Expedition-6 Astronauts Have A Long Wait After Landing

First things first. They're home and they're safe, the three astronauts aboard the Soyuz TMA-2 capsule who returned from space early this morning.

But where was the band? Where were the dignitaries to welcome them home? Why didn't the radio work?

2 Hour Wait

The TMA-2 capsule, in its first-ever manned mission, re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at about 6pm (EDT) Saturday night. While it was the first successful manned re-entry since the Feb. 1 Columbia disaster, it wasn't what you'd call picture-perfect.

The Soyuz landed about 500 miles short of its target. Oops. Normally, Russian Mission Control erupts into applause when a spacecraft lands on the steppes. This time, however, as the Russian and American flight team no doubt recalled the Columbia disintegration, there was only silence. Nobody could figure out where the Soyuz had landed.

Cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin and Americans Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit had another problem. Nobody was talking to them on the radio. Finally, after hanging around in the capsule for about two hours, they were spotted by a Russian helicopter. Eight hours after landing, they were in Moscow.

Pettit was carried off the helicopter at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a stretcher. He didn't do the grin-and-greet at Baikonur. "The most important thing in our work is a happy ending, so the crew can walk around the capsule after landing and pick tulips," said Yuri Koptev, head of Russia's space agency, in an interview with reporters at Baikonur. "There is no need to dramatize the situation."

"Everything is great!" Bowersox told journalists in the Kazakh capital Astana, before climbing on board a plane to Moscow. "(The crew) are doing great. Just a normal return to earth."

On board the flight to Moscow, Bowersox told a reporter for the French news angency AFP, "Kazakhstan is such a beautiful place. Today I looked out the window. I went outside and I saw beautiful brown earth, the greenest grass I've ever seen. It was fantastic."

So What Happened?

Experts tell Reuters the 500 mile mistake apparently occurred when the Soyuz TMA-2 re-entered the atmosphere at a much steeper than anticipated angle. That would have made the capsule much harder for the crew to control and may have knocked out the comms.

But the crew apparently took it in stride. "What we carried out was a test flight," Bowersox joked after landing.

FMI: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station