Moscow, October 11: The first clown in space, Canadian circus tycoon Guy Laliberte, arrived safely back on Earth on Sunday touching down in a Russian Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan, the Russian mission control centre said.
The capsule, also carrying Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and US astronaut Michael Barratt, landed in Kazakhstan’s steppe at 0431 GMT after travelling from the International Space Station (ISS).
“The team took the landing quite well, they are feeling fine,” the space official commented as quoted by the RIA Novosti News Agency.
Laliberte is the billionaire founder of the popular Cirque du Soleil and the seventh person in history to spend millions of dollars from a personal fortune to fly into space.
The Canadian, who arrived at the ISS on October 2, could be the last space tourist for some time as seats will be limited aboard the Soyuz once NASA takes its long-serving shuttles out of service from 2010.
The Cirque du Soleil, which Laliberte founded in 1984, fuses acrobatics with music and has made him the world’s 261st richest man with a fortune of 2.5 billion dollars, according to Forbes magazine. on Saturday.
–PTI