RUSSIA: A US-Russian space crew returned safely to Earth yesterday, but a frantic two-hour search to find them after they lost radio contact with Moscow rekindled grim memories of the Columbia space shuttle accident that killed seven astronauts in February.
Mission control fell silent after the Russian capsule re-entered Earth's atmosphere. Communication was lost with the vessel and spotter planes reported no sign of it at the landing site in Kazakhstan.
Relatives of Americans Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit and Russian Nikolai Budarin were ushered away from the media and Russian scientists hurried into side rooms to discuss the problem. Officials from US space agency NASA waited nervously for news from pilots scouring Kazakhstan for any sign of the capsule.
Finally, after almost two hours, word reached Moscow that it had been found, almost 500kms short of its planned landing site, and that the three men were walking around outside the capsule. Cheers erupted in mission control, and NASA chief Sean O'Keefe embraced Russian space agency head Yuri Koptev.
"Sometimes we have to digress from the original plan, but the most important thing is that there is a happy ending - that the ship has landed and that the crew can walk around outside it and pick tulips," Mr Koptev said.
Russian scientists suggested that the guidance system may have malfunctioned, forcing the capsule, which is slowed before landing by parachutes and braking rockets, to make a far steeper re-entry than intended, increasing the g-force on the crew and the strain on the vessel.
"We will definitely find out what happened," Mr Koptev said. "It could have been the crew's actions, the conditions at the start of re-entry or the onboard systems."
Russian television showed the three crewmen in the Kazakh steppe, surrounded by policemen and a local man on horseback, next to a Soyuz capsule that looked charred from its fiery flight through the atmosphere.
"It's great to be back on Earth," Mr Bowersox said after flying to the Kazakh capital Astana. "Soyuz is very reliable. It worked just like it was supposed to. The landing was actually pretty great." With the space shuttles grounded pending an explanation of why Columbia disintegrated, only cash-strapped Russia can send crew and cargo to the ISS.