Space tourist, Russia-U.S. crew return to Earth

NEAR ARKALYK, Kazakhstan - A Russian Soyuz capsule with Iranian-born space tourist Anousheh Ansari on board bumped down safely in the Kazakh steppe at dawn on Friday.

Space tourist Anousheh Ansari and her husband Hamid meet near the Souyz capsule after landing in northern Kazakhstan September 29, 2006. A Russian Soyuz capsule with Iranian-born space tourist Ansari on board bumped down safely in the Kazakh steppe at dawn on Friday. [Reuters]

"They've completed the landing," a mission control official in Moscow said after the small Soyuz TMA-8 capsule, charred black from re-entry into the atmosphere, landed in northern Kazakhstan.

The capsule, returning from the International Space Station, was also carrying Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. astronaut Jeff Williams.

The craft slowed its descent with parachutes and fired rockets to make a soft landing on its side in a field about 80 km (50 miles) north of the town of Arkalyk.

A Russian space programme recovery team surrounded the capsule to open the hatch and extract the cosmonauts.

Ansari, a 40-year-old U.S. telecoms entrepreneur who left Iran in 1984, was the first female tourist, first female Muslim and first Iranian to go to space.

There have been three other space tourists, each paying the Russian space programme about $20 million for the trip.

Ansari blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 18 along with a fresh U.S-Russian crew that relieved Vinogradov and Williams on the space station.

"This 10 days has been magnificent for me," she said during a farewell ceremony aboard the station, about three-and-a-half hours before the landing at 0114 GMT. "I hope to be able to have this experience once again in the near future."