Space Tourist's Junket Near An End

U.S. scientist Gregory Olsen and a two-man Russian-American crew made final preparations to leave the international space station Monday, ending a seven-day trip for the millionaire businessman as the third private citizen to visit the orbiting outpost.

After the incoming crew formally takes over command of the station, Olsen, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and astronaut John Phillips will climb into a Soyuz capsule, undock from the station and begin the fiery, 3½-hour descent en route to a landing on Kazakhstan's barren steppe.

The three will spend two hours undergoing medical checks following landing, then be flown by helicopter to a Kazakh staging point and ultimately back to Moscow for further examinations.

Krikalev and Phillips have inhabited the station since April, during which time Krikalev passed the mark of 800 cumulative days in space — breaking the previous record of 748 days set in the late 1990s by cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev over three missions.

Krikalev spent two long stints aboard Russia's Mir station, and flew twice on NASA's space shuttles. He was also part of the international space station's first crew nearly five years ago.

Last week, Olsen, a millionaire and co-founder of infrared camera maker Sensors Unlimited Inc. near Princeton, N.J., told schoolchildren the ride and the view from the international space station are "exhilarating."

"You have 16 orbits a day, so that's a sunrise and a sunset every 45 minutes," Olsen told students at Fort Hamilton High School in his native Brooklyn, N.Y., on Thursday via a ham radio hookup as the station passed over Australia. "Your sense of what a day is is really altered."

Olsen spent two years in training and paid $20 million to ride aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and stay on the space station for a week. The trip was brokered by Arlington, Va.-based Space Adventures, which previously sent American Dennis Tito and South African Mark Shuttleworth up to the station on a Soyuz.

"Basically, I do medical experiments, take video and photos, do some station chores (and) enjoy being here, floating free in space," Olsen described his adventure in an e-mail interview with The Associated Press.

The experiments Olsen is doing include one to determine how different species of microbes, built up on the space station over years, are affected by space flight, particularly whether their rate of genetic mutation has been affected by conditions in orbit.

"I went around the ISS (international space station) today with a whole bunch of Q-tips and swabbed different areas for biological samples," he told the Brooklyn students.

Olsen, who holds advanced degrees in physics and materials science, made his fortune in optics inventions, mainly through the company he founded with partner Marshall Cohen, Sensors Unlimited. They sold the company for $700 million in 2000 just before the telecom bubble burst, then bought it back for $6 million in 2002 and brought it back to profitability. The company is to be sold by year's end for $60 million to Charlotte, N.C.-based Goodrich Corp.

Olsen, who said he has been fascinated with spaceflight since boyhood, has a home in Montgomery Township in Somerset County, as well as a ranch in Montana. He also owns a vineyard in South Africa and spotted the area while passing over it, he told the students.

"I just love it up here and it's fulfilling everything I expected," Olsen told the Brooklyn students, one of three high school groups he spoke with in an effort to encourage more interest in science among youth. "You can only dream about what it's like to float around for a long time."

The other schools were Princeton High School and Ridgefield Park High School in New Jersey.

Still, Olsen indicated in his e-mail to the AP that he's a little tired of the canned and reconstituted food.

"I look forward to a salad, steak and red wine on my return," he wrote.

Astronaut William McArthur and cosmonaut Valery Tokarev will spend six months on the station, during which time they will conduct at least two spacewalks, as well as scientific experiments, medical checks and routine maintenance.

"We consider this a great trust, not just from the member nations and the International Space Station program, but a great trust from all humanity," said McArthur in a ceremony at the station. "I think there is no greater endeavor for human beings than to explore."

The next cargo shipment that McArthur and Tokarev can expect will be a Russian Progress ship, scheduled to reach the station in December.