=Everyone get your

spacesuits on and grab your intergalactic

passports because we are going on a journey to

outer space!

But first, I’d like you to meet Charles Simonyi.

Charles Simonyi launches into space on Russian rocket

March 27, 2009

US software pioneer Charles Simonyi has become the first person to travel twice to space as a tourist, as he blasted off to the International Space Station (ISS) on a Russian rocket.

“I feel great and I am looking at the Earth,” he told mission control in Russia after lift-off, as his wife watched from the ground.

Simonyi paid...

35 million dollars...for the voyage.

He previously travelled to the space station in April 2007, becoming one of a select group of wealthy people, most of them from the United States, to have established space tourism.

The launch went smoothly and the flare from the spacecraft’s rockets could be seen gradually disappearing into the sky before it reached low-Earth orbit a few minutes after lift-off. Simonyi spent 10 days aboard the station.

Simonyi confirmed that Russia plans to double the number of manned launches to the space station this year, to four, to support an expansion of the station’s science programme.

“In space cooperation between different countries, there will be even more great projects, maybe future flights to asteroids, to other planets, to Mars. Everything is possible,” he said.

\Space Adventures, the American company that arranged Simonyi’s flight, said it was planning to carry out the first space launch exclusively for paying tourists in 2013.

Now, take off you spacesuits and put on

your thinking hats, ready for some fun activities!