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Soyuz lifts off on space station voyage

A Soyuz spacecraft with two Americans and a Russian on board lifted off from Kazakhstan on Sunday for the international space station.

The Soyuz TMA-13 capsule carrying American computer game millionaire Richard Garriott soared into a clear sky atop a Russian rocket as the latest paying space traveller’s family watched from a viewing platform. Also aboard were U.S. astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov.

The rocket lifted off on schedule at 1:01 p.m. (7.01 GMT), sending an orange flare behind it as it streaked upward. The craft entered orbit about 10 minutes later.

“I’m elated, elated,” said Richard Garriott’s father, Owen, a former U.S. astronaut who is the first American to see his child follow in his footsteps and reach space. “They’re in orbit, that’s good.”

Garriott’s mother Eve and his girlfriend, Kelly Miller, shed tears of joy and relief at the successful launch.

The Soyuz is to dock Tuesday with the international space station, where Garriott will spend about 10 days conducting experiments — including some whose sponsors helped fund his trip — and photographing Earth to measure changes since his father snapped pictures from the U.S. station Skylab in 1973. He is to return to Earth on October 24 in a Soyuz capsule with cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergei Volkov, whose father Alexander also travelled to space — making him the first second-generation space traveller.

Garriott, a Texan who made his fortune designing computer fantasy games, dreamed of space as a child but learned as a youth that he could not become a NASA astronaut because of his poor eyesight. He paid a reported $30 million for his voyage. - AP

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