charles simonyi

This morning, Charles Simonyi blasted off for his return visit to the International Space Station. He will return to Earth on April 7.

Read our interview with the avid tourist.

Charles Simonyi, a computer software executive most famous for leading the development of Microsoft Word and Excel in the 1980s, announced in September 2008 that he had booked a second flight with Space Adventures, currently the only company providing orbital space tourist flights to the International Space Station (ISS). Simonyi is currently training for the upcoming flight, which is scheduled to launch on March 25, 2009. He will join Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and NASA astronaut Mike Barratt, both members of Expedition 19 to the space station. The crew will ride to the ISS in the Russian spacecraft Soyuz TMA-14.

I caught up with Charles in between his training for a little chat about his upcoming trip.

While we're certainly not going to criticize the world's richest man for using so many of his billions to try to solve humanity's most pressing health problems, it's nice to see that he's got a little left over for the cosmos, too. Bill Gates donated $10 million —and former Microsoft colleague Charles Simonyi dished out $20 million—to the finance three large mirrors for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a massive observatory being built in Chile.

The $400 million project will help astronomers spot asteroids and supernovae, map galaxies, and find out more about dark energy and dark matter, the invisible stuff that scientists say dominates most of our universe.—Gregory Mone

Via PhysOrg

(Image credit: Kevin Hand / NASA)