NEW YORK (AP) – Lunch with former astronauts Robert Curbeam, Jerry Linenger and Yi So-yeon feels a little like eavesdropping on the meeting of a special club.
Bring up the reason they’re together – to discuss the near misses that have them featured on the Science Channel’s upcoming series “Secret Space Escapes” – and the club would seem even more exclusive. But not as much as you’d think, since the danger of space travel probably isn’t fully appreciated by the general public.
For many reasons, incidents are often minimized at the time. Space agencies don’t want the bad publicity, no one wants to scare families back home and astronauts are trained to fix problems and move on.
“Whenever you’re operating on the edge of human ability, you’re going to have close calls,” Linenger said. “We’ve had quite a few. But because we usually come out of them successfully people say that it’s fine when it’s actually quite hairy.”
Linenger’s close call, part of the series that premieres Nov. 10 at 10 p.m. EST, came when he and the other five men onboard had to put out a fire on the Russian space station Mir in 1997. Russian press reports at the time dismissed it as akin to a cigarette burning; in reality it was like a sparking blowtorch so hot it melted metal. There aren’t many places to escape a serious fire on a spaceship.