STAR CITY, Russia (AP) - South
Korea's first astronaut said Monday she was "really scared'' when the Russian space
capsule she was in made an unexpectedly steep descent to Earth over the
weekend.
"During descent I saw some
kind of fire outside as we were going through the atmosphere,'' said Yi
So-yeon, a 29-year-old bioengineer. "At first I was really scared because it
looked really, really hot and I thought we could burn.''
But then she said she
noticed it was not even warm inside the Soyuz capsule. "I looked at the others
and I pretended to be OK,'' Yi said.
The steeper-than-usual
descent from the international space station subjected Yi, American
astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko to
severe gravitational forces during the re-entry Saturday.
The technical glitch also
sent the TMA-11 craft off-course and it landed about 420 kilometers (260 miles)
from its target on Kazakhstan's barren steppe.
All three members of the
crew walked slowly and were unsteady on their feet Monday when arriving for the
news conference at Russia's Star City cosmonaut training center outside Moscow.
Malenchenko said it was not
yet clear what caused the unusual descent.
"There was no action of the
crew that led to this,'' he said. "Time will tell what went wrong.''
It was the second
time in a row - and the third since 2003 - that the Soyuz landing had gone
awry.
Officials said the craft
followed a so-called "ballistic re-entry'' - a very steep trajectory that
subjects the crew to extreme physical force. Mission Control spokesman Valery
Lyndin said the crew had experienced gravitational forces up to 10 times those
on Earth during the 3 1/2-hour descent.
Yi traveled to the
international space station on April 10, along with cosmonauts Sergei Volkov
and Oleg Kononenko, who have replaced Whitson and Malenchenko. South Korea paid
Russia US$20 million for Yi's flight.
Whitson and Malenchenko
spent roughly six months performing experiments and maintaining the orbiting
station and were replaced by Volkov and Kononenko. They joined American
astronaut Garrett Reisman, who arrived last month on the U.S. space shuttle
Endeavour.
According to NASA, Whitson,
48, set
a new American record for cumulative time in space - 377 days.
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