The craft carrying , and space tourist undocked from the orbital station on schedule at 1:11 p.m. Moscow time (0911 GMT), fired its engines and pulled away, Russian Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said.

The journey was to take more than three hours and end with a landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan, a massive Central Asian nation south of Russia. Among the final tasks the travelers performed was to move containers with biological experiments from refrigerators on the station into the Soyuz, Lyndin said.

Before setting off, they checked the seals on the hatches of the Soyuz, donned space suits and moved into the capsule that was to set them down after splitting off from the other two sections of the spacecraft, which burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, he said.

Simonyi arrived at the station on April 9 — also courtesy of a Soyuz, which rose into space atop a Russian rocket launched from the Russian facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan — along with cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov, who remained on the station.

A soft-spoken, Hungarian-born computer programmer, Simonyi — the world's fifth paying space tourist — is associated with two major American household names: Microsoft and lifestyle maven Martha Stewart.

Simonyi amassed the fortune that made his $25 million dream voyage possible through his work with computer software, including helping to develop Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.

He was seen off at Baikonur by Stewart, who is a friend, and who also watched the Soyuz dock from Russian mission control outside Moscow and spoke to him during a video linkup after he boarded the station.

Tyurin, Michael Lopez-Alegria and Simonyi were initially to return a day earlier, but the trip was postponed and the landing site shifted because of concerns that spring floodwaters in the usual landing area near the Kazakh town of Arkalyk could complicate the recovery, Lyndin said.

The capsule was to land at a reserve site near Zhezkazgan, in central Kazakhstan some 310 miles southwest of the capital, Astana, and 185 miles south of Arkalyk. The site has rarely been used since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lyndin said.

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