What kinds of measures are being put into place to make Soyuz safer for travel?
The Soyuz is a robust vehicle. It has a lot of safety built into its very engineering design. It has the equivalent of two spare tires. During our ballistic entry, which was on Soyuz TMA1, we used one of our spare tires coming in. The Soyuz is notorious for rough landings and that’s actually independent of whether you do a ballistic entry or not. There’s always going to be that big thump at the end and that’s a characteristic of having the spacecraft land on the land via a parachute. We had our big thump at the end and there was sufficient crosswind that after the big thump, we went roll, roll, roll, roll and we ended up about a hundred feet from where we landed on our side and I was the equivalent of being strapped in a chair on the ceiling. Let’s talk about the mission. How would you describe the STS-126 ULF mission to the lay person? It’s a construction flight for space station. Space station is still a construction zone. Some of the construction flights put external truss segments
