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Microsoft's Charles Simonyi to be 1st Nerd in Space
Richard L. James writes "The BBC are reporting that Hungarian-born Charles Simonyi, a 58-year old Microsoft billionaire software engineer is set to become the first 'nerd in space' on board the Soyuz TMA-10 when the spacecraft launches on Thursday 09th March 2007. Charles oversaw the development of Multiplan, Word, and Excel among many other achievements. He has launched a website detailing the 3 goals he wishes to achieve on the trip: advance civilian spaceflight, assist space station research, and involve kids in space sciences. Jó szerencse pölö Charles!"
Wouldn't he qualify as first geek in space? I mean, the Russians didn't send a painter up did they?
Many scientists have been in space. Some of them probably consider themselves 'nerds'.
Maybe I'm out of the loop with modern lingo, but 'nerd' doesn't necessarily have anything to do with computers.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Charles Simonyi is the Hungarian in Hungarian notation (you know, m_lpszUsrTxt and the like).
To be entirely fair to him, it wasn't intended to make variable names inscrutable, it applied to a language with weak type checking and few real types, and it still has valid uses today if you use it to mark information about the type of data instead of the "type" of variable.
I guess the submitter (I hope it wasn't the editor's) didn't realize that a heck of a lot of physicists and astronomers and other hard core scientists have been to space way before Charles Simonyi. If his point was that he was the first somewhat famous computer geek to make it into space, he would be wrong again. Simonyi was beaten to the punch years ago by Mark Shuttleworth of Thawte and Ubunutu Linux fame.
No, this is the guy who donated enough money to have a tenured position named after him. The real prevailing factors here are money and some sufficient amount of respectability--Oxford wasn't waiting around for Ghandi, but the chair wasn't to be named after Pauli Shore.
Read the Right Stuff. The scientists running the first missions wanted "Spam in a Can" - monkeys would have done them, and probably would have performed better than the astronauts. However, lowering the entry qualifications *so* low meant obvious problems in recruitment, with too many people flying. So the "obvious" pick was amongst fighter pilots and aerospace test pilots. the latter soon realised they were overly qualified (as both pilots and geeks) to run a mercury or an apollo rig but that got out-balanced by the inherent dangers of the missions. The tests they took to become astronauts could easily have been done by, oh, weight-lifters, long-distance runners etc. However, there's not much glory attached to sending runners into space ...
The Soviets went through a similar process.
The shuttle changes things again, but I would dispute that you need to be a fighter-jock to control it. A bomber or transport or even an airline pilot would be equally, if not better adapted, to deal with the shuttle controls. If they had kept the X15 program going, then that truly was a fighter-jocks dream aircraft and we'd've had returnable aircraft flying today rather than the flying brick of a shuttle.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious