Charles in Space

In just a few hours, the TMA-10 Soyuz spacecraft will dock with the International Space Station. Launched from Kazakhstan on Saturday, it carries two cosmonauts and the latest "space tourist," Charles Simonyi, a software designer who made his fortune developing applications for Microsoft. As was the case with Ms Anousheh Ansari last fall, Mr. Simonyi has been blogging about the preparations for his voyage, and he plans to send some blog posts from the ISS. He also has a rather flashy Flash-driven web site with a good bit of educational and multimedia content in addition to his blog.

The "Kids Ask Charles" feature is pretty nice - there are answers to a lot of space related questions asked by kids all over the world. Once again it's good to see the effort being made to share this still rather rare experience with the people of the world via the web, though Mr. Simonyi's outreach efforts don't seem to have struck a chord with as many people as did Ms Ansari's, though his blog posts are certainly informative, detailed, and quite personal.