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New Delhi, Apr 21: Charles Simonyi has touched terra firma again, a couple of inches taller and with a slightly swollen head, after spending a fortnight in space. And what has he missed most on Earth while away in space? “A nice cold beer would have been nice,” he replies.
As the fifth private citizen to fly off to space, Simonyi’s trip has been different from the others. He grew peas in space and tried to set up a space library, besides taking umpteenth questions from school children in the US and his native Hungary over amateur ham radio from the International Space Station (ISS). And of course, as ‘the first nerd in space’ as he calls himself, he could not refrain from blogging even while 220 miles from Earth.
“Seeing the Earth on the top and the sky on the bottom of the window for the first time is amazing,” he wrote on his blog, from where he also sent condolences on the Virginia Tech university killings. The former programmer at Microsoft earned his billions as a member of the team that developed Word and Excel, and today heads Intentional Software Corp, where he says he’s programming harder than ever.
Simonyi left communist Hungary at the age of 17 to pursue his dreams in the US, but space travel continued to enthrall him. He, along with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, another space enthusiast, had flown to Cape Kennedy to watch the first space shuttle lift of on April 12, 1981, he writes.
On his space jaunt, Simonyi also found the time to read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, a 1966 science fiction novel by US writer Robert A Heinlein. “It’s interesting, but some parts are questionable,” says the sceptical computer scientist.
During his spaceflight, Simonyi completed over 190 90-minute orbits of the Earth and travelled over five million miles before returning home on April 20 with the Expedition 14 crewmembers Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria. “Being in space is a lot of fun but being on Earth is special,” he said before logging out.
Back on earth, his experiments on radiation for the Hungarian Space Agency will be analysed by experts. “Dr Simonyi has been operating a Pille dosimeter system which helps to generate a highly accurate map of the radiation environment aboard the ISS. The results of the project will be helpful in designing better spacecraft radiation shielding for future ISS crews,” says...
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