Just How Dangerous Was That Soyuz Reentry?

NASA Offers Only Minor Insight Into Soyuz Off Course Landing, SpaceRef

“Gerstenmaier was rather reluctant to get into any specifics preferring instead to defer, and to “let the Russians get the spacecraft back, dump the data from its computers, and allow the commission that has been established to look at what happened”. He would repeat this caveat more than a dozen times during the press teleconference.”

Space crew’s hard landing raises hard questions, MSNBC

“How on earth did the Russians lose track of the descending spacecraft? Why did alarming details of the landing — including the ignition of a brush fire that set the collapsed parachute ablaze and filled the landed spacecraft with smoke — take so long to reach the public?”

Report: Soyuz capsule nearly burned up, AP

“A Russian news agency says the crew of the Soyuz capsule that landed in Kazakhstan this weekend after an unexpectedly severe descent was in serious danger. Interfax quotes an unnamed space official as saying that the capsule entered the atmosphere improperly, with the hatch first, instead of with heat shields leading the way. The official says the hatch suffered significant damage. The official also says the capsule’s antenna burned up during the descent, meaning the crew could not communicate properly.”

Spacecraft’s Shaky Descent Under Scrutiny, CBS

“The capsule apparently entered the discernible atmosphere in an unusual orientation and was subjected to relatively violent buffeting until the attached section finally broke away, as planned in such scenarios, allowing the descent module to settle into a normal heat- shield-down orientation. The failure of the lower propulsion module to cleanly separate is believed to have forced the craft into a steep, so-called ballistic re-entry.”