South Korean astronaut Yi So-Yeon was hospitalized on Tuesday because of back pain that resulted from Soyuz’s rough re-entry on April 19. Telecoms Korea reports the 29-year-old Yi was undergoing tests at an Air Force hospital in Cheongju, Korea.
“She has complained of considerable back pains and will have to cancel all her appointments for the time being, including visits to the presidential office and TV interviews,” Telecoms Korea quotes a doctor at the hospital.
While Yi recovers, the investigation into what caused the off-course, high-G re-entry continues amid much finger pointing. Alan Boyle of Cosmic Log has a nice report of the claims, counterclaims and sometimes strange statements being thrown around. Both the Russian and American space agencies have downplayed the seriousness of the problem. Russian space chief Anatoly Perminov, fresh off his poorly received comments that having two women aboard Soyuz was bad luck, is playing up a conspiracy angle: false rumors are being spread by “people who are interested in destabilization of our relations with the American partners.”
Jim Oberg has a more detailed account of the dust-up over at NASASpaceFlight.com. He reports that this isn’t the first time Perminov and other Russian officials have cried conspiracy. Oberg says that Russians officials are pre-judging the cause of the incident even though an investigation is barely under way - something that will complicate decisions about hardware and procedures that are already in place should a major problem be discovered with the Soyuz spacecraft.
Oberg believes the incident was extremely serious, and he chronicles a long history of Soviet and Russian cover-ups and distortions of problems in the space program. He says that this simply can’t continue if the International Space Station program wants to avoid future fatalities.
“Pusillanimous pussy-footing with Russian paranoia about their passion to conceal their ‘dirty space laundry’, and diplomacy-dictated toleration of brush-offs and continued cover-ups, is no way to keep faith with the lost Columbia astronauts, and with their predecessors in Russia and the U.S. And it’s no way to keep future names off the already too long list of spaceflight casualties,” Oberg concludes.
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