Shuttleworth trip to cost R240m
2002-01-05 16:19
Cape Town - Internet technology millionaire, 28-year-old Mark Shuttleworth, is optimistic that it is all systems go for his trip into space with the Russian space agency on April 20.
Shuttleworth, who has been training in Moscow for his space flight with three cosmonauts, will become the second paying passenger on board a Russian Soyuz shuttle bound for to the International Space Station (ISS).
US billionaire Dennis Tito, 60, who became the first individual "space tourist" last April, paid $20 million to be blasted into space with a Russian team to the orbiting space platform.
Shuttleworth said on Saturday that he would pay a similar amount for his space flight and all the expenses it involved.
He has been negotiating with the Russian space agency since August and dismissed recent reports that the 10-day mission might be delayed by changes at Nasa, the US space agency which is also involved in ISS operations.
"It was a negotiating jiggle by Russia ... there is no substance to that," Shuttleworth said in an interview given during a brief holiday in Cape Town.
Shuttleworth hopes to conduct experiments during the trip, in collaboration with South African scientists.
He said his dream of space flight became a reality when he convinced the Russians the experiments had merit.
Scientific proposals turned trip into reality
"When we showed them the actual scientific proposals, they changed and then [the trip] was a reality," he said.
Dressed in a black training suit, embroidered with a South African flag and his Russian nickname, Buranov - a play on the words "shuttle" and "blizzard" - Shuttleworth said he was enjoying training for the flight.
"I go on faith and enjoy every day of the training," he said.
Shuttleworth said he will be a working member of the space team - along with a Russian commander and an Italian engineer - responsible for communications and life support systems during the flight.
He said training on the flight simulator, one element of his demanding eight-hour days in Moscow, was great.
Pointing to a desk, Shuttleworth said: "It is very real. We are in a tiny capsule as wide as this desk, on our backs with our knees up on our chins looking at a console panel and using pointers to press the buttons."
"The controls are primitive, from the 1960s when they did not have computers," the technology tycoon smiled.
Shuttleworth made his fortune two years ago at age 26 when he sold the IT company he started from scratch for R3.5 billion ($575 million at the time).
A business graduate, he founded Thawte Consulting, a one-man internet consulting business, in his parents' backyard in 1996 and whittled down its focus to security for electronic commerce.
The company made him a millionaire by the age of 24 and he became the first to provide a worldwide full-security e-commerce web server, providing software for encrypting information and authenticating internet transactions. In 1999, he sold the system to US-based competitor VeriSign. - Sapa-AFP
- SAPA