Soyuz TMA 20's crew photo

Pat Flannery wrote:

Soyuz is a tough little critter; on Soyuz 5 the thing came into the
atmosphere front end first with the equipment module still attached, and
the solar arrays working like fins on a bomb. After the propellants in
the equipment module cooked off and it exploded and fell off, the
landing module turned around to the correct attitude and descended,
though with its front hatch and parachutes damaged by the heat.
The thing hit so hard that the cosmonaut got some of his teeth knocked
out, but he survived;in fact, by the time the recovery team showed up he
had left the capsule and walked to a nearby farm house...no doubt for a
stiff drink of vodka.
In the case of the Soyuz I8A flight, the spacecraft pulled 21.3 g's on
the way down after an in-flight abort put the crew down near the Chinese
border...where the capsule rolled down a mountainside till the parachute
caught in the foliage, preventing it from falling into a 500 foot deep
chasm. The wisdom of abandoning the original automatic parachute
jettisoning system on landing (after a unmanned flight fired its landing
rockets and jettisoned its parachute while still a few thousand feet in
the air) was hereby proved in best cliff-hanger tradition. ;-)
There have been several ballistic reentries of Soyuz capsules rather
than the normal lifting one, but it always seems to get the crew down
alive, if maybe a bit bruised and scared ****less.

Who needs new editions of Roadrunner and Coyote. I want films of these
events. Yikes!