The most exciting experience of the first South Korean astronaut to go into space ended unexpectedly for the 29-year-old, as the Russian Soyuz TMA-11 capsule missed its pre-established landing spot and ended up 230 miles away from its initial target as a result of a technical problem.

Yi talked about her experience in a press conference after Expedition 16’s return to Earth, held at Russia’s Star City cosmonaut training center outside Moscow, describing moments of fear while seeing flames outside the capsule as they were descending through the atmosphere: “At first I was really scared because it looked really, really hot and I thought we could burn,” she explained.

The 29-year-old female bioengineering student, who was chosen out of 36,000 candidates for the job, said she managed to calm down a bit after seeing her two colleagues quietly awaiting to land: “I looked at the others and I pretended to be OK,” Yi said, adding that despite her fears, the temperature inside the capsule had not changed.

Due to an unplanned rough landing, the astronauts had to ask for the support of locals in order to call for help. “We went through the same thing on Expedition 6,” said Steve Lindsey, NASA’s chief astronaut said, as quoted by USA Today. “Of course we didn’t hear from them a while, so we were concerned. But eventually we got word that they were located so that’s real good news.”

Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko said during the press conference that none of the crew members did anything to alter the natural course of the flight, and only an investigation will be able to tell what went wrong.

Describing his experience with the landing, Malenchenko said the locals “were surprised and could not believe their eyes […] They could not believe that we had been to space. They believed us when they saw the spacesuits,” he added.

In the meantime, Yi, who traveled on the International Space Station on April 10, becoming the first South Korean to achieve such a performance, made women organizations in her country consider her a role model that encourages Korean women who want to enter science and technology (a field that puts high difficulty in finding a job, as opposed to men).