Billionaire Space Tourist’s Landing Delayed a Day

This story was updated at 5:50 p.m. EDT.

American billionaire Charles Simonyi will return to Earth from the International Space Station a day later than planned next week due to flooding at his Russian spacecraft?s landing site, NASA officials said Friday.

Simonyi, the world?s first repeat space tourist, and two professional astronauts are now slated to land their Soyuz spacecraft on the barren Central Asian steppes of Kazakhstan on Wednesday at 3:15 a.m. EDT (0715 GMT). They will touch down southeast of their initial landing zone, NASA officials said.

?Because of the soggy conditions at the original landing site, we switched to a more southerly landing site in Kazakhstan,? NASA spokesperson Katherine Trinidad told SPACE.com from the agency?s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

The landing delay gives Simonyi, 60, a free extra day in space and extends his mission to 13 days, one day shy of the world record for longest space tourist flight. Simonyi set that record in 2007, when his first flight to the space station was extended by two days.

Simonyi, a Hungary-born software developer, is paying about $35 million for his second flight to the space station under an agreement between Russia?s Federal Space Agency and the Virginia-based space tourism firm Space Adventures. He is making the seventh private spaceflight to orbit, and also made the fifth when he first flew in April 2007.

Earlier this week, Simonyi said his spaceflight has been a whirlwind of work. Like on his previous flight, he has packed his mission with science experiments and educational events to speak with schoolchildren for space.

?We are just so busy,? Simonyi told reporters Wednesday via a space-to-ground video link. ?I volunteered for a lot of work and I?m accomplishing that work.?

Simonyi launched to the space station on March 26 with the outpost?s new Expedition 19 crew. He arrived two days later and will land with the station?s outgoing crew: Expedition 18 commander Michael Fincke of NASA and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov. Fincke and Lonchakov are completing a six-month mission aboard the station.

The three spaceflyers are now targeting a landing zone near the Kazakh town of Dzhezkazgan, about 186 miles (300 km) southeast of their original site, NASA officials said.

?They?ve been looking at the weather there for several days and just decided it would be better to move farther south,? NASA spokesperson Kelly Humphries told SPACE.com from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Simonyi may be the last space tourist to visit the International Space Station for several years due to the lack of available seats for sale once the outpost reaches its full six-person crew, Russian space agency officials have said.

Space tourist Charles Simonyi is chronicling his second spaceflight on his website: www.charlesinspace.com.

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