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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