By Patti Meagher

 

He is no stranger to bold ventures. At age 17, he left his family behind in communist Hungary, with no intention of returning, to pursue his dream of becoming a computer programmer. When government authorities discovered the defection, it was his father who took the punishment by having his electrical engineering professorship stripped from him. The boy would not see his family again until 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell.

That boy was software engineer Charles Simonyi (B.S.’72 Eng Math), now age 59 and a U.S. citizen since 1980. Best known as the “father of Microsoft Word” and less well known as the companion of Martha Stewart, his latest claim to fame is his most recent bold venture, the 14-day, 5.5-million-mile voyage he took last April with Expedition 15 to the International Space Station (ISS). He became only the fifth civilian space tourist in history and, in the process, added zero-gravity existence and the Russian language to his eclectic list of achievements.

An entrepreneur and philanthropist, Simonyi is also an aviator, yachtsman, collector of modern art and music lover. Ranked 891 on Forbes.com’s list of world billionaires, he made his fortune at Microsoft, which he joined in its startup phase and left in 2002 to found Intentional Software. His 20,000-square-foot lakeside home in Medina, Washington—which features an art gallery, a glass-enclosed swimming pool and a heliport—cost him $10 million to build. His space adventure cost him twice that amount, $20 million, and he says it was worth every penny.

Simonyi has been fascinated with aviation and space for as long as he has been tinkering with computers. He was selected Hungary’s Junior Astronaut at age 13, winning a trip to Moscow and the chance to meet one of Russia’s first cosmonauts, Pavel Popovich. Currently licensed to fly multi-engine aircraft, he has logged more than 2,000 hours of flying time.

 

To share his experience in space, Simonyi created an elaborate website that includes images, video, a section for kids and a blog chronicling his training and space expedition. Through www.charlesinspace.com, Simonyi has unabashedly invited the world into his life on a first-name basis and probably done more than anyone since Gene Roddenberry (creator of NBC-TV’s Star Trek) or Philip Kaufman (screenwriter/director of The Right Stuff) to advance the popularity of space. The difference is that Simonyi has advanced our understanding of the real stuff, the details of what actually goes into training for and executing manned space travel.

His goal for the site, he says, is “to provide a civilian’s perspective on current space travel, making it as tangible as possible to as many people as possible.” Through an interactive feature called “Ask Charles,” anyone can submit questions about everything from black holes, to what space sounds like, to how he brushed his teeth and went to the toilet aboard the ISS. The site has received millions of queries, and Simonyi has personally answered many of them. He believes that humans will one day live and travel comfortably in space.

“I am convinced that, in the long run, space will be accessible to practically anyone without much more preparation than what we do today for an airline flight,” Simonyi says. “However, we are still very far from that point. The spacecraft and space station are built for trained personnel.”

As a civilian, Simonyi trained intensively for six months, primarily in Star City, Russia, outside Moscow, to prepare for the rigors of space and his assigned tasks. He was a willing pupil, training in operations, survival skills and life-support systems, to name just a few. He was fitted for and trained in his custom-made spacesuit (which he got to keep) and learned how to navigate in three environments: the Russian Soyuz craft that transports crews to and from the ISS, and both the Russian-built and U.S.-built wings of the ISS. He spent about 25 percent of his training time learning Russian, “one of the great benefits” of his preparations.

Of course, he also had to learn how to live and function in weightlessness, which he describes with evident delight as “lots of fun,” similar to flying, floating or scuba diving. “Eating is surprisingly easy,” he writes. “If I drop a little piece, it will just float in the air and I can catch it with my mouth. . . . Another fun thing is to observe what happens to water in weightlessness. It turns into wonderful silvery balls that float about.”

 

The space-tour package, organized by Virginia-based Space Adventures, Ltd., coordinates civilian space travel with the twice-yearly Soyuz trips to the ISS. Simonyi took off April 7 from the same concrete pad in Kazakhstan used to launch Sputnik 1 in 1957 and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. For the two-day trip to the space station, he joined two professional astronauts who were on their way up and returned April 20 with two who were coming home. During his 14 days in space he saw 213 sunsets and countless spectacular views, all while traveling at an average speed of 17,236 mph. With their clocks set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the crew’s daily routine began in the evening and ended in the morning, a ritual that Simonyi, with his software programmer’s problem-solving mind, found both amusing and frustrating.

“Every day during my stay here,” he posted to his blog on April 9, “we will be going to bed at 10:30 a.m. and waking up at 18:30 p.m. (GMT). Why can’t we just admit that we are in a time zone different from Greenwich, for example, in a time zone where it is 9 or 10 in the evening right now when we go to bed? I was told the software could not handle it and that it does not make sense for the space station to be in a time zone anyway. . . . !” Nevertheless, he slept well and felt remarkably calm and comfortable throughout the entire journey, even saying he felt “at home” in space.

Simonyi approached his adventure with the confidence, pragmatism and intention that have defined his life and career choices ever since he first resolved to leave Hungary. He had by then already learned the basics of computing on an obsolete vacuum-tube-powered Soviet mainframe and secured himself an invitation to work at Regnecentralen in Copenhagen. Then he landed at Berkeley Engineering, where, he says, he was “skimming the bottom of the expulsion curve” due to immigration and financial troubles. He hooked up with Butler Lampson and joined Berkeley Computer Corporation (see Project Genie, p. 22), then Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he built Bravo, the world’s first WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) word processor. When he started working for Xerox PARC in 1972, he hadn’t completed his Berkeley education; but by the time he left in 1980, he had his bachelor’s degree and a Stanford Ph.D. in computer science. As he describes his transition to Microsoft, it sounds like he was the one doing the hiring.

“When I decided that I wanted to leave Xerox and seek employment in the fledgling personal computer industry,” Simonyi says, “Bob Metcalfe [the inventor of Ethernet] helped me draw up a list of the key players. Microsoft was first on my list, and I was so impressed by Bill Gates’s vision that I did not interview with any of the others.”

Gates calls Simonyi “one of the great programmers of all time.” At Microsoft, he developed Word and Excel, two of the world’s most widely used software applications. He left in 2002 to found his own company, Intentional Software, based in Bellevue, Washington. There he is developing a bold new approach to programming that creates generic tools, whether for inventory tracking or missile guidance, that the end user can modify to guide the software’s future evolution.

After investing so much time in his space sojourn, Simonyi was anxious to get back to his company, where he says he is working harder than ever. His musings in space, however, leave no doubt that he will be quick to seize the next bold venture that comes his way.