Astana, Kazakhstan ? A Russian capsule safely returned two astronauts and a cosmonaut from the international space station on Sunday, but the landing, nearly 300 miles off target, triggered a nerve-racking two-hour search in the steppes of central Asia.

The three men were finally spotted in the vast, brown, barren stretch of Kazakhstan by a recovery plane and waved to show they were fine. Helicopters arrived for them an hour or two later.

“I was just happy we were down, that everything was safe,” astronaut Kenneth Bowersox told The Associated Press while flying back to cosmonaut headquarters at Star City outside Moscow. “It was the most beautiful dirt I’ve ever seen.”

It was a dramatic end to a 5 1/2-month space station mission for Bowersox, who served as the commander, astronaut Donald Pettit and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin.

Because it was the first manned space landing since the Columbia disaster and the first touchdown by NASA astronauts in a foreign spacecraft in a foreign land, tension was running high.

Bowersox, Pettit and Budarin knew during re-entry that they were coming in steep and faced high gravity forces, or G loads. When they saw the computer indicate they would miss their landing target, “our eyes kind of went like this,” Bowersox said, pretending to widen his eyes with his hands.

“But honestly it wasn’t frightening,” he said. “It was just, I’ll call it an interesting test flight experience.”

This latest Soyuz model had never descended from orbit before — until Sunday.

No one was there to greet the spacemen. But after 161 days in space, they did not mind a little time to themselves to get their land legs back — and to savor the scenery.

“We could smell the dirt. We could smell the grass,” Bowersox said. “It was fantastic…”