Stewart came Friday to the bleak space town
of Baikonur to say goodbye to Charles Simonyi, a software engineer and developer
of Microsoft Word who paid between $20 million and $25 million for a 13-day
trip to the space station.
Simonyi, one of the 400
richest Americans according to Forbes Magazine, is to lift off Saturday aboard
a Soyuz space capsule with two Russian cosmonauts.
Stewart and Simonyi have been friends for
about a decade, and some celebrity-gossip publications have suggested they're
romantically linked.
Samantha Schabel, a
spokeswoman for Stewart, declined to elaborate on the relationship, saying
only, "They're best friends.''
The founder of Martha
Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., a multimedia empire dedicated to
stylish living, Stewart ranks third on Forbes.com's list of "The 20
Richest Women in Entertainment,'' with assets of $638 million. In March 2005,
she completed a five-month prison term for lying to federal investigators about
a stock sale.
After arriving at the
gritty spaceport set in the seemingly endless Kazakh steppes, she shared a
private moment with Simonyi, 58, through a plate glass window protecting him
and his crewmates from germs.
"He's in excellent
spirits,'' Stewart, 65, told The Associated Press after their
tete-a-tete. "He's very fit and very well-trained.''
Stewart's arrival in Baikonur inspired wide
speculation the two would announce their engagement before liftoff. A
spokeswoman for Space Adventures, the company that arranged Simonyi's trip,
declined to comment on her visit, other than to say she would watch the launch.
Baikonur, a collection of
worn concrete buildings, would seem extremely low on Stewart's list for an
ideal place to announce her betrothal. But she's already made an attempt at
sprucing up the space trip.
Stewart chose the menu for a gourmet meal
that Simonyi will be taking to the space station as a treat for his comrades
in space. They plan a celebratory feast for April 12, which Russia observes as Cosmonauts' Day.
The menu includes quail
roasted in Madiran wine, duck breast confit with capers, shredded chicken
parmentier, apple fondant pieces, rice pudding with candied fruit, and semolina
cake with dried apricots. It was to be prepared by
celebrity chef Alain Ducasse's consulting and training center, ADF,
according to Space Adventures.
Born in Hungary, Simonyi began programming on a bulky Soviet computer called Ural-2 as a teenager.
He went to Denmark to work as a programmer and moved to the United States in 1968, where he worked at Microsoft Corp. developing Microsoft Word and
Excel and eventually founded his own software company.
Simonyi, who lives in the Seattle area, said at the space travelers' final news conference that his friend Microsoft
chairman Bill Gates was excited about the adventure.
"I am in contact with Bill
and he is very happy that I am doing this,'' Simonyi said.
Simonyi said he had spoken with
the two most recent space tourists, Gregory Olsen and Anousheh Ansari, "and
they gave me a lot of advice not to move my head and not to drink too much
before the launch.''
While at the space station,
Simonyi will be conducting experiments that include measuring radiation levels
and studying biological organisms. He will also be writing a blog that he hopes
will inspire others, especially children, to get interested in space
exploration.
"There is an element of
hope. We don't quite know what we are going to find, but we have to go and see
and find it,'' Simonyi said.
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