SPACE WIRE
Officials promise to fix fault in Russia's Soyuz craft before next space mission
KOROLYOV, Russia (AFP) May 26, 2003
The technical fault that caused an uncontrolled landing by a modernized Russian Soyuz craft in early May will be fixed before the rocket is sent into space in October, officials said Monday.

Nikolai Zelenshchikov, number two at RKK Energiya, which builds Soyuz spacecraft, and head of an inquiry into the botched landing, confirmed that the crew had not been in any way to blame for the incident.

The investigation is "practically finished" and "we understand what we need to do to correct this problem so that we can be certain of a normal reentry into the atmosphere in the future," Zelenshchikov told a news conference.

"We will make the necessary modifications in the TMA-3 Soyuz vessel," he told reporters at the RKK Energiya headquarters at Korolyov, outside Moscow.

However, no such repairs can be carried out on the Soyuz TMA-2, currently docked to the International Space Station (ISS), on board which US astronaut Edward Lu and Russian colleague Yury Malenchenko will return to Earth in October.

On May 4, a Soyuz TMA-1 rocket carrying two US astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut made an uncontrolled reentry into the Earth's atmosphere, landing nearly 500 kilometers (310 miles) off target in Kazakhstan after a malfunction forced the team to abort an automatic landing.

The flight from the ISS marked the first landing on a Russian-made craft since the United States grounded its space fleet in the wake of the Columbia space shuttle disaster on February 1.

It was also the first time the new Soyuz TMA-1 craft, which made its maiden manned voyage to space last October, had made a landing.

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