The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported Monday that Roskosmos has signed a contract for the next orbital space tourist to visit the ISS: former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi. The Hungarian born Simonyi joined Microsoft in 1981 and oversaw development of some of the software giant’s most famous applications, Word and Excel. He left Microsoft in 2002 a very wealthy man, and has donated tens of millions of dollars to various organizations, so he certainly has the money to pay the estimated $20 million for an orbital spaceflight. Simonyi would fly on the spring 2007 Soyuz taxi flight, after this fall’s flight of the next orbital space tourist, Daisuke “Dice-K” Enomoto. (Reuters has a few more details about the agreement.)

The announcement is a little surprising, since most speculation regarding who would be next to fly after Enomoto centered around Anousheh Ansari, who is in training in Russia right now as Enomoto’s backup. A RIA Novosti article from Saturday, announcing the formal signing of Enomoto’s contract, did quote a Roskosmos official, discussing plans to fly “another American” tourist in 2007, as saying “We have signed a preliminary contract with him for the spring of 2007 but he may decide to fly later.” The “him” appears to be Simonyi, and would of course have ruled out Ansari.

Space Adventures, which has brokered the three orbital tourist flights to ISS to date, plus Enomoto’s upcoming mission, has yet to issue a formal release. That could mean that Simonyi made his deal through an alternative arrangement, or that they’re simply preparing to make an announcement. (UPDATE: Space Adventures issued a press release late Monday afternoon confirming the deal but setting no timetable for the flight.)

Speaking of Rocketplane, I have an article about the company’s first microgravity research customer, a Japanese organization called HASTIC (Hokkaido Aerospace Science and Technology Incubation Center), in this week’s issue of The Space Review. This got a little attention back in February when HASTIC officials were honored by the Oklahoma legislature, but after talking with both Rocketplane and HASTIC officials at the FAA/AST Commercial Space Transportation Conference a short time after the Oklahoma event, I found a very interesting story. The president of HASTIC, Ryojiro Akiba, has been working on Japanese space efforts since effectively the very beginning, with sounding rocket flights in the mid-1950s. And the Rocketplane connection was made almost literally by accident: Rocketplane’s Chuck Lauer was a last-minute addition to a symposium HASTIC was organizing last summer, at which he discovered their need for microgravity research flight opportunities.

While the initial agreement between HASTIC and Rocketplane is devoted to microgravity research, Rocketplane wants to extend that to include space tourism flights from Hokkaido. That’s “a long-term proposition”, Lauer admitted, in part because Japan does not yet see space as something for the private sector, and among other things lacks a regulatory infrastructure like that in the US. Rocketplane, Japanese officials suggested, might be the 21t century equivalent of the “black ships” of Commodore Perry that opened Japanese ports to Western trade 150 years ago.

By coincidence, the same day I planned to launch this new blog is the same day that Space Shot, the space tourism skill game, officially opened to the public. Space Shot, for those who have now been closely following its development, is an online skill game where contestants compete for a ride on Rocketplane Ltd.’s XP spaceplane. For a $3.50 fee per entry, people try to guess the weather conditions—high and low temperatures, average humidity, and precipitation total—in New York City’s Central Park each day. Contestants compete head-to-head, and whomever is closest to the actual weather conditions recorded wins and moves on to the next level. Win 17 levels and you get a free Rocketplane flight.

MSNBC’s Alan Boyle has a detailed article about the venture, going into some of the nitty-gritty issues like legal concerns (Space Shot founder Sam Dinkin tells Boyle that if any state’s attorney general complains, he “would have to lock them [that state's residents] out” of the competition. Dinkin, who has openly discussed his plans for such a venture in previous issues of The Space Review, offers more details about the work required to create Space Shot in this week’s issue. I’ll have more to say about Space Shot in a future post.

(Disclaimer: Sam Dinkin has been a frequent contributor to The Space Review over the last couple of years, although less frequent is recent months as he devoted his time to Space Shot. However, I have not been involved in the development of the company in any way beyond publishing his articles that touched on the topic.)

For those of you who have wondered in from The Space Review or other locales, welcome to my new blog. Personal Spaceflight is devoted to the emerging space tourism industry (the blog takes its name from one of the alternative terms put forward for “space tourism”, although none seem to have the cachet of the original term.)

Why space tourism? In recent years it’s become clear that space tourism is possibly the biggest—if not the only—growth market for the space industry in general in the near to mid term. Satellite launches for conventional markets, government and commercial, have been flat in recent years, and limited demand and high launch prices have created a vicious circle. Space tourism is perhaps the best opportunity to break that cycle, with a large market of willing customers (or “self-loading carbon-based payloads”, as Peter Diamandis has called them) sufficient to warrant the development of new vehicles that can access space at far lower costs—with potential applications beyond just ferrying passengers.

Space tourism has received growing attention in recent years, thanks to the Ansari X Prize and the flights of SpaceShipOne, and more recently with the activities of Virgin Galactic, Rocketplane Ltd., Space Adventures, and other companies seeking a share of the market. I’ve been following space tourism for several years, from back in the late 1990s when it suffered from the “snicker factor”: the inevitable giggle that would come from the audience of a space industry event when someone mentioned it with a straight face. That snicker factor is largely (but not entirely) gone, thanks in part to the very real accomplishments of the industry to date as well as the considerable investment being made by the likes of Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Paul Allen.

Of course, space tourism has its share of hype, dubious ventures, and unrealistic expectations. With Personal Spaceflight I hope to share both big news and little tidbits about the industry, good and bad, to provide a perspective on the state of the industry. This is certainly not the only blog that is devoted in part or in total to space tourism; I’m just adding my own voice to the cacophony. I hope to avoid unwarranted boosterism, but also extreme negativity: cautious optimism, with a mild dose of skepticism, is what I’m aiming for here. Please email me your comments, suggestions, questions, etc. about this blog. Let’s see just how vital space tourism is to the future of the space industry and spaceflight in general.