MSNBC.COM (Oberg)-Dangling strap to blame for scary space leak?

MSNBC.COM posted story is below the double-line. Additional non-published
paragraphs follow immediately:

Other retired veterans of NASA's Mission Control in Houston told msnbc.com
that they were most concerned about the potentially unfounded Russian
decision to proceed with the undocking even when there were early
indications of an air leak. Rather than rigorously verifying the
airtightness of the spacecraft, these Americans suspect, Russia's 'Mission
Control' in Moscow made an unjustified assumption that the indications were
spurious and there probably wasn't really anything wrong.

This complacent 'assumption of non-hazard' was a key culture contributor to
major American space disasters such as the loss of the shuttles Challenger
and Columbia, investigators later realized. If it played any role in the
flawed decision-making during this particular situation, it may be an
indicator of the need for adjusting management attitudes on the Russian side
along the same lines as NASA's "cultural revolution" of the past two years.

This event is only the second known depressurization emergency aboard
Russian space vehicles since the 1971 loss of three lives aboard Soyuz-11.
In 1997, a botched space docking led to a collision with the Mir space
station that holed one of the science modules. Purely by luck, the crew was
able to determine which section the leak was in, and seal it off with an
emergency pressure hatch.

Experts also suggested that the alleged presence of an impression on the
Soyuz hatch seal may not imply an error by the flight crew during a 'hurried
descent preparation'. A foreign object could have been inserted into the
interface either before launch in April, or during the redocking of the
craft on July 19, and left the small damaged section which may not have been
evident to a quick visual inspection. The degree to which the pressure seal
was tested during the redocking operation is unclear.

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Dangling strap to blame for scary space leak?

Russian space officials say 'rushed' crew failed to shut hatch properly

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9888881/

By James Oberg, NBC News space analyst // Special to MSNBC

Updated: 8:04 p.m. ET Nov. 1, 2005

Russian space officials are unofficially blaming the alarming pressure
drop during last month's landing of the Soyuz TMA-6 spacecraft on a dangling
strap and crew error, MSNBC.com has learned. The Russian space agency's
draft report on the matter remains unsigned, however, according to the NASA
safety official who provided MSNBC.com with a copy of the report.

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