Nikolai Budarin and his US crewmates Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit, who had blasted off from the International Space Station on the Soyuz TMA-1 earlier Sunday, were to have been met after landing at around 6:00 am Moscow time (0200 GMT).

However, with the capsule landing some 440 kilometres (275 miles) away from the preset destination, rescue teams could not locate the spacecraft and its crew for more than two hours, officials told AFP in the Kazakh capital.

Finally at 10:25 Moscow time (0625 GMT), three helicopters carrying rescue and medical personnel actually reached the remote spot in the centre of Kazakhstan, where the three crew were waiting outside their capsule.

Anxiety was high ahead of the first landing on Earth since the February 1 Columbia disaster, when the US shuttle spacecraft broke up into bits during re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven crew members.

Bowersox and Pettit were also the first US astronauts to come back from space in a Russian Soyuz, an updated version of the same craft on which Yury Gagarin flew into orbit in 1961 to become the first man in space.

After a brief medical check-up, one helicopter airlifted the three crew members to Astana, from where they were to fly to the Star City astronaut centre outside Moscow. The other two choppers had to stay behind because of lack of fuel.

Budarin, Bowersox and Pettit were all "feeling fine," officials at Russian mission control outside Moscow told AFP.

This was despite a very "rough" landing, in which the astronauts were likely to have briefly experienced up to nine times the force of Earth's gravity, according to the top ballistics expert at mission control, Nikolai Ivanov, quoted by ITAR-TASS.

The astronauts managed to make radio contact with the rescue teams and assure them that they were fine before communications broke off, but the radio signal was too weak for the search party to use it to pinpoint the vessel.

A rescue airplane finally obtained visual contact with the capsule at 8:21 Moscow time (0421 GMT), giving the search teams the precise location of the crew.

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

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 because of the Columbia disaster.

NASA suspended all shuttle missions, including those to the ISS, in the wake of the tragedy, and Russian spacecraft currently provide the only transportation to the space station.

NASA chief administrator Sean O'Keefe was to arrive in Moscow late Sunday to welcome the ISS crew back to Earth and to hold talks with his Russian counterpart, Yuri Koptev, head of Russian space agency Rosaviakosmos.

The only American until then to return to Earth in a Russian spacecraft had been Dennis Tito, a US millionaire who became the world's first "space tourist" two years ago when he went to the ISS and back on a Soyuz.

Russian flight commander Yury Malenchenko and US flight engineer Edward Lu, who travelled aboard a Soyuz to the space station around a week ago, are due to stay aboard the ISS for six months.

SPACE.WIRE