MARK Shuttleworth, due on Thursday to become Africa’s first spaceman, is a youthful idealist who sees his flight into orbit as a contribution to science rather than a rich man’s self-indulgence.
Still only 28, and aged just 24 when he became a millionaire, the South African said last week that he had planned from the start to be a crew member rather than simply a tourist.
”I wanted to train as a crew member, instead of just riding up there as a passenger. I wanted to do all the things space agencies do, which is run experiments and build an education campaign around the space project itself,” he said.
Research on HIV proteins also forms part of his mission, reflecting South Africa’s unhappy status as home to the world’s largest number of HIV-positive citizens — around 4.7 million — with some 70 000 babies are born with the virus every year. Shuttleworth made the fortune that will pay his way to the International Space Station two years ago at the age of 26 when he sold an IT company for R3,5-billion ($575-million at the time).
A business graduate, he set up Thawte Consulting, a one-man internet consulting business, in his parents’ backyard in 1996 and whittled down its focus to security for electronic commerce.
The company made him a millionaire within two years and he became the first to provide a worldwide full-security e-commerce web server, providing software for encrypting information and authenticating Internet transactions.
A year later he sold the system to US-based competitor VeriSign.
By then Thawte had become the leading Internet certificate authority outside the United States, capturing 40% of the world market.
Little was known about the business in South Africa and locals were baffled to hear about a laid-back computer geek who wore shorts and had sold an obscure unlisted company for more money than they would ever earn.
The wonder grew when two weeks after the deal came through Shuttleworth promised to pay his staff — which had by then grown to 57 — one million rand ($165 000) each in Christmas bonuses, including the two office cleaners and the gardener.
He also created the Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit body that funds education projects in Africa, serves as an IT advisor to President Thabo Mbeki, and sits on the board of bridges.org, an international non-profit organisation that seeks to narrow the digital divide between rich and poor countries.
For all his philanthropy, his public image soured in 2000 when he moved to London.
It disappointed South Africans who recalled that he had vowed after selling Thawte that he was too much of a patriot to emigrate and add to the brain-drain of talented, upwardly mobile citizens.
Shuttleworth dismissed the criticism, saying he had become depressed after selling his brainchild and needed time for personal reflection.
Today, he has once again become a national figure as he fulfils a ”life’s dream,” heading for a 10-day trip to the International Space Station.
This will make him the second businessman to have paid his own way into space, after 60-year-old US businessman Dennis Tito paid 20 million dollars to become the world’s first space tourist last April. He will carry out a number of scientific experiments in space in collaboration with South African and Russian researchers, including tests on the impact of microgravity on the functions of the body and research into HIV proteins. – AFP
