US software pioneer Charles Simonyi should tomorrow become the first person in history to travel into space twice as a tourist, in trips costing a total of €44 million.

Mr Simonyi will blast off for the International Space Station (ISS) at 1149 GMT from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome deep in the Kazakh steppe, along with a professional astronaut and cosmonaut.

The software programmer, who was one of the pioneers of Microsoft before founding his own firm, has paid a cool €25 million for the trip, a significant rise from the €18.2 million he paid for the April 2007 visit.

But making the final preparations for the trip, Mr Simonyi in Baikonur spoke with passion about the moment the spacecraft docks with the ISS and said he expected the latest voyage to be even better than the first visit.

"You are basically nowhere, far from everything and you reach this fantastic manmade object. It looks very fragile," he said, referring to the ISS.

Some things have changed in his life since then. When Mr Simonyi became the fifth person to go to space as a tourist, he was going out with US lifestyle queen Martha Stewart, who gave him an emotional send-off at the cosmodrome.

But Mr Symonyi, 60, has since married Swedish millionaire's daughter Lisa Persdotter who it seems is less keen on space travel than he is.

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