Millionaire back from space

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 visit, the third trip by a private citizen to the orbiting laboratory. The Soyuz spacecraft that carried them covered the approximately 250 miles from the space station to Earth in 3 1/2 hours.

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 had been there since April.

Ground officials established radio and visual contact with the craft about five minutes before the landing around dawn today on the broad, empty steppes of Kazakhstan, where Russia’s manned-space facilities are based. Four search planes and 17 helicopters scrambled to meet the spacecraft.

Phillips’ wife, monitoring the landing at Russian Mission Control at Korolyov outside Moscow, said her husband was launched to space on his birthday and was returning on hers.

“I guess it’s the best present a person could ask for,” she said.

After landing, the crewmen were to spend two hours undergoing medical checks, then be shuttled by helicopter to a Kazakh staging point and then back to Moscow for more examinations.

McArthur and Tokarev are to conduct two spacewalks as well as an array of scientific experiments, medical tests and routine maintenance during their time aboard the space station.

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 if their rate of mutation has been affected.

In addition, he took videos and photos and “enjoy(ed) being here, floating free in space,” he told the Associated Press by e-mail last week.