-g for an extended period and they're probably still getting used to gravity this capsule actually includes opening tools for the hatch on the bottom so you can take one of these turn it clockwise and unlock the hatch to help them begin helping them out but during the Cold War these plans wouldn't have been officially communicated even during the apollo-soyuz test project I can't see any information that suggests that NASA had been informed of what to do if a Soyuz capsule landed back so the Russians of course did the obvious thing and put the instructions on the capsule this is a soviet-era capsule and you'll see that includes the instructions in Russian and English so these alternate landing sites were even incorporated into the spacecraft's design but some of you might wonder what kind of treatment cosmonauts would expect if they landed in the u.s. after all most of them were Soviet military well this eventualities was anticipated by the Space Treaty of 1967 with an addendum in 1968 called the rescue agreement which said that signatories to the treaty have to do their best to render assistance and immediately notify the launching authority of the problem and of course return the astronauts or cosmonauts home as quickly as possible as well as the spacecraft so the intelligence services wouldn't be allowed free reign to disassemble a stranded capsule they would have to return it as quickly as possible but of course I'm sure they would do their best to inspect as much as they could and learn what they could before returning it to the relevant authorities regardless of what any treaty said so even without an official agreement with the US the Soviet Union realized the safety of their cosmonauts might require an unintentional collaboration with the US I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] you

Channel: Scott Manley

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Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2020