Sep 28, 2006 1:40 pm US/Eastern
Space Capsule, Tourist To Return To Earth
MOSCOW (AP) ―
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Space Tourist Anousheh Ansari (File).
AP
Anousheh Ansari's trip of a lifetime is to come to an end early Friday Moscow time, when a space capsule brings the world's first paying female space tourist back to Earth.
Ansari and two professional astronauts — Russian Pavel Vinogradov and American Jeffrey Williams — were to leave the international space station aboard a cramped Russian Soyuz capsule and journey just over three hours before landing in Kazakhstan.
Ansari, an Iran-born American telecommunications entrepreneur, was a last-minute choice for the mission, which blasted off from the Russian manned space launch complex in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on Sept. 18. Japanese businessman Daisuke Enomoto was scheduled to be on the launch, but he was scrubbed from the trip in late August for unspecified medical reasons.
The 40-year-old Ansari is the fourth person, and the first woman, to pay a reported $20 million for a trip to the international space station. Briton Helen Sharman in 1991 took a trip to Russia's Mir station that she won through a contest.
Her two companions on the trip to the station, Russian Mikhail Tyruin and American Michael Lopez-Alegria, were staying aboard the station for a six-month stint along with German Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency, who arrived on the U.S. space shuttle in July.
The return to Earth, though quick, can be physically taxing; the heavy deceleration once in the Earth's atmosphere — from about 500 mph to 180 mph — inflicts severe G-forces on space explorers who have spent the previous weeks or months weightless. As it nears the ground, the Soyuz fires its engines to slow the descent again to about 3 mph.
In her native Iran, Ansari has become an inspiration to many women who chafe at the country's male-dominated rule. Scores of women went to an observatory near Tehran last week to watch the space station streak across the sky at dawn.
In a blog about her space experiences, Ansari suggested that life aboard the crowded space station could be a model for reducing tensions among people and nations on the planet.
"It's sort of like on Earth, if you think about it," she wrote. "We are all connected to each other by living on the only habitable planet in the solar system; we have no place else to go, at least not for a while, so if we don't get along and blow up everything and create a mess of our home, well guess what? We have to live with it."
(© 2006 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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