14 DAY TRIAL // Software developer Charles Simonyi, born in Hungary, and now an American billionaire, will spend an extra day aboard the International Space Station, on account of the fact that his craft's landing site in Kazakhstan has been flooded, officials from RosCosmos, the Russian space agency, announced on Friday. Having paid some $35 million for his trip, Simonyi is now the first repeat space tourist to have flown in space, and reached the ISS. His first trip was in April 2007.
The Soyuz TMA-14 mission to the orbital facility blasted off on Thursday, March 26, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the busiest space port in the world, located in Kazakhstan. The facility is operated by Russia under a leasing deal, slated to end in 2050. Since the early 1950s, when the first launches were made, the complex was used to test Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM), as well as rockets and other delivery systems, capable of reaching orbit.
However, it would appear that the current mission on the ISS will not be able to use the cosmodrome as a landing site when they are due to return on Wednesday. As such, officials at NASA and RosCosmos decided to direct the flight towards the empty Central Asian steppes of Kazakhstan, where they are now due to land on April 8, at 3:15 am EDT (0715 GMT). Speaking from NASA's headquarters in Washington DC, the agency's spokeswoman, Katherine Trinidad, told Space that “Because of the soggy conditions at the original landing site, we switched to a more southerly landing site in Kazakhstan.”
Charles Simonyi may very well be the last private person to go in space on a Russian-built rocket, on account of the fact that the permanent crew aboard the ISS will be, starting this May, comprised of six astronauts. This means that when a flight is made to change the crew, there will be no more vacant seats on the space capsules for the Russian agency to sell. The billionaire got the seats for his two journeys after the Russian space agency collaborated with the US-based company Space Adventures.