After the three-hour flight, the patient and five-man team of doctors -- strapped to a wall during surgery -- landed safely at an airport outside Bordeaux, in southwest France.
The mid-air surgery to remove a cyst from the man's arm took about 8 minutes -- the same amount of time the operation would have taken in normal conditions, the lead surgeon said.
Chief surgeon Dominique Martin said the near zero-gravity operation -- the first on a human -- was not technically difficult and was aimed at breaking a barrier in medical expertise.
The experiment, three years in the making, was meant to give a preliminary idea of what surgery in space might be like, providing information about blood flows or the need for special equipment.
Naysayers silenced
With the International Space Station offering an outpost in space, the French team sees the test as important for future exploration of the cosmos.
Doctors said the test was also designed to rebut naysayers who claimed that surgery was unlikely -- if not impossible -- in space, and to explore a field American doctors have left largely unexplored.
The surgery went "exactly as we had expected," Martin told reporters.
"All the data we collected allow us to think that operating on a human in the conditions of space would not present insurmountable problems," he said.
Patient Philippe Sanchot -- chosen because he is an avid bungee jumper -- was given a local aesthetic.
"I'm just a little tired, but it's because my head is spinning," Sanchot said.
The medical team was strapped to the walls of the Airbus 300
Zero-G plane as it looped up and down in a total of 22 roller coaster-like manoeuvres, called parabolas. Each dive, creating conditions close to weightlessness, lasted 22 seconds - with doctors operating during those intervals only.