A Soyuz capsule carrying a US space tourist and two Russians landed safely in Kazakhstan today.
"I feel great. I feel very good. Re-entry was perfectly smooth," a smiling Richard Garriott, who paid $35 million for his 12-day journey into space, told Reuters after a Russian recovery team extracted him from the capsule.
Charred black from its fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, the craft landed in a field 80km (50 miles) north of the town of Arkalyk earlier this morning as planned.
Its flawless landing was a relief for Russian and US officials who have been worried about the landings after the capsule malfunctioned twice over the past year, subjecting crews to dangerous "ballistic" re-entries.
A ballistic landing is steeper than a normal one and subjects crews to massive gravitational forces. A South Korean astronaut said she feared death during such a landing in April.
After the touch down, recovery teams surrounded the capsule, opened the hatch and extracted the cosmonauts as the first rays of the morning sun lit up the barren steppes of Kazakhstan.
Mr Garriott, a US video game magnate, came back from the International Space Station alongside Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.
The American, son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, and Mr Volkov, whose father Alexander was in space when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, are the first second-generation spacemen to fly together - a symbolic act at a time when US-Russia relations are tense.
Reuters