This week’s issue of Newsweek magazine includes an essay by Charles Simonyi on his flight to the ISS earlier this year. Simonyi described how he started down the path of being a “Spaceflight Participant” on a Soyuz flight to the station:
I was just an earthbound tourist, visiting Baikonur, the Russian spaceport, when I met Eric [Anderson, of Space Adventures] in 2004. I was amazed by the openness of the Russian space program—we could practically touch the fully fueled rocket on the launchpad as we saw the cosmonauts off to space. I was even more amazed when Eric, ever so gently, suggested that one day I might want to be on the departure platform where the cosmonauts were standing.
Simonyi said he went through a series of medical tests he passed without problems, and then got a surprise:
Eric was the first to congratulate me. He also said that, as opposed to what we had planned, the Russians wanted me to enter training as soon as possible and fly on the next spacecraft. I had to decide then and there. It actually wasn’t as hard as it seems in the abstract. I felt incredibly lucky and privileged just to have been asked. The answer had to be yes, come what may.
The rest is a fairly abbreviated, high-level discussion of his training and the flight itself (he does reveal that he didn’t get spacesick at all during the flight; he would simply recall his training on Earth when he felt “any unease”).
If there are questions about his flight that he didn’t answer in his essay, you can pose them to him in a live chat Thursday, December 6 at 2 pm EST.
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