KOROLYOV, Russia - An American billionaire who paid $25 million for a 13-day trip to outer space returned to Earth on Saturday in a space capsule that also carried a cosmonaut and an American astronaut, a Russian space official said.
The capsule carrying Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-born software engineer who helped develop Microsoft Word and Excel, touched down after a more than three-hour return trip from the orbital station, a spokesman said in an announcement at Mission Control outside Moscow.
Also on the return journey were Mikhail Tyurin and Michael Lopez-Alegria, who spent seven months on the international space station.
The capsule raced down to Earth after separating from the two other sections of the Soyuz TMA-9 craft following its departure from the station, where one of the final tasks the travelers performed was to move containers with biological experiments from refrigerators on the station into the Soyuz.
Simonyi arrived at the station on April 9 -- also courtesy of a Soyuz, which flew into space atop a Russian rocket launched from the Russian-leased launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan -- along with cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov, who remained on the station.
