Five years ago today — April 7, 2007 — Hungarian-American software executive Charles Simonyi blasted off on the first of his two tourist trips to the International Space Station.
(Soyuz 14 [TMA-10] approaches the International Space Station. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)
Soyuz TMA-10 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying Simonyi and cosmonauts Oleg V. Kotov and Fyodor N. Yurchikhin. Simonyi, who made his fortune as one of the primary developers of the Microsoft Office products Word and Excel, spent about 2 weeks in space before returning to earth aboard TMA-9.
That would not be Simonyi’s only trip to space, however: In March 2009 he returned to the ISS aboard TMA-14.
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