A Russian Soyuz spacecraft blasted off from Kazakhstan this morning carrying the first female space tourist.

Anousheh Ansari, 40, a telecoms entrepreneur, has in fact notched up three space records - she also becomes the first female Muslim in space, and first the Iranian in orbit.

Ms Ansari, who paid an estimated $25 million for the trip, joined a Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut in the cramped interior of Soyuz TMA-9 to the International Space Station (ISS).

With a roar of its rocket engine, the Soviet-designed spacecraft lifted off without incident into a clear blue sky at 0509 BST from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

"The launch was successful," Vladimir Solovyov, the mission control chief, told reporters in Moscow.

At an observation post about a kilometre from the launch site in the Kazakh steppe, Ms Ansari’s mother was in tears. "I am happy for her," she said. "I know she is very happy and I am praying with all my heart that she is coming back."

Unlike her fellow voyagers Michael Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail Tyurin, who are starting a six-month stint in space, Ms Ansari will come back to earth in 11 days with the outgoing US-Russian crew.

Ms Ansari was born in Iran in 1966 but left with her parents in 1984, shortly after the Iranian revolution. She is now an American citizen based in Dallas, Texas. She has said that she wants to be an example to the country of her birth.

"I think my flight has become a sort of ray of hope for young Iranians living in Iran, helping them to look forward to something positive, because everything they’ve been hearing is all so very depressing and talks of war and talks of bloodshed," she told the Reuters news agency last week.

She has been told to remove an Iranian flag from her spacesuit and, at the insistence of the Russian and American governments, promise that there will be no political messages during her trip.

Looking relaxed and smiling at a pre-launch news conference at the Baikonur Cosmodrome yesterday, Ms Ansari said that she would still pack another Iranian flag for her trip.

In many ways, however, Ms Ansari epitomises the American dream. After arriving in the United States speaking Farsi and French, she holds two degrees and is studying for a third, in astronomy. In 1993 she convinced her husband to leave the company where they both worked to set out on their own. Their telecommunications business grew to employ 250 people before she sold it in 2000.

Ms Ansari's has invested in technology and in space exploration, contributing $10 million to the X Foundation, set up to encourage advances in human space flight. The money formed a prize, the Ansari X Prize, which in 2004 was awarded to Mojave Aerospace Ventures for launching a reusable space ship that reached space twice in two weeks.

"She is a very determined, resolute woman," said Eric Anderson, chairman of Space Adventures, the company that markets the space tourism flights, in a telephone interview with the AFP news agency.

The practice of selling tourists the chance to fly to space - Ms Ansari is the fourth - has caused tension between Moscow and Nasa in the past, but Nasa’s ISS Flight Controller, Robert Dempsey, said today that he had no great problems with it.

"My personal feeling is I wish it could be me," he told reporters at Mission Control."I don’t think the space participant Ansari will impact the mission at all: she will add to it and I think the mission will be a success."

Ms Ansari had originally been scheduled to join a later Soyuz mission, but took the place of Daisuke Enomoto, a Japanese businessman, when Russian space officials said last month that he was not able to fly for unspecified medical reasons.

Two of the current ISS crew - Pavel Vinogradov, a Russian, and Jeff Williams, an American - will return with Ms Ansari on September 29. The third ISS crewmember, Thomas Reiter, a German, will remain onboard with the fresh US-Russian crew.

Several hours before the Soyuz blast off, the US space Shuttle Atlantis undocked from the ISS, after a rigorous inspection for damage to the shuttle’s wings and nose. This is part of the post-Columbia accident routine for shuttles, in which astronauts look for the type of heat shield cuts and tears that caused the fatal shuttle accident in 2003.

Soyuz will dock with the space station early on Wednesday and Atlantis is scheduled to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida a few hours later.

At the start of a busy week in space, the three astronauts still aboard the space station were preparing for the departure of an unmanned Progress supply ship today, and Soyuz's arrival on Wednesday.

"Just one thing after another," Williams radioed back to Earth. "It’s a busy week in space."

Times Recommends

• Heed the great stabiliser’s words
• How a voice for everyone led to stalemate
• Bakara market becomes a slaughterhouse