Tehran: Dozens of space travel enthusiasts, most of them women, burst into applause at dawn at an observatory near the capital as the spacecraft carrying the first Iranian woman to travel into space appeared in the sky.
Space tourist Anousheh Ansari, who began her journey into space Monday aboard a Soyuz TMA-9 capsule from Baikonur, Kazakhastan, has become an inspiration to women in male-dominated Iran.
Space enthusiasts gathered on Saturday at the Zaferanieh Observatory in Tehran were rapt as they followed the progress of the craft, visible to the naked eye for about two minutes, as it streaked across the sky.
"Anousheh is my hope," said teenager Delagah Dadbeh, watching the spacecraft as tears of joy rolled down her cheek.
"She will shine in Iranian history as a woman who broke barriers," Dadbeh said.
Ansari, the world's first paying female space tourist left Iran with her family a few years after the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the pro-US Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought hard-line clerics to power.
One of the reasons the family left Iran was that the opportunities for a young girl to study science were becoming limited.
Ansari has said she is eager to see Iran from space and hopes to inspire girls in her homeland to study science.
Ansari says she has received e-mail messages from many of them. Iran's state-run media has briefly mentioned Ansari's voyage. But some hard-line media criticized state television for even this, dismissing Ansari as a 'wealthy woman.'
The Iranian Space Agency was the only government-run body to congratulate Ansari on her achievement. Ansari, 40, is a telecommunications entreprenuer.
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