Soyuz TMA

Soyuz TMA was a crewed Russian spacecraft developed as a modification of the Soyuz TM under agreements between Russia and the United States, and an integral part of the International Space Station complex. It delivered visiting crews of up to three people with small cargoes, stayed docked to the station as the lifeboat for the main crew in an emergency, and returned visiting crews and low-mass payloads to the ground, while also carrying station waste to burn up in the atmosphere. The letters TMA stand for anthropometric: the redesign widened the range of crew body sizes the capsule could accept to suit American astronauts and improved protection from landing shocks. Changes to the descent module included three new long Kazbek-UM shock-absorbing chairs with four-mode dampers, a lower control panel, stamped recesses about 30 millimeters deep in the structure beside the footrests, new three-mode soft landing engines and a Kaktus-2V gamma altimeter. The Soyuz-TMA 1 to 22 flights ran from 30 October 2002 to 14 November 2011, all launched on Soyuz-FG rockets from Baikonur.