By Xinhua,
Moscow : South Korea’s first astronaut, Yi So-yeon, said Monday that she was afraid of dying during her trip back to Earth, Russian media reported.
At a steeper-than-normal descent, the Soyuz capsule, also carrying U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, landed safely on the Kazakh steppe in Central Asia Saturday following a 10-day stay in the International Space Station (ISS).
The unusual ballistic descent path was a safe landing but the cosmonauts felt high acceleration force, experts said.
Yi said she saw flames around the spacecraft during the descent and was extremely scared at first, Interfax quoted her as saying in Star City, Russia’s space center near Moscow.
The biosystems engineer, 29, calmed down when she looked at her colleagues who did not look afraid.
NASA astronaut Whitson said after a six-month mission on the ISS it was more difficult for her to return to Earth on the Russian Soyuz than the U.S. space shuttle but she was not scared.
Whitson hoped engineers would find out what caused the craft to descend along a ballistic trajectory.
Malenchenko said there was nothing frightening in the descent.
“We were not dying there really,” he was quoted as saying.