Kazakhstan ? The capsule carrying a female space tourist landed today on the Kazakh steppe after a bone-jarring journey from the international space station.

Anousheh Ansari, Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. astronaut Jeffrey Williams left the station aboard a cramped Russian Soyuz capsule about three hours earlier. After the capsule entered the Earth’s atmosphere, search and rescue teams in three planes and 12 helicopters tracked the trajectory and scrambled to help the crew out of the craft.

Ansari, an Iranian-born American telecommunications entrepreneur, was a last-minute choice for the mission, which blasted off Sept. 18 from the Russian manned space launch complex in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

The 40-year-old Ansari was the fourth person, and the first woman, to pay a reported $20 million for a trip to the international space station.