Charles Simonyi, a 58 year-old billionaire software engineer, is paying $20 to $25 million to go to the International Space Station. Space Adventures Ltd. of Vienna, Virginia will send Simonyi to the space station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in March. He’ll be the fifth person they have sent into space.

Simonyi was born in Hungary behind the Iron Curtain and moved to the U.S. when he was 17 to study engineering and computer science. He helped develop two popular software applications, Microsoft Word and Excel. He was very interested in space as a child. Some of his first English words were “propellant” and “nozzle”. At 13, Simonyi won a junior astronaut contest. He won a trip to Moscow and met one of the first cosmonauts, Pavel Popovich.