First female space tourist returns to Earth

NEAR ARKALYK, Kazakhstan, Sep 29 (Reuters) The world's first female space tourist, Iranian-born Anousheh Ansari, returned to Earth today, bumping down in a Russian Soyuz capsule at dawn on the Kazakh steppe.

''They brought me home safe and sound,'' Ansari, looking tired but happy said as she sat in a special reclining chair next to the capsule in bright early morning sunshine.

''I had a great experience.'' A Russian space programme recovery team had surrounded the capsule, opened the hatch and extracted the cosmonauts from the Soyuz TMA-8 capsule, charred black from its fiery re-entry into the atmosphere.

Ansari, a 40-year-old US telecoms entrepreneur, left Iran in 1984 and who paid 20 million dollar for the trip.

She came back with a Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and a US astronaut Jeff Williams and was greeted with red roses as well as a hug from her husband, Hamid.

''It was the ride of a lifetime,'' Williams, eating an apple, a symbol of Kazakhstan and a traditional treat for returning space crews, said as he adapted to gravity after his six months in space.

The craft slowed its descent with a large orange and white parachute and fired special gunpowder engines to cushion its landing on one side in a puff of dust and dirt in a field about 80 km (50 miles) north of the small town of Arkalyk.

FLOWERS Ansari waved and smiled broadly after being presented with the bunch of red roses with a pink ribbon by the recovery team.

Asked how she felt, she gave a thumbs up and said ''khorosho'' -- ''good'' in Russian.

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

Ansari blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September. 18 with a fresh US-Russian crew that relieved Vinogradov and Williams on the International Space Station.

''This 10 days has been magnificent for me,'' she said during a farewell ceremony aboard the station, about 3-1/2 hours before the landing at 0644 IST. ''I hope to be able to have this experience once again in the near future.'' Remaining on the space station are Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and US astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who flew to the outpost with Ansari, and German astronaut Thomas Reiter.

Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria will be on the ISS for six months.

Reiter, who arrived on a US space shuttle in July, is set to return home in December.

REUTERS LL PM1406