Got a few extra million just burning a hole in your pocket? A number of
Silicon Valley pioneers are spending their spare change for a ticket into
space.
There's such a race, like the lines at some Disneyland ride, as one
high-tech luminary lands another prepares to blast off into orbit.
Former designer of Word and Excel, Microsoft billionaire
Charles Simonyi, 58, is preparing for his March 9 trip to the International
Space Station.
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To put it another way, what might be called the Silicon Valley mentality -- favoring but the cost of putting objects into orbit is still too high.
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Simonyi, who left Microsoft in 2002, expects to pay between
$20 million and $25 million for an eight-day trip aboard a Soyuz spacecraft
and then the ISS.
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Like any computer geek, Simonyi plans to blog while in orbit.
As Simonyi starts training later this month at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut
Training Center in Moscow, Anousheh Ansari, the Iranian-born sponsor of the
$10 million Ansari X-Prize recovers from her time aboard the space station
last month.
The X-Prize foundation recently turned its attention to discovering a privately-developed lunar lander, as
recently reported.
Paul Allen, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder, helped with Virgin
Group's Richard Branson fund SpaceShipOne, the Burt Rutan-designed
spacecraft that won the X-Prize in 2004.
Today, Allen and Branson have
joined forced in Virgin Galactic, a venture already selling tickets for
short space flights.
But Allen isn't the only Silicon Valley mover-and-shaker dreaming of the
stars. In West Texas, Jeff Bezos, founder of e-tail giant Amazon.com, is
planning to build his own private sub-orbital space facility as part of his
Blue Origin firm.
Until Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic get off the ground, the single source
for Silicon Valley space cadets is Vienna, Virginia-based Space Adventures
Ltd., which had arranged for Simonyi, Ansari and others to catch a ride with
a Russian rocket.
The company, along with offering a quick trip to the
International Space Station, plans trips around the moon and is standing by
to take your reservation for future suborbital spacecrafts.
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