The world’s first female space tourist could not stop smiling as she returned to Earth at dawn today after an 11-day stay in space.

The Russian Soyuz space capsule carrying Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-born telecoms entrepreneur from Texas, and two male astronauts bumped down on the steppes of Kazakhstan at 0214 BST, suspended from a large orange and white parachute.

The craft fired special gunpowder engines to cushion it as it landed on its side in a puff of dust and dirt, in a field about 80 km (50 miles) north of the small town of Arkalyk.

Ground crew from the Russian space programme opened the hatch and helped Ms Ansari out of the Soyuz TMA-8 capsule, charred black from its fiery re-entry into the atmosphere. They wrapped her in furs and carried her to a special reclining chair nearby, in bright morning sunshine.

She kissed her husband, Hamid, and held his hand, clutching his bouquet of red roses with a pink ribbon in the other.

"They brought me home safe and sound," said Ms Ansari, looking tired but with the grin still firmly in place. "I had a great experience."

Asked how she felt, she gave a thumbs up and said "khorosho" — "good" in Russian.

Then she was helped to a medical tent, where doctors checked her over for the effects of weightlessness on her body and the bone-jarring effects of her journey home. She chatted to her family by satellite phone as the tests were carried out.

Ms Ansari, 40, left Iran with her family as a teenager in 1984 after the fall of the Shah, and made a new life in America. She is the fourth person, but the first woman, to pay an estimated $25 million to Space Adventures, the Russian space programme's tourism agency, for the trip. She is also the first Iranian, and the first female Muslim, in space.

She blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 18 with a fresh US-Russian crew for the International Space Station. While aboard the ISS she carried out medical and biological experiments for the European Space Agency (ESA) and took hundreds of photos of the Earth.

She came back with Pavel Vinogradov, a Russian cosmonaut, and Jeff Williams, a US astronaut, who were finishing their six month tour of duty.

"I can’t not be sad to leave," she said during a farewell ceremony aboard the station, her pigtails floating behind her in the zero-gravity.

"I had a very unique experience because of the people here... This 10 days has been magnificent for me. I hope to be able to have this experience once again in the near future."

Williams, eating an apple, a symbol of Kazakhstan and a traditional treat for returning space crews, agreed after the return voyage: "It was the ride of a lifetime."

Later Ms Ansari and the two professional space travellers were flown by helicopter to a news conference in the nearby town of Kostanai, wearing traditional Kazakh costumes presented to them by local people as a memento.

The Russian news agency ITAR-TASS quoted a Russian space official saying that all three were in good health. Nikolai Sevastyanov, the head of the Russian company Energia that constructed the ISS, praised the three, calling the trip "a success."

"The crew performed magnificently," Sevastyanov told the press conference, in comments shown on NTV. Later today they are due to fly to Moscow to reacclimatise to Earth conditions.

Three people remain on the space station: Mikhail Tyurin, a Russian cosmonaut, and Michael Lopez-Alegria, a US astronaut, both of whom flew out with Ms Ansari and will be on the ISS for six months, along with Thomas Reiter, a German astronaut who arrived on a US space shuttle in July and is due to return home in December.

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