Mark Shuttleworth

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Mark Shuttleworth
Mark Shuttleworth
Space Flight Participant
 Nationality South African / British
 Born 17 September 1973
Welkom, Free State
 Occupation1 Entrepreneur
 Current occupation Entrepreneur
 Rank Spaceflight participant
 Space time 9d 21h 25m
 Selection 2001
 Mission(s) Soyuz TM-34
Mission insignia
 1 previous or current

Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 17 September 1973) is a South African entrepreneur, made famous for being the second space tourist and first African national in space.[1] He is currently well known in the technology community for Thawte and Ubuntu. Shuttleworth was born in Welkom, Free State, South Africa. He currently lives in London and holds dual citizenship of South Africa and the United Kingdom.

After going to school at Diocesan College, Shuttleworth obtained a Business Science degree in Finance and Information Systems at the University of Cape Town.

Shuttleworth gained worldwide fame on 25 April 2002 as a civilian cosmonaut aboard the Russian Soyuz TM-34 mission, paying approximately US$20 million. Two days later, the Soyuz spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station, where he spent eight days participating in experiments related to AIDS and genome research. On 5 May, he returned to Earth. In order to participate on the flight, Shuttleworth had to undergo one year of training and preparation, including seven months spent in Star City, Moscow.

Contents

[edit] Work

Shuttleworth founded Thawte in 1995, which specialised in digital certificates and Internet security and then sold it to VeriSign in December 1999, earning R3,5-billion (about $575 million US dollars at the time).

In September 2000, Shuttleworth formed HBD Venture Capital, a business incubator and venture capital provider.

In 2001 he formed the Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to social innovation which also funds educational and open source projects in South Africa, such as The Freedom Toaster.

In the 1990s, Shuttleworth participated as a developer of Debian, a computer operating system. In 2004 he returned to the Linux world by funding the development of Ubuntu, a user-friendly distribution of Linux, through his company Canonical Ltd. In 2005 he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of 10 million dollars. In the Ubuntu project, Shuttleworth is often referred to with the tongue-in-cheek title Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life. In September 2005, he purchased a 65% stake of ImpiLinux.[2]

On 15 October 2006 it was announced that Mark Shuttleworth became the first patron of KDE, the highest level of sponsorship available.[3]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Shuttleworth is the first citizen of an independent African country to be in space, but another astronaut was also born in Africa. Patrick Baudry was in space before Shuttleworth, but because his native Cameroon was still a French colony at his birth, he is considered a French citizen.
  2. ^ Shuttleworth bets on ImpiLinux. MyADSL (29 September 2005). Retrieved on 2006-08-28.
  3. ^ Mark Shuttleworth Becomes the First Patron of KDE. KDE (15 October 2006). Retrieved on 2006-10-16.

[edit] External links

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