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First woman space tourist makes safe return to Earth

Anousheh Ansari, the world's first female space tourist, looks at her husband after landing yesterday not far from the town of Arkalyk, some 300km from Kazakhstan's capital of Astana. Hamid Ansari gave her fresh fruit and a bouquet of roses when she and the two crew members of the 13th International Space Station mission landed. PHOTO: AFP

The world's first female space tourist was greeted with fresh fruit and a bouquet of roses when she and the two crew members of the 13th International Space Station (ISS) mission landed early yesterday in the steppe of Kazakhstan.

The capsule carrying Anousheh Ansari -- who was born in Iran but is a US citizen -- Pavel Vinogradov of Russia and US astronaut Jeffrey Williams touched down softly yesterday north of Arkalyk, Russian news agencies quoted the Russian flight control center as saying.

The mission departed from the ISS on Thursday.

"Everything went off as planned, the vessel landed on its side," a center spokesman said, adding that helicopters and planes of the space service had successfully pinpointed the capsule while it was still in the sky.

Russian television channel NTV showed space service workers helping the cosmonauts out of the capsule and wrapping them in furs to protect them from the cold.

A beaming Ansari was greeted by her husband, Hamid Ansari, who brought her a bouquet of red roses as she sat in a special chair to help her recover from weightlessness.

Ansari spent eight days on the ISS while Vinogradov and Williams spent 183 days there.

All three cosmonauts "are in good health," ITAR-TASS quoted a Russian space official as saying.

Nikolai Sevastyanov, the head of Energia, the Russian company Energia that is helping to construct the ISS, praised the three at a news conference shortly after the landing, calling the trip "a success."

"The crew performed magnificently," Sevastyanov said in comments shown on NTV.

After being examined by a medical team, the trio were to be taken by helicopter to nearby Kostanai. They were scheduled to fly on to Moscow yesterday.

Ansari, 40, paid US$25 million to space tourism agency Space Adventures to spend a week aboard the ISS, Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson said.

She carried out medical and biological experiments there for the European Space Agency (ESA) and took hundreds of photos.

NTV showed footage of Ansari's farewell broadcast from the ISS.

"I can't not be sad to leave," she said, her pigtails floating behind her in the zero-gravity. "I had a very unique experience because of the people here."

Ansari lived in Iran until the age of 16 and is only the fourth space tourist in history.

She made her fortune in the telecom sector and her family has gone on to invest in technology and space exploration, contributing US$10 million to the X Foundation, which was founded to encourage advances in human space flight.

Ansari accompanied the 14th ISS crew, NASA's Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russia's Mikhail Tyurin, to the station. The duo will stay there until spring next year, along with the ESA's Thomas Reiter of Germany, who will return to Earth at the end of this year.
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