Space Tourist Charles Simonyi to Chronicle ISS Flight in Book

By Palma Benczenleitner, Associated Press Writer

posted: 30 April 2007 5:10 p.m. ET

: U.S. spaceflight participant Charles Simonyi is taken in his chair to the medical tent near the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft where the recovery officials conduct post-landing medical checks after he and two Expedition 14 astronauts returned from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls.
: American entrepreneur Charles Simonyi, the fifth space tourist to the International Space Station (ISS), describes life aboard the orbital laboratory during a video broadcast on his Web site www.charlesinspace.com. Expedition 15 flight engineer Oleg Kotov floats behind. Credit: www.charlesinspace.com.

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - Charles Simonyi, who recently returned to Earth after a 13-day space odyssey, said Monday he was planning to write a book about his travel into orbit.

Hungarian-born Simonyi, 58, told a news conference in Budapest that he planned to compile the writings he had done in space and posted on his Web site into a book.

"I think there will most definitely be a book," he said, without specifying when it might be published. He said he still needed to review his notes.

"Although the Web site is almost a book it has not been edited as such," Simonyi said in his native Hungarian, though with a slight American accent. "It has lots of entries, which have all been written by me, but I need some more blog (space) because while I was up there I took notes which now have to be processed."

Simonyi - a software engineer who helped develop Microsoft Word and Excel - paid US$25 million to accompany two cosmonauts aboard a Russian rocket that launched April 7 for the International Space Station.

Simonyi was the fifth such paying "space tourist" to ride Russian rockets to the international space station, after Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Gregory Olsen and Anousheh Ansari.

Briton Helen Sharman in 1991 took a trip to the Soviet station Mir that she won through a contest, and a Japanese journalist traveled to Mir in 1990 with a ticket that reportedly cost US$12 million.

Simonyi is the second Hungarian astronaut ever to enter space. Hungarian cosmonaut Bertalan Farkas, who was also at the news conference, spent almost eight days in orbit in 1980.

Simonyi left Hungary as a teenager in 1966, first living in Denmark before moving to the U.S. state of California in 1968. He obtained U.S. citizenship in the 1980s.

"Although I am known as Charles Simonyi, I was born here in Hungary as Simonyi Karoly," he said. "I have never forgotten about Hungary, where I came from; the memories of my mother country are kept deep in my heart."

Editor's note: You can visit Charles Simonyi's Web site at www.charlesinspace.com.