{"id":668,"date":"2011-09-18T19:34:09","date_gmt":"2011-09-18T19:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress65\/?p=668"},"modified":"2011-09-18T19:34:09","modified_gmt":"2011-09-18T19:34:09","slug":"space-history-today-iranian-born-americans-flight-intl-space-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/space-history-today-iranian-born-americans-flight-intl-space-station\/","title":{"rendered":"Space History Today: An Iranian-Born American's Flight to the Int'l Space Station"},"content":{"rendered":"

Five years ago today — September 18, 2006 — Soyuz TMA-9 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome toward its rendezvous with the International Space Station.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n(Spaceflight participant Anousheh Ansari in the Zvezda module of the ISS, holding a plant that was grown there. NASA image.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\nSoyuz TMA-9<\/a> was piloted by Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, and carried U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria to his new post as the ISS mission commander. It also carried Anousheh Ansari<\/a>, who had come to the U.S. from Iran as a teenager, earned engineering degrees from George Mason and George Washington universities, and with her husband made a fortune in the telecommunications industry.<\/p>\n

Ms. Ansari paid her way on the Soyuz flight, becoming the world’s first female “space tourist” — though she preferred the term “spaceflight participant.” Two years before, she had contributed a sizable portion of her family fortune to sponsor the spaceflight X-Prize, which was re-named the Ansari X-Prize<\/a>. The $10 million prize was won in October 2004 by Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites<\/a> with their second suborbital SpaceShipOne<\/a> flight.<\/p>\n

Ms. Ansari spent a little more than a week aboard the ISS, and landed safely in Kazakhstan on September 29, 2006.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five years ago today — September 18, 2006 — Soyuz TMA-9 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome toward its rendezvous with the International Space Station. (Spaceflight participant Anousheh Ansari in the Zvezda module of the ISS, holding a plant that was grown there. NASA image.) Soyuz TMA-9 was piloted by Russian \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[26,11,22],"class_list":["post-668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space","tag-launch","tag-space-history","tag-space-station"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}