A Soyuz capsule carrying South Korea’s first astronaut touched down in northern Kazakhstan on Saturday, 260 miles from its target landing site, a Russian space official said.

The Russian TMA-11 craft touched down around 4:30 a.m. EDT after a bone-rattling 3 1/2-hour descent from the international space station, Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said.

The condition of the crew _ South Korean bioengineer Yi So-yeon, American astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko _ was still unclear, he said. However, Russian space officials speaking in footage broadcast by NASA said Malenchenko had reported the crew was fine.

The capsule landed around 260 miles away from the scheduled landing site in the barren Kazakh steppes outside the town of Arkalyk _ an unusual gap given how precise engineers plan for such landings, Lyndin said.

Searchers were en route to the site in helicopters and trucks, he said.

South Korea paid Russia $20 million for Yi’s flight. She arrived at the station on April 10, along with cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko who replaced Whitson and Malenchenko.

Whitson and Malenchenko spent roughly six months performing experiments and maintaining the orbiting station.

American astronaut Garrett Reisman, who arrived last month on the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour, is also on board the station.