Expedition 6 commander Bowersox a few hours after landing. Photo: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now

Bowersox, Soyuz commander Nikolai Budarin and science officer Donald Pettit landed shortly after 10 p.m. EDT Saturday in Kazakhstan some 285 miles short of their planned target near the town of Arkylyk southwest of the Kazak capital of Astana.

It took Russian search crews more than two hours to locate the spacecraft and another two hours for helicopters to get support crews to the landing site. Bowersox, Budarin and Pettit, meanwhile, had opened the main hatch themselves and waved at search crews as they flew over.

The returning station crew eventually was flown back to Astana and from there to Star City, the Russian equivalent of the Johnson Space Center, for detailed medical exams and reunions with family members and friends.

Videotape broadcast on NASA's satellite television system showed Budarin and Bowersox moving about with ease, climbing down from a helicopter and then walking up a flight of runway steps to a jet airplane.

Citing medical privacy, NASA will not discuss crew health issues. But based on the ease with which a smiling Bowersox answered questions from a NASA interviewer, Pettit presumably was not seriously ill.

"It was fantastic," Bowersox said of the nerve-wracking re-entry. "For me as a test pilot, it was a really great experience to be able to do the first entry in the first in a series of (new) Soyuz vehicles. It was something I've always dreamed about, to have a first flight in a vehicle like that, and today I got my chance."

But it quickly became apparent to the crew that something was not quite right, or "nominal" in NASA-speak.

"The first thing we saw was signs in our displays that the entry was going to be off nominal," Bowersox said. "And when we saw those signs, our eyes got very wide because we truly expected a nominal entry, completely normal, about 4 Gs (of deceleration). But instead, we pulled a few more than that and the ride was a little more aggressive. But it also makes the entry a lot shorter when you do that and so before we knew it, we were on the ground, looking out the window at the dirt there in southern Kazakhstan."

The Soyuz TMA-1 was the first in a series of upgraded Russian spacecraft equipped with improved computers, more advanced cockpit displays and larger seats to accommodate a broader cross-section of U.S. space station astronauts.

Entering the atmosphere at a steeper-than-planned angle, the Soyuz TMA-1 landed short of the intended target, only the third such "ballistic" entry in Soyuz history. As a result, the crew was subjected to higher than normal deceleration forces, or Gs.

Despite the rough ride, Bowersox said, "it was just a really great feeling to be back on Earth." Even so, he said he was a bit envious of the two-man caretaker crew - commander Yuri Malenchenko and Edward Lu - left behind on the international space station.

"I felt good that we had accomplished our mission as a crew, I felt that it was OK for us to leave, that Ed and Yuri were ready to take on their jobs," Bowersox said. "I was happy for them and a little bit envious that they get six months aboard that huge, gigantic, beautiful ship, the international space station.

"I think they were sort of happy to see us go because that meant they were going to have it all to themselves without us there."

Bowersox and Pettit plan to spend about 16 days at Star City before returning to their homes in Houston to continue physical rehabilitation. It typically takes returning space station crews a month or more to get their land legs back and even longer to completely overcome the effects of weightlessness.

"At Star City I'm looking forward to walking around, looking at the trees, smell the air, hugging my wife," Bowersox said. "Pretty soon I'll be home in America and I'll get to hug my kids and I think that will be the highlight ... to get to squeeze my boys."

In a final comment, he said the unexpected off-target Soyuz landing illustrated the risky nature of space flight and the value of keeping the space station manned at all cost while NASA works to get the space shuttle program back off the ground in the wake of the Columbia tragedy.

"When people are there, when off-nominal things happen, people give you capability to change or repair something," he said. "Today's a perfect example of how things you don't expect happen. We all expected a hundred percent nominal entry but we got something else. That's what happens when you're testing new vehicles. The space station is a test flight every day. We never know when something new may happen up there so it's good to have humans up there to fix it so we can maintain our investment up on orbit. And I think that's the proof of today."

Bill Gerstenmaier, space station program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said Russian engineers will begin work right away to determine what went wrong with today's re-entry. The issue needs to be resolved as quickly as possible, because the station's current crew also must relay on a Soyuz TMA spacecraft to get back to Earth in October. But as of this writing, it's not known whether the vehicle suffered a malfunction or whether crew error might have played a role.

"It's still too early to find out why that occurred, but we will, we'll work with the Russians next week and the subsequent weeks to understand what occurred with the TMA and what occurred during this entry that made us come up short and we'll see what happens," Gerstenmaier told a NASA interviewer.

Astronaut James Newman will represent NASA at the upcoming engineering review.

"He'll meet with the Russians and I'm sure they're as interested as we are in understanding what occurred," Gerstenmaier said. "They've had some entries like this in their past history and so this again is not totally off nominal and so I don't think we have any real immediate concerns with our crew on orbit.

"But we need to understand what happened and see if there's anything there that can be improved or corrected or needs to be corrected. And I don't know the answer to that but the next couple of weeks we'll be able to determine that along with our Russian partners."

Robert Cabana, director of flight crew operations at the Johnson Space Center, summed it all up by describing today's entry as "an interesting end to an outstanding mission."

Video coverage for subscribers only:
   VIDEO: POST-LANDING INTERVIEW WITH COMMANDER BOWERSOX QT
   VIDEO: ISS MANAGER SAYS LANDING PROBLEM TO BE EXAMINED QT
   VIDEO: NASA'S DIRECTOR OF FLIGHT CREW OPERATIONS QT

   VIDEO: WATCH THE CHANGE-OF-COMMAND CEREMONY QT
   VIDEO: NASA ADMINISTRATOR SEAN O'KEEFE CALLS THE STATION QT
   VIDEO: EXPEDITION 6 CREW BIDS FAREWELL AND BOARDS SOYUZ QT
   VIDEO: 5-MINUTE REPLAY OF SOYUZ TMA-1 UNDOCKING QT
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