She’s been called the First Lady of Cyberspace. And now, Internet guru Esther Dyson is staking a claim to being a different sort of pioneer - as an investor and participant in space travel.
Dyson, 57, announced yesterday that she is paying $3 million to train as the back-up crew member alongside Microsoft pioneer Charles Simonyi, 60, who is planning his second mission to the International Space Station in spring 2009 with Space Adventures, a Virginia-based space tourism company.
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“As an investor in Space Adventures, I am thrilled to be training as a cosmonaut and learning about space travel firsthand - especially with Charles, whom I have known since the 80s when he was writing software for Microsoft,” she said in a company release. “I fully expect to follow him all the way up to space sometime in the future.”
The daughter of physicist Freeman Dyson who helped designed a rocket ship when she was a child, Dyson said she had always assumed she would travel to space.
She and Simonyi also appear to be part of a trend: They’re among a growing number of Internet entrepreneurs who have invested millions in commercial aviation and space travel, including:
- Elon Musk, a PayPal co-founder who went on to found Space Explorations Technology;
- Amazon Chairman and President Jeff Bezos who funded Blue Origins to develop a suborbital tourist service;
- Jeff Greason, formerly with Intel, who co-founded XCOR Aerospace, a private rocket engine and spaceflight development company;
- Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, who has invested $5 million in Space Adventures to reserve a spaceship slot for 2011;
- Vern L. Raburn, formerly of Microsoft and Symantec, who founded Eclipse Aviation, a jet aircraft manufacturer.
Dyson described the appeal in a Wall Street Journal column last year:
Lots of people are building new IT companies. You can start a company and sell it to Yahoo! or Google in a couple of years. But so can anyone else. Aerospace is different. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy in 1962: We choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.
That’s why, as a long-time investor in IT and Internet start-ups, I’m now spending more and more time on private aviation and commercial space start-ups.
As a fluent Russian speaker, Dyson should have an easier time at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia than some of the others who have paid Space Adventures to train them. If Simonyi is unable to go on his scheduled trip next spring, Dyson will take his place - although she will have to cough up another $30 million or so to Space Adventures for the privilege.
Dyson has always been ahead of the curve. Since the early 1980s, she’s been involved as a venture capitalist and as a director in many of the major developments in emerging technologies and markets.
After graduating from Harvard in economics, she joined Forbes as a fact-checker and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities in the research department following Federal Express and other startups. After a stint as an analyst at Oppenheimer covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research and in 1983 bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, renaming it EDventure Holdings, where she became an expert on everything from artificial intelligence to wireless technologies.
Currently, she is a board member and active investor in a variety of startups, mostly in health care, genetics and space travel. She was one of the first 10 volunteers in the Personal Genome Project and since 2005, has hosted the Flight School conference in Aspen.
In line with her commitment to exploring space, she has also invested in XCOR Aerospace, Constellation Services International, Zero Gravity Corporation, Icon Aircraft and Space Adventures.
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