New Tourist to Visit the Space Station
The Associated Press
Thursday, October 26, 2006; 7:26 PM
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The next space tourist is set to visit the international space station next March, officials with the company that brokered the trip said Thursday.
Charles Simonyi, who made his fortune in the computer software industry, is set to launch March 9 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, according to Space Adventures Ltd.
  Space tourist Charles Simonyi stands Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006 in Seattle next to a space suit similar to the one he will wear when he travels into space next year. The billionaire software engineer, who helped develop two of the world's most popular software applications, Microsoft Corp.'s Word and Excel, is scheduled to go into orbit on March 9, 2007, aboard a Soyuz TMA-10 en route to the International Space Station. Simonyi paid more than an estimated $20 million for the trip through the space tourism company Space Adventures Ltd. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren) (Ted S. Warren - AP) 
| ||||||||||||||||||||
He will become the fifth space tourist to pay an estimated $20 million for the privilege.
The most recent space tourist, Texas businesswoman Anousheh Ansari, returned to Earth last month after a 10-day trip. The Virginia-based company previously brokered trips for Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen and Ansari.
Simonyi currently is training for the eight-day trip in Star City, Russia.
Simonyi was born in Budapest and earned a doctorate in computer science at Stanford University. He worked at Xerox, and then Microsoft, before founding his own software engineering company.
