ISSCOM 23 April 2008 (062) SoYonYi: The South-Korean lady could be heard on 15 and 16 April via VHF-1 (143.625 mc) when she co-ordinated her experiments with her countrymen at TsUP-Moscow. On both days she did this very extensive and she also etablished the contact in good Russian (and not as some not-russian speaking persons suggested in layman russian). Via the downlink within the range of Western Europe these were the last during this mission. For other contacts from the ISS she could use the NASA-channels. Some of these contacts could be monitored via NASA-TV. Until 19 April, the day of the returnflight of Expedition 16 and SoYonYi to Earth, all unfurled like the normal routine, the hand-over of the command of the ISS from Peggy Whitson to Sergey Volkov included. But on 19 April there was not much left of that normal routine. For me during the return flights of Soyuz-ships a normal routine was to be always alert, for if the landing should be delayed after the first attempt, a Soyuz-ship could possibly come within my range. In the past this sometimes gave me historically valuable audio – adventures: such as the almost catastrophally ending return-flight of the Soyuz-TM5 with Lyakhov and the Afghan Mohmand and the delayed return of the Soyuz-TM6 with Titov, Manarov and the Frenchman Chretien. Communications between the crew of the Soyuz-TMA11 and TsUP-Moscow were relayed by NASA-TV, but shortly before the beginning of the last crucial operations, such as the separation of the 3 modules of the Soyuz and the ingress in the earth’s atmosphere, communications between the Soyuz and the tracking stations were very bad and these were even fully interrupted after the AN-beacon still could be monitored for a while. An American commentator said that Malenchenko reported that all was going well, but I did not hear that via the relay. The lady interpreter only mentioned the interference by ‘statics’. I hoped that after the AN-beacon I would be able to pick up the beacon with the sea-gull sounds, but these signals did not show up at all. NASA-TV relayed a few contacts between TsUP-M and the ISS. On board of the ISS it was obvious that Sergey Volkov was worried about the not forthcoming good news. The original plan was that the station crew would go asleep after the message that a safe landing had taken place, but now they stayed awake. For many years I was busy with affairs like this and I always realized that a return operation of cosmonauts is risky and this meant that after the disappearance of the communications after the AN-beacon I had to get my stress under control. Via some contacts with a spaceflight friend, who also monitored NASA-TV, I was able to concentrate my attention on that what happened. Without any information via the relay, in about 30 minutes the screen gave the good message ‘???? ???????’ (Landing OK). To get the cause of the transfer of the normal to the ballistic descent we have to wait for the results of the investigation by a commission. More or less officially the possibility had been suggested that the separation of the DM from the motor compartment was a little bit too late. The Russians have to solve this problem for the present ISS expedition 17 will be the following crew to return with the Soyuz-TMA and the importance of the Soyuz-TMA ships for the operations of the ISS in the future. But meanwhile I will remain alert and I hope that I will be able to monitor many interesting communications by Volkov and Kononenko via VHF-1. Chris van den Berg, NL-9165