Friends in High Places: Martha Stewart at Russian Launch
April 7, 2007 — -- Charles Simonyi isn't a household name. He quietly made his fortune developing word-processing software for a little start-up called Microsoft.
Once you've made your first billion, though, life gets more interesting. Simonyi lifted off Saturday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, riding in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with two professional cosmonauts.
Among those watching from the bleachers was an old friend of his. She made -- and lost some of -- her fortune somewhat more publicly. Her name is Martha Stewart.
Space Adventures Inc., the company that brokered Simonyi's trip, has not commented, other than to confirm that Stewart went to the bleak steppes of Central Asia.
Baikonur is a remote place, about three hours by plane from Moscow. Russia has been launching cosmonauts from there since 1961, using the same launch pad from which Yuri Gagarin left to become the first human being in space. The accommodations -- if you'll forgive us -- are a bit better than what you'll find, say, at a minimum-security federal penitentiary in West Virginia.
Stewart and Simonyi are said to have known each other for about a decade. Oh, there were rumors in the tabloids of a romance -- the Globe went so far as to (inaccurately) report in 2005 that they were getting married -- but since then things have sounded a bit more domestic.
Simonyi says on his Web site, www.charlesinspace.com, that Stewart, the home-hospitality diva, has chosen the menu for a gourmet meal that he's taken along as a treat for his crewmates.
He, along with cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov, is on a mission to the International Space Station, more than 200 miles out in orbit, to join American astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria and Suni Williams, and cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin. The six of them will be together on April 12 -- the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight -- which is celebrated in Russia as Cosmonauts' Day.
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