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Space tourist prepares for Earth
21/04/2007 14:34 - (SA)
Moscow - A Russian cosmonaut and a United States astronaut prepared to return to Earth on Saturday along with an American billionaire who was their crew mate in the final days of their seven-month stint on the international space station.
Mikhail Tyurin, Michael Lopez-Alegria and space tourist Charles Simonyi boarded a Soyuz spacecraft docked to the orbital station, shut the hatches at 10:03 Moscow time (0803 GMT) and began preparing for the trip home, Russian mission control spokesperson Valery Lyndin said.
The journey was to take more than three hours and end with a landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan.
Among the final tasks the travellers performed was to move containers with biological experiments from refrigerators on the station into the Soyuz TMA-9, Lyndin said.
Before setting off, they had to check the seals on the hatches of the Soyuz, don space suits and move into the capsule that was to set them down after splitting off from the other two sections of the spacecraft, which burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, he said.
Trip initially postponed
Simonyi arrived at the station on April 9 - also courtesy of a Soyuz, which rose into space atop a Russian rocket launched from the Russian facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan - along with cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov, who remained on the station.
A soft-spoken, Hungarian-born computer programmer, Simonyi is associated with two major American household names: Microsoft and Martha Stewart.
Simonyi amassed the fortune that made his $25m dream voyage possible through his work with computer software, including developing Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
He is the world's fifth paying space tourist.
He was seen off at Baikonur by Stewart, and the lifestyle maven also watched the Soyuz dock from Russian mission control outside Moscow and exchanged words of wonder with him during a video linkup after he boarded the station.
Tyurin, Michael Lopez-Alegria and Simonyi were initially to return a day earlier, but the trip was postponed and the landing site shifted because of concerns that spring floodwaters in the usual landing area near the Kazakh town of Arkalyk could complicate recovery, Lyndin said.
The capsule was to land at a reserve site near Zhezkazgan, in central Kazakhstan. The site was rarely used since the Soviet break-up, Lyndin said.
- AP
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