Rocket with first Azeri female space tourist Anousheh Ansari lifts off for ISS

The liftoff took place at 8.09 a.m. Moscow time (4.09 a.m. GMT)," the spokesman said. "The Soyuz TMA-9 [capsule] will deliver [space tourist] Anousheh Ansari, a U.S. citizen of Iranian origin, NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin to the International Space Station."

The Russian-U.S. crew will join German astronaut Thomas Reiter when the spacecraft docks with the ISS in two days, and the new crew will replace Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. astronaut Jeffrey Williams, who have been on the station since April.

The outgoing crew will take the Iranian-American telecommunications businesswoman, who paid $20 million for the tour, back to Earth in late-September.

For Ms Ansari, the trip fulfils a childhood dream. Ms Ansari is the first space tourist to have passionately pursued the development of commercial space travel.

After emigrating to the United States from Iran in her teens, she went on to earn a bachelor's degree in electronics and computer engineering from George Mason University.

In 1993, Ms Ansari set up a telecommunications company with her husband Hamid. This was eventually sold for hundreds of millions of dollars and part of the fortune went into funding Ms Ansari's interest in the space industry.

She and another family member donated $10m to the X-Prize competition - a race to be the first private company to put a craft into space twice in two weeks.

Ms Ansari will wear both the American and old Iranian flags on her space suit. She says she wanted to recognise both countries' contributions to her life. "I was born in Iran and lived there until the age of 16 and then moved to the United States," she said in an interview recently. "So I have a lot of roots in Iran and feel very close to the Iranian people and the culture of the country."

The Soyuz TMA-9 lifted off less than a day after the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis undocked from the ISS and began its journey back to Earth.

/RIA Novosti, APA/