A little more than a week ago three space travelers got the scare of a lifetime: two crew members and a visitor to the International Space Station returned to terra firma in a Soyuz capsule — a routine re-entry, if anything connected to space flight can be called routine in this era.

But something went wrong and the capsule landed hundreds of miles off the planned target. While that by itself is generally an inconvenience and annoyance for those involved it’s not fatal. During the Apollo days all astronauts underwent extensive training in wilderness survival, and even today there are plenty of established procedures on what to do if you don’t end up where you expected and have to wait for the ride home for a while.

What made the recent Soyuz re-entry such a white-knuckle ride was the fact that the angle at which it plunged through the atmosphere was too steep and the people on board were subjected to ten times the force of gravity. If you weigh 150 pounds this trip would have made you feel as if you tipped the scales at 1,500 pounds — roughly the weight of a mature Holstein cow!

This kind of force is survivable over short periods of time but it’s extremely uncomfortable, painful and terrifying. In the high-stress situation of a re-entry everyone knows that something has gone terribly wrong.

Lucky for the intrepid passengers they not only survived the ordeal but also were declared to be in satisfactory condition when they were found. Undoubtedly they were miserable, especially after having experienced microgravity for quite some time before their frightening return trip.

It was not immediately clear what caused the capsule to veer off course, but what’s more worrisome is the fact that this has also happened just last year. Still — would it keep an astronaut or cosmonaut from making the trip? Not a chance. Astronaut Peggy Whitson, one of the passengers, would go again in a heartbeat. The Right Stuff, indeed. Read more about the incident at http://www.russianspaceweb.com