The first ever female space tourist, Anousheh Ansari of the United States, settled into the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday for a multi-million dollar cosmic holiday. Ansari, whose Soyuz spacecraft safely docked with the ISS after completing its journey from Earth, will spend the next eight days on board with five professional astronauts.
Ground control at Korolev, outside Moscow, showed live footage of Ansari and two astronauts who travelled with her entering the station and embracing the current occupants.
Ansari, wearing a black baseball cap and a yellow shirt, smiled broadly as she entered the station. On Earth, space officials and Ansari's relatives applauded.
"She made history. She's very lucky to have a great crew and she had great training," Hamid Ansari, her husband, told AFP when the Soyuz vessel docked.
An Iranian-born US citizen and telecoms tycoon, Ansari is the world's fourth space tourist. She accompanied NASA's Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russia's Mikhail Tyurin to the ISS and is believed to have paid some 25 million dollars (20 million euros) for her trip.
The three blasted off Monday from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Their Soyuz craft docked at 0521 GMT, space flight officials said at the Korolev centre outside Moscow.
"We'll look after her," Tyurin told her relatives on Earth in a video link-up with the crew. Hamid Ansari congratulated her as relatives expressed pride and joy.
Ansari's arrival follows a number of technical glitches on the ISS, including a possible chemical leak on Monday, in which the three occupants put on surgical masks and gloves due to a bad odour.
But at Korolev her sister Atousa Raissyan had no qualms, saying Ansari's childhood dream of entering space was always bound to come true.
"I knew she would do it sooner or later," Raissyan said.
Ansari, 40, will return to Earth on September 28 with two of the station's current occupants, Russia's Pavel Vinogradov and American Jeffrey Williams. Thomas Reiter from Germany will stay on board.
Born in 1966 in Iran, Ansari left the country for the United States with her parents at the age of 16 shortly after the Islamic revolution and launched herself into the study of electronics and data processing.
She made millions in telecoms, and her family has gone on to invest in technology and space exploration, contributing 10 million dollars to the X Foundation, set up to encourage advances in human space flight.
Before setting off, Ansari said: "I hope that not only my flights, but the life I have lived so far, become an inspiration for all youth all over the world, especially women and girls around the world, to pursue their dreams."
The flight has attracted considerable attention from Iranian media, much of it positive, but not all.
On Tuesday the Iranian newspaper Jomhouri Eslami attacked state television for its repeated coverage of the voyage, saying it risked creating a bad role-model for Iranian youngsters.
As Ansari settled in aboard the ISS, her Internet site spaceblog.xprize.org received numerous messages from well-wishers around the world.
Ansari's trip was hailed as a success by its organiser, Space Adventures, based in the US state of Virginia, which said in a statement: "We plan to send many more individuals to space in our continued effort in opening the final frontier".
Source: Agence France-Presse
