Having flown higher than any Cork flag in history, the blood and bandages that once orbited the globe have returned to Earth.

The unlit torch for the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Russian city of Sochi is to be taken on a space walk tomorrow.

A US software billionaire who won a junior cosmonaut contest as a child in Communist-ruled Hungary returned from a dream voyage to the international space station today, riding a Russian capsule to a soft landing on the Kazakh steppe along with a Russian and an American who spent seven months in orbit.

In one of their last days before leaving the planet aboard a wardrobe-sized space capsule, two Russian cosmonauts and a US billionaire computer programmer enjoyed an array of earthly pleasures today.