Rich programmer to visit space

STAR CITY, Russia – Decades before helping to write the programs that led to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, Charles Simonyi learned the basics on a clunky, Soviet-era computer called Ural-2.

Next month, the U.S. billionaire programmer will carry a paper-tape memento from that first computer and put his faith in the heirs to that Soviet-era technology when he blasts into space aboard a Soyuz rocket.

He will become the world’s fifth space tourist.

“I will take one of those paper tapes with me to remind me where it all started,” Simonyi said Thursday at Russia’s Star City cosmonaut preparation center.

Simonyi’s skill at computers and his work in helping to develop the world’s most commonly used word processing and spreadsheet programs earned him enough money to spare more than $20 million to become the world’s fifth space tourist, set to blast off early next month.

Simonyi, 58, will travel to the international space station aboard a Soyuz TMA-10 capsule together with Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov. He will return to Earth 11 days later with the station’s current crew – Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and Spanish-born U.S. astronaut Miguel Lopez-Alegria.

U.S. astronaut Sunita Williams is expected to remain onboard the station until June, when she is scheduled to be replaced by Clayton Anderson.

Since beginning training at Star City in October, Simonyi, like the other “space tourists” before him, has had to learn to walk and breathe in a cumbersome space suit, use special gas masks, practice helicopter rescues in case of a water landing, and other tasks.

The hardest thing of all, he said, has been spinning in a high-speed rotating chair to help train against dizziness in space – along with learning some Russian. Now that he is finished training, he says he is sure the trip will go without a hitch.

“I am nervous about public appearances and press conferences, but I think that about the flight I am not nervous at all,” the soft-spoken Simonyi said.