Mark Shuttleworth

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Mark Shuttleworth
Mark Shuttleworth
Country: South Africa
Organization: Private
selected on December 5, 2001
Calls: 1 space flight
Begin: April 25, 2002
Landing: May 5, 2002
Time in space: 9d 21h 25min
Space flights

Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born September 18, 1973 in Welkom , Free State Province , South Africa ) is a British - South African entrepreneur. He became known as the first African in space (this gave him the nickname Afronaut in South Africa ) and as the second space tourist as well as the founder of the Ubuntu project.

Life

Shuttleworth was born in the gold mining town of Welkom . After a few years, Shuttleworth's parents, Richard and Ronelle, moved to Cape Town ( Western Cape Province ) because his father found a job as a surgeon there. There Shuttleworth first attended the private Diocesan College. After graduating from high school in 1991, he began studying business administration and computer science at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa's oldest university. In 1996 he received a bachelor's degree from UCT .

Since 1995 he has been working on the Linux distribution Debian as a developer. During his senior year at university, he founded his first company in December 1995: Thawte Consulting, which he ran from his parents' garage. It initially advised local business customers on issues relating to the Internet, then specialized in web security and is now a global leader in the issuing of digital certificates . Shortly before the collapse of Internet companies on the stock exchange ( dot-com bubble ), Shuttleworth sold Thawte to the US company Verisign for an estimated 500 million US dollars, exactly four years after its founding in December 1999 .

Shuttleworth founded HBD Venture Capital in September 2000. The name is the abbreviation of a designation that English seafarers used to mark areas that have not yet been mapped: Here Be Dragons (German: here dragons live). The venture capital company invests in innovative South African companies. The Shuttleworth Foundation (TSF), a non-profit organization that supports educational projects in South Africa, followed shortly afterwards. TSF launched the so-called Freedom Toasters right after their creation . Similar to ticket machines, open source software can be burned onto CDs at publicly accessible places because the telecommunications network in South Africa is sometimes quite rudimentary.

Shuttleworth founded his next company in the spring of 2004: Canonical Limited, based on the Isle of Man, sponsors the Debian-based Linux distribution Ubuntu and other open source projects. Canonical should be profitable in the long term by offering paid support for this software. Shuttleworth documents his close ties to the Debian project through his active participation in the annual Debian conferences . In addition to around 20 Debian developers, his company also employs programmers for the Linux projects Gnome and KDE - whose patronage he took over in October 2006.

Mark Shuttleworth left Cape Town in February 2001 and has lived on the Isle of Man ever since. He has British and South African citizenship, is single and has no children.

The flight into space

Shuttleworth in the ISS

Shuttleworth had always dreamed of going into space. If he had initially assumed that this possibility would only be available when space travel was possible for everyone, he saw his chance when Dennis Tito became the first space tourist in April 2001. He contacted Space Adventures , a private US company promoting space tourism that had already made Tito's flight possible. He also turned to Tito himself, telephoned him several times and visited him in June 2001. A month later, Shuttleworth started his seven-month training in Star City near Moscow after passing all medical tests. Half a year later, the final contract for his flight to the International Space Station (ISS) was signed.

On April 25, 2002 Shuttleworth launched into space on the Russian Soyuz TM-34 as a member of the third ISS guest team . Two days later, the Soyuz spacecraft moored at the space station, where the fourth long-term crew had lived and worked since December 2001 .

In addition to paying around $ 20 million for flights and training, Shuttleworth had paid for the five experiments he conducted during his eight-day stay. German scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry were also involved in one of the projects. Together with the University of Port Elizabeth in South Africa, you had developed the SPC (Soluble Protein Crystallization) experiment to research protein crystals. In addition, both marine observation and research on stem cells and the cardiovascular system were on the program. Shuttleworth also held a math-science lesson that was followed by around one hundred thousand students in South Africa. On May 5th, he returned to Earth with Soyuz TM-33 .

See also

Web links

Commons : Mark Shuttleworth  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
personal data
SURNAME Shuttleworth, Mark
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shuttleworth, Mark Richard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-South African entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH 18th September 1973
PLACE OF BIRTH Welkom , Free State Province , South Africa