At a Sentinel Mission lunch today, Astronaut Ed Lu presented his photo of the first Soyuz TMA flight, looking though a porthole window of the ISS, just before the spacecraft was scorched by a ballistic reentry. He thought of this gift when seeing that we have two of the external panels from that very flight on display in the DFJ lobby (photos below). Edward Lu: “I looked through my photos and I found this picture I took of Soyuz TMA-1 as it pulled away after undocking. If you look at the top you can see my hand and the camera lens reflected in the porthole window. We normally went to an inertial attitude hold before undocking, so unfortunately the Sun is almost in the window making the photo less than ideal, but that’s how it goes sometimes. About 2 hours after this photo was taken, Soyuz TMA-1 (with Expedition 6 onboard) had the sensor failure that forced a downmode to ballistic entry. The thruster panel you have was used to spin up the Soyuz to gyro-stabilize the vehicle (rifle bullet style) so it could make an unguided reentry.”
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