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ALMATY - A RUSSIAN Soyuz capsule carrying US space tourist Richard Garriott and a Russian crew bumped down safely in Kazakhstan at 0336 GMT (11.36am Singapore time) as planned on Friday.
'Everything went well. They landed safely,' said a Moscow mission control spokesman. A Nasa Television live feed from the centre described it as a flawless on-target landing.
Friday's re-entry has attracted heightened attention after the Soyuz malfunctioned twice over the past year, subjecting crews to dangerous 'ballistic' re-entries and raising concerns about its reliability.
'The crew reports feeling well,' the Nasa live feed said.
Mr Garriott, a US video game magnate who paid US$35 million (S$52.8 million) for his 12-day space adventure, came back alongside Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.
Mr Garriott, son of a Nasa astronaut, and Mr Volkov, whose father was in space when the Soviet Union collapsed, are the first second-generation spacemen to fly together - a symbolic act at a time when US-Russia relations are particularly tense.
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