Jeff Foust has an interview with Charles Simonyi, who is about to become the first space tourist (and unlike many, he doesn’t dislike the phrase) to do it again.

There are two interesting points to me. First:

If you look at professional astronauts and cosmonauts, it’s astounding how many of them fly multiple times. It was something I never quite understood: I would see the same names again and again, and I would wonder why this person is flying again when there are others who would probably want to fly too.

The answer is that space agencies see that people with experience do much better. The “start up” time on that first flight takes away so much from the overall performance compared to the second and third flights. The top ten people have 60 flights among themselves, which is a lot of flights. It shows that, with experience, you can do so much better. In my case, I hope to accomplish more, in terms of experiments and amateur radio communications with schools and so on.

To me, while you obviously want to use the best candidates for a mission costing hundreds of millions of dollars, this validates the theory that George Abbey grew the astronaut office to a high surplus in order to maintain control over them, by forcing competition among them for the limited flights available.

As for the frustration of some in the space community with these millionaires who buy rides for themselves, but don’t otherwise help the nascent industry with their millions:

I’m not an investor, I’m a customer of these industries. I recommend it to everyone else to be a customer. Whether it’s a good investment is a completely different question, and one I’m not qualified to talk about.

Well, we do need customers, so he is playing a key role. It’s just a shame that, at least for now, “everyone else” can’t afford it. So we’ll need investors too.

[Monday evening update]

Here’s another interview with Simonyi over at Popular Science.