Microsoft Billionaire Charles Simonyi Caught in Potty Contretremps
As if U.S.-Russia relations weren’t sufficiently strained already, now comes word that the space tourists who recently traveled to the International Space Station and return Wednesday have been living out a Cold War of their own. At least, NASA and the Russian governments would reportedly have it that way. Fifty-year-old Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka -- who’s currently in space with four other individuals, including Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi -- says immediately before the Russian Soyuz rocket took off from Kazakhstan, he was told he couldn’t use a U.S. gym aboard the space station, or to eat any U.S. rations, or even to use the same toilet(!) used by Americans. (That toilet, btw, apparently cost NASA around $19 million back in 2007.)
