Nikolai Budarin and US crewmates Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit, who had blasted off from the International Space Station (ISS) on the Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft earlier on Sunday, were to have been met after landing at around 0200 GMT.

But the capsule landed 440 kilometres (275 miles) off course and rescue teams took more than two hours to locate it, according to officials in Astana, the capital of the central Asian republic of Kazakhstan.

Three helicopters carrying emergency and medical personnel finally reached the spot in the remote steppe, where the three were waiting outside the capsule.

Bowersox, Pettit and Budarin had been aboard the ISS since December. They were originally to have left in March but their return to earth was delayed after US spacecraft Columbia disintegrated on its return from the ISS on February 1, killing all seven crew on board.

The disaster led NASA to suspend all shuttle missions, including those to the ISS, delaying the three astronauts' return to earth.

Russian spacecraft now provide the only transportation to the space station.

When the three were finally found in Kazakhstan on Sunday they were airlifted by helicopter to Astana, from where they flew to the Star City astronaut centre outside Moscow.

Eyewitnesses said one of the US crew members -- it was not immediately clear which -- had to be carried from the plane but security officials prevented cameramen getting near.

An AFP cameraman said earlier that Pettit was seen lying on a bench in a vehicle as the astronauts were driven off from the landing site to Astana.

Unconfirmed reports from Astana said Pettit had dislocated a shoulder during the landing and appeared to have problems with his balance.

But Russian officials said all three men were in good shape.

"No abnormal symptoms have bene detected by doctors," said Pyotr Klimuk, an official at Star City, where the trio were set to undergo re-adaptation procedures after 161 days in space.

Anxiety had been high ahead of the first spacecraft landing on earth since the Columbia disaster.

Bowersox and Pettit were the first US astronauts to return from space in a Russian Soyuz. They were travelling in a new TMA model of the craft which was making its first re-entry since its maiden launch in October 2002.

Russian officials said the Soyuz, based on technology dating back more than three decades, had been forced to land using an uncontrolled ballistic trajectory rather than the usual manual or automatic procedure.

"There's no sense in overdramatising the situation," ITAR-TASS news agency quoted Russian space agency chief Yuri Koptev as saying.

"The main thing in our work is a happy ending so that the crew strolled around the craft after landing and picked tulips."

But he admitted there had only been two previous instances when Russian spacecraft had made ballistic landings.

"That is why we were all worried," said Yury Semyonov, head of the Energiya space construction firm.

"But we definitely will find out the cause. It could be the crew's actions, the conditions at the start of the re-entry or the onboard systems," ITAR-TASS quoted him as saying.

Bowersox later shrugged off the landing, saying it had all gone to plan.

"It's a lot scarier than landing on an aircraft carrier. It was great.

Everything worked. Soyuz is very reliable. It worked just like it was supposed to."

But NASA officials waiting to welcome the ISS crew back to earth in Astana voiced relief.

"Nobody panicked, nobody got hurt. The first landing of the TMA vehicle was a success. They will look into why it was this far short," Jim Newman, director of NASA's human spaceflight programme, told AFP.

A rescue airplane made visual contact with the capsule at 0421 GMT, giving the search teams the precise location.

The astronauts had managed to open the hatch and get out an hour and a half after landing, officials said.

Unlike US shuttles, Russian Soyuz craft can be used only once in space.

Protected by a heat shield, the crew capsule plunges through the earth's atmosphere, while the rocket burns up and then hits the ground, its impact softened by parachutes and six small braking-rockets that fire two seconds before.

The crew had a very rough landing, briefly experiencing up to nine times the force of earth's gravity, ITAR-TASS quoted ballistics expert Nikolai Ivanov as saying.

Speaking during the plane flight to Moscow, Bowersox told AFP: "I am a test pilot and test pilots always dream of getting to fly a vehicle for the first time. So today I was able to fulfil a dream."

"The space station is wonderful environment... The extra two months were a gift.

"Humans were meant to be in space."

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