Female Space Tourist Blasts Off

Russian Capsule Headed For Space Station With Telecommunications Entrepreneur On Board

(AP)  Ansari gave $10 million in 2002 for the naming rights to a prize awarded to the first successful privately financed manned trip into space.

Astronaut Lopez-Alegria said just a few years ago he was skeptical of private tourists. But he said now it was clear that the Russian space program needed such investment - and that without the Russian space program, the U.S. space program would suffer.

"If that's the correct solution... then not only is it good from the standpoint of supporting the Russian space program, but it's good for us as well," he said. Ansari's presence in space "is a great dream and a great hope not just for our country but for countries all around the world."

Cosmonaut Tyurin called Ansari "very professional" and said he felt like they had worked together for a decade.

Ansari said she expected seeing Earth from space would alter her view of the planet.

"You'll see how small and how fragile the Earth is compared to the rest of the universe," she said. "It will give us a better sense of responsibility."

Earlier she said she was eager to see Iran from space - she hasn't been back since emigrating to the United States - and hopes to inspire girls in her homeland to study science.

Ansari and her family left Iran a few years after the Islamic revolution, in part because the opportunities for a young girl to study science were becoming limited there.

Speaking no English when she arrived as a teenager with her family in Virginia, she went on to earn bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering within a few years.

She and her husband married in 1991 and later moved to Texas to start a company that made signal-switching software for phone networks.

In 2000, at the height of the telecommunications boom, they sold their suburban Dallas company to Massachusetts-based Sonus Networks Inc. for $550 million in Sonus stock.

The value of those shares slid from $40 to under $5 as the telecom industry collapsed but her husband said they had "enough opportunity to sell enough shares to earn financial independence."

The timing of some stock sales led to shareholder suits against Sonus and nine people, including Anousheh Ansari. The plaintiffs accused her of illegal insider trading in the sale of $26.3 million in Sonus stock.

A spokeswoman for the couple said the Securities and Exchange Commission never accused Mrs. Ansari of insider trading.

Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria are to join Reiter as the construction at the space station is picking up pace. On the agenda for the four days following the departure of the Atlantis: The station's current crew will shift a Progress supply ship to a different docking port to make way for the Soyuz; Atlantis will land back on Earth; and the Soyuz will dock at the station.

During the six-month tenure of Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria, four spacewalks are planned, with as many as three to be conducted in January to help set up the station's permanent cooling system. Another will take place earlier to retrieve and install experiments on the station's exterior.