Russian Spacecraft Returns Off-Course

A Soyuz capsule carrying South Korea's first astronaut landed in northern Kazakhstan on Saturday, several hundred miles off target, Russian space officials said.

Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said the condition of the crew - South Korean bio-engineer Yi So-yeon, American astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko - was satisfactory, though the three had been subjected to severe G-forces during the re-entry.

The Russian TMA-11 craft touched down around 0830 GMT some 260 miles off-target, Lyndin said - a highly unusual distance given how precisely engineers plan for such landings.

It was also around 20 minutes later than scheduled.

Officials said the craft followed a so-called "ballistic re-entry" - a very steep trajectory that subjects the crew to extreme physical force.

Lyndin said the crew had experienced gravitational forces up to 10 times those on Earth during the descent.

The crew were helped down the aircraft steps when they arrived back at Star City, northeast of Moscow.

At a news conference at the Korolyov Mission Control Centre, officials from Roscosmos (the Russian space agency) and NASA gave more information on the landing.

Roscosmos Chief Anatoli Preminov said that the crew felt "very well."

Christopher Scolese of NASA, described the crew as "super" and said they had accomplished great things in space that demonstrated true international cooperation, adding Japanese and European modules to the International Space Station.

Asked about the presence of two women on the Soyuz spacecraft, Preminov referred to a naval superstition that having women aboard a ship was bad luck.

"In Russia, we have a sort of omen regarding such occasions," he said, "but thank God, everything ended well. Certainly we will try to somehow avoid a prevalence of females on a crew, though I don't think it will be mandatory."

It is the second landing in a row of a Soyuz capsule that has gone awry.

Last October, a technical glitch sent a Soyuz spacecraft carrying Malaysia's first space traveler and two Russian cosmonauts on a steeper-than-normal path during their return to Earth.

A similar problem occurred in May 2003 when the crew also experienced a steep, off-course landing. It then took salvage crews several hours to locate the spacecraft because of communication problems.

Yi travelled to the station on April 10, along with cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, who have replaced Whitson and Malenchenko.

South Korea paid Russia $20 million dollars for Yi's flight.

Whitson and Malenchenko spent roughly six months performing experiments and maintaining the orbiting station.