Yi So-yeon, South Korea’s first astronaut, detailed today her return to Earth during the news conference at Russia's Star City cosmonaut training center outside Moscow. She said she got “really scared” with the Russian capsule’s steep descent.

According to the Associated Press, the 29-year-old bioengineer said: "During descent I saw some kind of fire outside as we were going through the atmosphere. At first I was really scared because it looked really, really hot and I thought we could burn."

After the initial panic reaction, she calmed down and realized that the temperature inside the Soyus capsule was not even slightly above normal. Seeing that the other two crew members were untroubled by the events, she adopted a similar attitude and quietly awaited the landing. "At first I was scared, but the two other guys looked okay, so I tried to look okay too," she said according to Reuters.

One of hers space mission colleagues, Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko, underlined the fact that at this point it is not yet clear what caused the strange complications of the descent and added: "There was no action of the crew that led to this. Time will tell what went wrong," as quoted by the AP.

The problematic return was declared by officials “irregular” but not an emergency, after a 20-minute delay and a 260-mile off mark landing.

The news briefing went on for about 30 minutes and showed the two astronauts Malenchenko and Whitson very tired and thin after almost six months in space.