[Medical aspect of cosmonauts' safety during emergency landing. Respicere et prospicere]

Participating in the comprehensive development of the system for safe emergency landing in space vehicles Voskhod and Soyuz, enterprise "Zvezda" undertook an extensive program of technical and physiological experiments with volunteers, including a group of physicians, in the interest of designing personal protection means for space crew. Over 130 physiological pile-engine experiments with the impact velocity of up to 9 m/s were performed between 1963 and 1967. The article presents medical and biomechanical analysis of the experimental data. The central part of the crew safety system in the event of emergency landing is a shock-absorbing seat with an individually molded support surface. This support surface ensures a uniform load distribution and also attenuates shock hardness by dint of own deformation. The Voskhod seat was outfitted with a pendulum hanger bracket on two shock-absorbers. The Soyuz seat has only one shock-absorber at the head end. The shock-absorber allows seat turns at high angular velocities and, consequently, appearance of additional mechanic and biomechanical reactions. The article attempts to analyze this phenomenon as well as the whole aggregate of human body responses onto the spacecraft impact with ground. To give readers the opportunity of independent conclusions from the data of the unlikely to be replicated experiments, the article is supplemented with graphs visualizing a larger part of the tests data, and their interpretations. It is aimed to help young specialists fill up the gap in knowledge about this medical aspect which remains of high topicality in many fields including safety of future piloted space programs.