Arkalyk, Kazakhstan – The seven-day space sojourn of an American millionaire scientist came to a close as he and a Russian-American crew undocked from the international space station and sped back to Earth, landing early today on the windswept steppes of Kazakhstan.
The bone-jarring descent brought an end to Gregory Olsen’s space-station trip, the third visit by a private citizen to the orbiting laboratory. The Soyuz spacecraft took 3 1/2 hours to carry the three men to Earth from the station’s approximately 250-mile-high orbit.
Olsen, American astronaut William McArthur and Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev blasted off from the Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan on Oct. 1 and docked with the space station two days later.
McArthur and Tokarev will stay aboard the station for six months, while Olsen returned with John Phillips and Sergei Krikalev, who were there since April.
As the sun rose, search-and- rescue crew members helped the men from the capsule on Kazakhstan’s broad, empty steppes, where Russia’s manned space facilities are based. Rescuers reported that the crew’s condition was “good,” according to Russian Mission Control at Korolyov outside Moscow.
After landing, the crewmen were to spend two hours undergoing medical checks, then be shuttled by helicopter to a Kazakh staging point and ultimately back to Moscow for further examinations.
McArthur and Tokarev are to conduct two spacewalks during their time aboard, as well as an array of scientific experiments, medical tests and routine maintenance.
Olsen, who spent two years in training and paid $20 million for his trip, conducted experiments during his visit, including one to determine how microbes that have built up on the space station are affected by flight, particularly whether their rate of mutation has been affected.
The Soyuz spacecraft and Russia’s unmanned Progress cargo ships have been the space station’s lifeline since the U.S. space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. The shuttle program was suspended for more than two years; the shuttle Discovery flew out in July, but problems with its insulation raised doubts about when the next shuttle would go into space.
