Space Adventures announced today that Esther Dyson will train as the backup to Charles Simonyi for his spring 2009 flighyt. Dyson will pay $3 million for the training, similar to the training that Nik Halik paid for as Richard Garriott’s backup. Dyson, who made her name in the computer industry as the longtime editor of the Release 1.0 newsletter, is now investing in the NewSpace field, among other industries, including Space Adventures and XCOR Aerospace; she’s been attending events like Space Access and the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace conferences the last few years.
As it turns out, Dyson herself almost scooped the Space Adventures announcement a couple of days ago. In an interview with VatorNews published Sunday, she said she was training as a backup for an unnamed “commercial space astronaut”. She talks about it in the first few minutes of the video interview below:
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