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How to Fake a Nice Spacecraft Landing

"The three astronauts aboard the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft return capsule said they 'feel good' after the capsule landed on Friday morning," reported China's wire service, "Xinhua":http://english.cntv.cn/20120629/107569.shtml. Their capsule came barreling...

“The three astronauts aboard the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft return capsule said they ‘feel good’ after the capsule landed on Friday morning,” reported China’s wire service, Xinhua. Their capsule came barreling out of the sky over Inner Mongolia, returning the country’s first female astronaut to Earth with a thud. The pictures on CCTV showed the taikonauts emerging from the capsule, smiling and waving. What was interesting here wasn’t what was on screen but what wasn’t.

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Liu Yang and her two crewmates were fine, reported state-operated CCTV, in part because the landing capsule uses not only parachutes but also a thrust reverser to help break its fall. “When it is only one meter above the ground, its thrust reverser will generate a buffering force to further reduce its speed to the same rate as a person falling from a one-meter-high desk.” Here’s how that kind of system looked on a Russian Soyuz landing yesterday:

This system wasn’t quite ready for the 2003 flight of Yang Liwei, the first Chinese astronaut in space. When his craft came down in the Mongolian desert, the violence of G forces left his face bloody. No one knew it from watching TV; the cameras stopped rolling and technicians on site cleaned him up before the cameras started rolling again. Wrote Andrew Jacobs in the Times:

a design flaw had exposed the astronaut to excessive G-force pressure during re-entry, splitting his lip and drenching his face in blood. Startled but undaunted by Mr. Yang’s appearance, the workers quickly mopped up the blood, strapped him back in his seat and shut the door. Then, with the cameras rolling, the cabin door swung open again, revealing an unblemished moment of triumph for all the world to see.

Reports about his bloody face were kept out of the news, confined to the upper echelons of China’s space administration, but used to make improvements in successive Shenzhou spacecraft. The point is, when spaceflight is in part a nationalist proposition, and it always has been, it can be hard to separate it from propaganda, and hard to know all the grizzly details of spaceflight (see the anodyne performance of the space phone call). Astronaut risks are many and the long list of “incidents” makes for a harrowing read. But a splashdown – the preferred method of NASA – is, to be sure, much more comfortable than slamming into the sand at 10 meters per second. (And sometimes faster: in 2008, a malfunction caused a Russian Soyuz capsule to return to Earth 475 km from its intended landing site and at a steeper than normal descent, subjecting the astronauts inside to g-forces ten times that on Earth and leaving one astronaut hospitalized.)

The landing of the Shenzhou-9 and the rest of the mission certainly looked flawless, and as the symbol of China’s renewed, gender-equal push into the cosmos, it had to look that way. Scientific achievement isn’t just good for the nation but for the people, one professor of political science told China Daily. “Great events provide us with excellent opportunities to spread scientific knowledge,” Ge said, “but we must find new ways of teaching.”

“For example, he said, during the live TV broadcast of the return of Shenzhou IX, reporters could have added some explanation on how the astronauts could stay in the spacecraft safely without being burned by high temperatures caused by intense friction between the spacecraft and the air,” wrote China Daily.

The commentary on CCTV’s English broadcast did not bear much relation to science. “One thing that impresses all of us is that she smiles a lot,” the CCTV anchor said of Liu Yang. “That’s also one of the advantages of a woman astronaut!”