Another Russian Soyuz space capsule, containing three crewmembers, missed its landing mark by a wide margin on Saturday, the third time this has happened in five years with a Soyuz spacecraft during re-entry. It proves that even after 45 years of sending humans into space, problems can still occur during the tricky re-entry phase of the flight. The space shuttle, with its winged shape, and it's ability to glide somewhat, has a much better cross range (glide ratio) capability than a blunt-shaped capsule such as Soyuz.  The shuttle geometry affords more precise landing opportunities, to a specific runway in fact. Blunt-body capsule re-entry, on the other hand, has more room for errors, and typically can only allow the capsule to be guided to a general landing area, of several miles radius at best. A mistake on the re-entry burn of too short or too long duration, or not the precise amount of burn thrust, and a blunt-shaped capsule can wind up hundreds of miles off course at touchdown. Apparently this is what happened with this Soyuz capsule, resulting in a more ballistic (steeper and faster) reentry trajectory.

NASA has decided to return to an Apollo-type capsule, called Orion, for the Constellation space program, which hopes to send humans back to the Moon, and eventually to Mars.  The difference from Apollo, though, is that NASA is investigating recovering the Orion capsule on land, somewhere in the western U.S., unlike Apollo, which always recovered the capsules at sea. (Even if you make a big mistake on reentry, it is pretty hard to miss an ocean. Also, with Orion, NASA is studying the reuse of the capsules, which would be difficult to do once they are exposed to highly-corrosive salt water like the Apollo capsules.) I have a feeling NASA will be working very closely with the Russians to learn from these re-entry mistakes. Unlike the vast flat, open plains of Russia's Kazakhstan steppe, where the Soyuz lands, the U.S. does not have quite as much flat open land in the western U.S.  A mistake of several hundred miles on a land recovery could put the Orion capsule into one of the many mountain ranges in the western U.S., and thus make the landing more hazardous.

The three crewmembers on the Soyuz capsule experienced as much as 10 Gs on their wayward landing, compared to the  4-5 gs on a normal Soyuz reentry.  This is why the original U.S. astronauts were subjected to human centrifuge training early in the U.S. space program.  Scientists and engineers knew that just a minor mistake causing a ballistic re-entry could subject the crew to very high G-forces. (Another advantage of the shuttle is the relatively minor 3 Gs astronauts are subjected to during landing.) Also, this Soyuz incident shows why astronauts and cosmonauts still undergo survival training. Because of problems just such as this, a returning blunt-shaped capsule could end up landing anywhere on earth, from water, to desert, to jungles, or even mountainous terrain.  They have to be prepared for just about any type of landing terrain.