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> Soviet space program was the safest one I've always had a similar perception. Incidentally, Soyuz is considered the safest craft with only two accidents (Soy

• tanzam75 13y ago
  > Incidentally, Soyuz is considered the safest craft with only two accidents (Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11) in 46 years. No. There were only two Soyuz missions with fatal accidents. However, there have been a number of Soyuz missions with nonfatal accidents. Multiple ballistic reentries, multiple engine failures, multiple docking issues, multiple failures of the braking rockets on landing. Cosmonauts have suffered bruises, broken teeth, broken ribs -- one crewmember on Soyuz 18a was so badly injured that he never flew in space again. But Soyuz was an inherently robust design. It is designed to be survivable, to have backups to backups. You may not enjoy the experience, but the Soyuz will try its best to bring you back to earth alive. For example, there have been three separation failures during reentry, most recently in 2008. This is an extremely harrowing event, because the unseparated spacecraft assumes a head-first orientation, unprotected by the heat shield. However, the Soyuz is robustly built, and in all three cases the reentry module survived long enough for the connection to the orbital module to burn free. Once that happened, the mass distribution of the reentry module automatically rotated it to face heat-shield forward. Those three separation failures could've killed 8 cosmonauts. Instead, they killed no cosmonauts. Because the Soyuz could tolerate this particular failure mode.