BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AP) --
In one of their last days before blasting off in a closet-sized capsule, two
Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. billionaire computer programmer enjoyed an array
of earthly pleasures Wednesday -- a springtime stroll, a game of ping pong and
a freshly cooked lunch.
Engineers, meanwhile, were
finishing the assembly of the Russian-made Soyuz rocket that will be launched
Saturday night carrying Fyodor
Yurchikhin, Oleg Kotov and Charles Simonyi to the International Space Station.
As they took a stroll down
the so-called Cosmonauts' Alley at the training center in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, Yurchikhin quipped to reporters that he was more worried about saying goodbye to his
wife than about the spaceflight.
"Yes, I am very nervous: my
wife is coming soon, I have to look nice and shaved.'' said Yurchikhin, 48. "What
launch? Is there going to be a launch?''
Simonyi, who spent $25
million to become the world's fifth paying "space tourist,'' said he was
getting lots of training and assistance.
"Everyone is helping me so
much that it's easy,'' the 58-year-old Hungarian-born computer programmer told
reporters.
Simonyi's 13-day journey
includes roughly 11 days on the orbiting station and travel time to and from
it. He returns to Earth on April 20 along with the two of the station's current
crew, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and American astronaut Miguel
Lopez-Alegria.
The third member of the
current crew, U.S.
astronaut Sunita Williams, will remain on board until June, when she will
be replaced by Clayton Anderson.
Yurchikhin and Kotov will
be aboard the station for more than six months.
Simonyi had earlier said
that the hardest parts of training were learning Russian and spinning in a
high-speed rotating chair to help train against dizziness. Now, he said he has
begun to actually enjoy the chair, and his Russian -- some of which he studied
as a child in Hungary -- is improving.
Before sitting down to a
three-course lunch, Simonyi began a ping pong game with Yurchikhin with an
energetic "Poyekhali,'' or "Let's go'' in Russian -- an echo of the words
uttered by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961 as he blasted off to become the first man in
space.
"I think the space station
will be more surprising than the Earth,'' Simonyi said. "The Earth will be
there at the start, it's going to be there during the flight, it will be always
there, but the space station will somehow come out of nowhere.''
Born in Communist Hungary,
Simonyi first learned computer programming on a bulky Soviet computer called
Ural-2. Later, after emigrating to the United States, he worked for software
giant Microsoft Corp.
He said his former
colleague -- Microsoft CEO Bill Gates -- was paying close attention to the
adventure and has asked several questions on Simonyi's Web site. Yurchikhin
joked that Gates is probably busy training himself to be a "spaceflight
participant'' -- as Simonyi and his four paying predecessors have been known.
Simonyi said he found it
fitting that four decades after he learned to program on a Soviet machine, it
is the successor of Soviet technology that was sending him into space.
"Technology and
engineering, it has very little to do with politics, so I am very proud of my
background with my -- at that time -- Soviet computers,'' he said.
Simonyi said an Ural-1
computer that he saw at the Baikonur museum reminded him of the Ural-2, on
which he learned his craft.
"And I kind of thought, the
circle has closed. We are back to the future, I think it's great,'' he said.
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