The Russians take a hard landing, unlike the ocean splashdown of Apollo or return glide of the Shuttle.
This 8×7” soft landing thruster was mounted at the bottom of a Soyuz capsule, and it fired when the capsule was just three feet from impact. It uses a gamma ray altimeter to sense the proximity of the Earth, to trigger the firing at the precise moment for a soft landing at 2 m/s.
On one Soyuz reentry, the gamma sensor misfired and triggered the retro-burn at a random moment, and the crew found themselves coming to a stop up at a high altitude, before resuming their decent to a rough landing with 30-G impact force (Soyuz-36 in 1980).
In 1967, the inaugural flight of Soyuz-1 came back ballistic with no main parachute and the drogue parachute tangled in the reserve chute, killing the cosmonaut Komorov. The NSA recorded his terrifying plummet, with him cursing the Russian engineers and saying final words to his wife. The Soviet Union said the soft-landing engines fired after impact, igniting and destroying the wreckage and contents. Buzz Aldrin left a Komorov medal with the silicon Goodwill Disc on the moon on Apollo 11.
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