As the conjoined modules entered the atmosphere, voice communication with the ground was badly garbled, perhaps by the spacecraft turning out of its planned orientation, thus pointing its primary antennas away from ground receivers. However, according to secondhand reports from NASA flight controllers then on duty, some telemetry status indicators and snatches of voice communications did get through before all contact was lost. That was enough to tell controllers that a major malfunction had occurred with the separation sequence.

Nothing was subsequently heard from the crew or any of the spacecraft radio beacons for an hour, and nothing showed up on ground radar. The main fleet of recovery helicopters hovering over the planned landing area was first directed eastward to respond to an overshoot, then turned around and ordered westward toward a short landing. And when a rescue helicopter crew stationed in a contingency landing zone 400 km to the west first spotted signs of the lost craft, they saw a wide grass fire on the steppe, right next to gouged earth, and the landed vehicle nearby with no signs of a deployed parachute. Local herdsmen were milling around the downed vehicle, but there were no signs of the three crew members. Rescuers feared the worst.

SOURCE: NASA documents

THE PLAN: Soyuz craft decelerates, then separates into three pieces. The center module, containing the crew reorients to enter the atmosphere. The other pieces burn up during the descent. On 19 April, the rear of the craft failed to fully separate from the crew module. The combined craft entered the atmosphere and remained joined up for an unknown amount of time, possibly exposing the wrong side of the crew module to the onrushing air.

Then the crew commander phoned home (all spacecraft communications systems had failed) by using a reserve satellite phone installed for just such an emergency. All the crew members were fine, he reported, and were awaiting the recovery helicopters. The herdsmen had quickly arrived and eagerly helped the crew out of the singed, sideways-leaning cabin. The unofficial rescuers had lain the three exhausted, weakened fliers in the shade of the spacecraft and had gone back inside to retrieve the satellite phone for them.

Despite widespread reports of massive charring and melting to the Soyuz TMA-11 exterior, inspection of photographs and reports from inside the Russian space program indicate otherwise. Comparison with detailed photographs of earlier missions suggests that the scorching was within normal ranges.

However, a suggestive detail in the postlanding photography, a thruster mounting with jagged gaps alongside it, indicates that an attitude thruster burned through. Such damage would have reduced or even entirely eliminated the crew's ability to point the crew module during descent. The thruster could have been lost as a consequence of a vain attempt to steer the much-heavier-than-expected combined vehicle through the initial buffeting.