Software millionaire Charles Simonyi has become the fifth paying tourist in space. The 58-year-old Hungarian-born programmer—one of those who developed Microsoft Word—launched aboard the Soyuz TMA-10 rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, at 11:31PM today (1:31PM EDT). Like his predecessors, he paid approximately $20 million for the trip, which will last about two weeks.
Simonyi is flying to the International Space Station (ISS) with cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov, who are the ISS’s Expedition 15 crew. Simonyi will leave the ISS with Expedition 14 crewmembers Michael Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail Tyurin (Expedition 14/15 crewmember Suni Williams is scheduled to return on the next space shuttle mission).
Simonyi got his professional start programming on a Soviet computer called Ural-2 when he was a teenager in Hungary. He emigrated to the US in 1968 and worked for Xerox before moving to Microsoft. After helping to develop Microsoft Word and Excel, he left to found his own software company.
While in space, Simonyi will be posting on his public blog at blog.charlesinspace.com.