A little more:

When the hatch first cracked open, the smells of spring on the steppes and the sounds of birds overwhelmed them. "Real earthy smells, because we'd stirred up a fair amount of dirt when we landed and then we rolled and were dragged a bit. So you had this fresh dirt smell, which was just a beautiful smell . . . and it had a little bit of crushed grass in it, too," Pettit said.

"Then the next thing that hit me were all the birds chirping. . . . It was just music to our ears."

Having come from almost six months in weightlessness, it took the three men more than an hour to drag themselves out of the hatch under the oppression of Earth's gravity and erect a folded communications antenna to help the searching planes and helicopters find them, they said.

"You'd crawl out. . . . You'd move a little bit. Rest. Move a little bit more. Rest," Bowersox said. "It was pretty amazing."

And he added, "I feel really lucky."