"I enjoyed this trip so much that I will grab any chance I get to do the flight again, whether it is to the ISS (International Space Station) or flying to space through other means," Anousheh Ansari, 40, told a press conference at Star City, the Russian cosmonaut training center outside Moscow.

The Iranian-born US telecoms billionaire -- the fourth ever tourist in space -- touched down Friday in the steppes of Kazakhstan with two male crew members, following a 11-day journey into space including eight on board the ISS.

One message from her groundbreaking flight, Ansari said, was "to inspire women and girls around the world and to show them they can dream big and they can dream the impossible, and if they really want it in their hearts and they work hard, it will come true."

"Of course this was a dream I was fulfilling for myself," she told reporters, "but at the same time I wanted to use it as a means to bring more interest and awareness about human space exploration."

"It's definitely the first chapter in our effort (with her husband) to open up space to more and more people," she said.

Ansari said her X Prize Foundation would continue to invest in private space exploration, offering rewards for the development of new technologies to allow more cost-effective flights into space.

She also said she hoped to help attract more children and young people to the sciences, specifically to the study of space.

Ansari said her trip was an eye-opening experience that left her determined to campaign for peace and the preservation of the natural world.

"It was wonderful to be able to see where I was born and where I lived and grew up from the station," she told reporters.

"From there I realized my countries (the United States and Iran) are not very different from any other place on Earth.

"I'm hoping to take this message to the people of all the countries to make sure that they understand that we're all living on Earth as inhabitants of Earth."

According to one of her fellow space travellers, Israel's four-week bombardment of Lebanon was visible to "the naked eye" from space.

"Of course it was visible. You know, all negative human activities, in particular military operations, are immediately visible from space," Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov -- who was based on the ISS at the time of the armed four-week armed offensive -- told the press conference.

"Of course we saw the fires, especially when it was a big city, it was very easily visible even without our instruments. You could see it with the naked eye," he said.

Ansari said that she had realised the need to "take care of this precious gift that we have and not to ruin what we have and destroy our home with wars and other disasters that we create on Earth."

The businesswoman, who lived in Iran until the age of 16 before going on to make her fortune in the United States, paid 25 million dollars (20 million euros) to the space tourism agency Space Adventures to spend a week aboard the ISS.

While in space she carried out three medical and biological experiments for the European Space Agency and took hundreds of photographs of the Earth.

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