Space tourist Garriott, cosmonauts return to Earth

MOSCOW: A Russian Soyuz space capsule Friday returned to the Earth safely, carrying its crew of Russian cosmonauts and a US space tourist.
 
The capsule with Richard Garriott, a computer games designer and son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who paid $30 million to follow in his father's footsteps, landed safely around 0330 GMT in the Kazakh steppe.
 
"Start and landing went according to plan. Now helicopters and search units are flying to the landing site," Valeri Lyndin a spokesman of the flight control near Moscow, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
 
Soyuz also carried cosmonauts Olek Kononenko and Sergei Volkov, himself the son of a cosmonaut. Both of them spent six months on board the international ISS space station, part of the station's 17th long-term crew.
 
Owen Garriott and Alexander Volkov both travelled to Kazakstan to welcome their sons.