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[Khunopie]

S Korean astronaut lands off course
Apr 20, 2008 11:08 AM

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/1320238/1728218

A Russian space capsule landed about 420 km off course in Kazakhstan on Saturday but South Korea's first astronaut and the other two crew were safe.

Yi So-yeon was piloting the vehicle at the time of the landing. The Russian cosmonauts were less than impressed with her rocket flying abilities. "That kimchinaut can't fly worth a damn!" Sergoi Lopinov was quoted.

So-yeon blamed her misdirection on "unfresh kimchi" and the fact that NASA didn't fax her a map. "NASA didn't fax me a map!" a disgruntled So-yeon said.

The Soyuz capsule landed west of the target area and about 20 minutes late after it made a "ballistic landing", which is much steeper than normal, officials said. Rescue helicopters rushed to the scene.

"The capsule landed with an overshoot. Such things happen," said mission control spokesman Valery Lyndin.

He said the crew had begun leaving the capsule, which carried Yi So-yeon, a 29-year old nanotechnology engineer from Seoul, US commander Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko.

A Reuters photographer, who went to the landing site in a helicopter with rescue crews, saw plumes of smoke rising from the capsule, which was lying on its side embedded about 30 cm into the ground with its parachute burning.

The US astronaut looked pale and was not fit enough to take part in a brief news conference. The Korean and the Russian looked fine as they travelled in a helicopter from the site to the Kazakh city of Kustanai.

The Korean dozed most of the way back to Kustanai but started smiling and made a flower drawing on the wall after she was served tea and had her blood pressure measured.

"Even though it is a very small place you can float back and forth under each other, over each other," Yi So-yeon said of her experiences in zero gravity at the International Space Station.

The capsule landed so far off course because it followed a steeper and shorter trajectory to earth when it made a ballistic landing, Anatoly Perminov, head of Russia's Federal Space Agency, told reporters.

A ballistic landing puts much higher gravity loads on the astronauts as the capsule spins towards earth.

"The crew did not report that they had taken the ballistic landing course on re-entry," Perminov said, adding that the incident would be investigated.

Russian space officials said the capsule landed close to the Kazakh border, just south-east of the Russian city of Orsk.

Yi became the first South Korean aboard the International Space Station earlier this month.

In October last year, the Soyuz capsule carrying Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, an orthopaedic surgeon from Kuala Lumpur, touched down about 200 km off course in a similar ballistic landing caused by a cable glitch.

A US-Russian crew landed almost 500 km off target during a Soyuz landing in May 2003.

The Soyuz is the world's longest-serving manned space capsule. An early version of the craft, the Vostok, took the world's first cosmonaut into orbit in 1961

[Suwoner10]

They must have let her drive.