The Russian Soyuz spacecraft, carrying video games tycoon Richard Garriott along with a Russian two-man crew, was reported to have landed safely Friday morning on the aforementioned country’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The manned mission was launched into orbit on October 12, from the same location it returned to Earth, aboard the Russian Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft that blasted off shortly after 3 a.m. EDT.

Carrying Garriott, United States astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov, the TMA-13 was scheduled to dock with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) International Space Station (ISS), so that the three men to perform several experiments in the outer-space.

Video games magnat Richard Garriott paid $35 million for this journey, which rendered him the sixth space tourist, after Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Gregory Olsen, Anousheh Ansari and Charles Simonyi, who have all had the chance to travel to space since 2001.

Although the Soyuz landing was deemed as having been flawless, many feared a highly dangerous ballistic re-entry of the spacecraft and not without good reason. On April 19, the Soyuz TMA-11, carrying South Korea’s first astronaut Yi So-Yeon, Russian flight-engineer Yuri Malenchenko and US Commander Peggy Whitson back from the ISS, made such a re-entry to Earth, exposing the crew to a ten times higher than normal gravity and landing 260 miles off-course.

Considering that the event has been the third of its kind since 2003, much concern has been raised with regards to the Soyuz spacecraft’s reliability and ability to safely bring Garriott and cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Oleg Kononenko back to Earth.

Richard Garriott is the son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who spent 60 days in space aboard the first space station launched by the United States on May, 14, 1973. Ten years later, he stayed aboard Spacelab-1 over a period of ten days.

Sergey Volkov, 35, also comes from a family of cosmonauts, his father Alexander Volkov being one of „the last citizens of the USSR,” since he and Sergei K. Krikalev had been aboard the Mir space station when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Volkov (the son) is the youngest ISS commander so far, having been appointed in June 2006 to serve as both Soyuz TMA Commander and ISS Commander.

Oleg Kononenko, 44, was assigned to be the Flight Engineer 1 on both the Expedition 17 mission to the ISS and the Soyuz TMA-12 mission, the one that took the Expedition 17 crew to NASA’s space station.

The International Space Station is a joint project among space agencies from the United States(NASA), Russia (RKA), Japan (JAXA), Canada (CSA) and eleven European countries (ESA).

The research facility’s on-orbit assembly began in 1998, while the first resident crew docked with the ISS on November 2, 2000.

The project is scheduled to be completed in the year 2010, but the ISS is set to remain operating another six years after that.