LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Charles Simonyi
built 649 days ago
As the fifth civilian in space, Simonyi was a member of a team of astronauts launched in a Soyuz TMA spacecraft. The mission includes Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov. At the space station, he joined U.S. astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria and Sunita Williams.
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There is a possibility that Simonyi's flight may be delayed to early April. The Russian news wire service Ria Novosti reported last week that Federal Space Agency officials were discussing whether to delay the mission to avoid the flooding season at the Kazakhstan landing site where Simonyi and the Expedition 14 astronauts will touch down.
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Simonyi was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Károly Simonyi, a professor of electrical engineering at Technical University of Budapest. While in high school he worked part-time as a night watchman at a computer laboratory, overseeing a large Soviet tube-based computer named Ural II. He took an interest in computing and learned to program from one of the laboratory's engineers. By the time he left school, he had learned to develop compilers and sold one of these to a government department. He was hired by Denmark's A/S Regnecentralen in 1966 and moved to the United States in 1968 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics, specializing in Mathematics and Statistics, in 1972.
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"The launch was beautiful, Charles," Stewart told Simonyi. "I just want to say that we are happy for the safe and beautiful trip and I want you to know that we all think that you are a true pioneer.
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Simonyi will not turn up at the ISS porch empty handed. He is bringing with him a six-course meal selected by close friend Martha Stewart and prepared by French chef Alain Ducasse's ADF consulting center.
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"People have a voracious appetite for the material found on CharlesinSpace.com," said Tim Garrigan, principal of The Garrigan Lyman Group, the creators of Dr. Simonyi's Web site. "The millions of hits the site received and continues to receive are just part of the equation. The impact of the content is equally significant."
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Charles Simonyi