Richard Garriott is back on Earth after his ride into space as part of Operation Immortality. You can look back on his adventure at RichardinSpace.com, where you can watch a video of his return.

Also, the Tabula Rasa Web site points us toward an article and video interview on the Times Online of the UK. The full article is also copied below. Personally, I'm glad this whole experience was a success for Garriott. It was an important and historic event.

In similar news, the TR team's Feedback Friday post gives a little taste of the first Earth map in the upcoming Deployment 15. It looks like Richards' not the only one returning to our home turf.

“What a great ride” declared the British-born space tourist Richard Garriott today after safely touching down inside the Russian Soyuz capsule, $30 million lighter for his 10-day stay on the International Space Station.

Wrapped in a blue blanket to combat the near-freezing temperature on the steppe in Kazakhstan, the American was greeted by his father, Owen Garriott, a retired Nasa astronaut who flew on the US space station Skylab in 1973.

“Hey, Papa-san,” Mr Garriott, 47, said as the pair shook hands. “How come you look so fresh and ready to go?” his 77-year-old father replied.

Alongside Mr Garriott, a computer games billionaire, were the Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko. Mr Volkov’s father Alexander was also a former astronaut and was in space when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The pair are the first second-generation spacemen to fly together.

The Soyuz capsule came to rest in a puff of dust in a field 80 km (50 miles) north of the town of Arkalyk at 0336 GMT as planned. The craft, charred black from its fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, slowed its descent with a large parachute and fired special gunpowder engines to cushion its landing.

“I don’t recall such a perfect landing as this one,” Anatoly Perminov, head of Russia’s space agency Roskosmos, said in Moscow. “We did everything that was possible and more, and the landing was just ideal. The crew feel fine.”

The crew were then carried in special reclining chairs to an inflated medical tent for a scheduled check-up as they acclimatised to Earth’s gravity.

The uneventful descent was a relief after recent technical problems caused unusually steep “ballistic descents" for the last two returning crews, putting them hundreds of miles off course and subjecting them to stronger gravitational force than in a usual.

On a Soyuz returning in May, the malfunction of an explosive bolt delayed the separation of the re-entry capsule from the rest of the ship. It forced the crew including a US astronaut and South Korea’s first space traveller to endure a rough ride as the gyrating capsule descended facing the wrong way.

Mr Garriott, who created the Ultima computer game series, spent time on the station conducting experiments including some whose sponsors helped pay for a trip he said cost him a large chunk of his wealth. He also took pictures of the Earth’s surface to measure changes since his father did the same 35 years ago.