Simonyi shares space experiences at UW

Your Seattle Astronomy correspondent has at least one thing in common with software executive and billionaire philanthropist Charles Simonyi: neither of us expects to be able to receive spousal clearance for a flight in space. Simonyi has a couple of legs up, having already taken Soyuz flights to and from the International Space Station in 2007 and 2009.

Simonyi spoke about his experiences during a talk titled “Practicalities of Orbital Space Tourism” last week at the University of Washington. It was the first of a series of lectures scheduled this fall celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the university’s Department of Astronomy.

Space tourist Charles Simonyi spoke about his experiences
during a lecture Sept. 29, 2015 at the University of Washington.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Simonyi acknowledged that the cost of going into Earth orbit is prohibitive for almost every individual. Speculation is that he shelled out $25 million to go on his 2007 flight and another $35 million to return to the ISS two years later. On top of the financial cost, he spent eight months training for the first flight, learning the spacecraft, studying Russian, and going through a dizzying and often invasive series of medical tests and examinations. His second flight took just three months of training because he already knew a lot.

Would he go again?

“Now I have a family to think about,” Simonyi said, smiling at his wife seated in the second row of the lecture room at Kane Hall.

“I would have to do eight months training again,” he said, because the Russians are using a different spacecraft. “I think I’m getting too old for that. It’s not easy and that would be a big obstacle.”

Still, the draw is great.

“Let’s assume the price didn’t go up, they didn’t require training, my wife lets me go,” he said to laughter. “I would do it!”

Simonyi said a big reason he wanted to fly in space was to support space exploration. Space tourists pumped more than $100 million into the Russian space program at a time that it was strapped for cash. He also did it to popularize science, he said, though interestingly he’s a bit skeptical about sending humans to space to do science because of the enormous cost. The believes simple wanderlust is a great reason to go into orbit.

“A tourist is a very honest broker. The tourist says, ‘Send me to space and I will pay you,'” Simonyi noted. “I think space tourism will be a major factor in promoting space travel because of this self-justifying property that it has.”

This Soyuz capsule TMA-14, which took Charles Simonyi to
the International Space Station in 2009, is on display at the
Museum of Flight. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Some astronauts get a big thrill at the moment of launch into space, but Simonyi found it to be fairly routine to be sitting in the capsule at blastoff.

“It’s not as dramatic as you think from the inside,” he said. “From the outside it’s incredible; I’ve seen it. From the inside it’s like being in an elevator and somebody pushed the button.”

It’s hard to say when space tourism will fall into the price range of those of us whose net worths are less than Simonyi’s $1.4 billion. He noted that these days it costs about $10,000 to send a kilogram of mass into orbit. If the price could be driven down to about $100 per kilogram, then a space tourist might get to orbit for $100,000, which Simonyi called a “reasonable ticket.”

“That’s what the suborbital people are basically pricing their services at,” he noted. “It’s a lot of money, but if it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience I think people would consider it seriously.”

“Those numbers are not here, and they’re not going to be here for quite a while,” Simonyi said. “That is the bad news.”