Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Sun 01 Oct 2006 12:36 PM PDT
September 30, 2006 12:00am
ARKALYK -- The world's first female space tourist was greeted with fresh fruit and a bouquet of roses when she and two members of an International Space Station mission landed yesterday in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
Iranian-born American Anousheh Ansari, Pavel Vinogradov of Russia, and US astronaut Jeffrey Williams touched down softly at 11.14am Melbourne time. Wrapped in furs to protect her from the cold, a beaming Ansari was greeted by her husband, Hamid, who brought her a bouquet of red roses.Ansari, 40, paid over $33 million to spend a week aboard the ISS carrying out medical and biological experiments for the European Space Agency and taking hundreds of photos of the Earth.
"I can't not be sad to leave," she said in her farewell broadcast.
On her weblog the telecommunications tycoon described washing her hair by opening a water bag to make a huge overhead bubble and rubbing in dry shampoo.
Zero gravity made it impossible to keep objects from drifting away, she wrote, "so God invented Velcro. Don't tell anyone up here, but I've lost a few little things already, like my lip-gloss."
And the smell of space, at least in the orbiting lab, was "strange . . . kind of like burned almond cookie".AFP, AP
Attachment:
