This is the realisation of a "remote dream", Shuttleworth, dressed in a black jumpsuit bearing the South African flag, told AFP during a brief holiday in his home town.

He first approached the Russian space agency about six years ago, before he made his fortune. "At that stage I did not even have the means but I was curious," said Shuttleworth.

Two years ago he sold his IT company for 575 million dollars and had the funds for space travel.

But securing a place was difficult and he conducted six months of "tough negotiations" last year before signing a deal in December to travel on a Soyuz shuttle to the International Space Station.

On April 20, Shuttleworth, Russian commander Yuri Gidzenko and Italian engineer Roberto Vittori will be crunched side by side into a capsule and blasted into space.

Last April former US space engineer, 60-year-old Dennis Tito, became the first space tourist after paying 20 million dollars to join the Russian team heading for the orbiting space platform.

Shuttleworth expects it will cost him much the same.

But he will participate as a trained crew member -- responsible for communications and life support systems -- after completing technical Russian examinations.

"Before we started any negotiations I wanted to show that I was going to come on board as a cosmonaut," he said.

The first step was a rigorous cosmonaut medical checkup conducted by some 25 Russian doctors over three weeks.

After being found fit, Shuttleworth launched into training in August at Star City outside Moscow without having finalised the deal.

His insistence on doing South African scientific experiments during the mission held up the negotiations.

"They were complicated by the fact I was trying to achieve with this programme what most countries set out to achieve when they first start a manned space programme ... and that is normally done by quite a large team," said Shuttleworth.

"Negotiations broke down several times, so sometimes I found myself sitting at night wondering what I was doing."

There were some initial Russian objections to South African experiments, but "when we showed them the actual scientific proposals, they changed and then (the trip) was a reality," he said.

Dozens of proposals were submitted to Shuttleworth's advisors and three were selected:

- monitoring sheep and mice embryos, and stem cells, in weightless conditions;

- monitoring his own heart rate, blood pressure and energy expenditure in space;

- and studying his own muscle tissue before and after the mission.

Shuttleworth, who is single, said he hopes now to concentrate solely on his training, which includes much Russian language tuition.

He said training on the flight simulator, one element of his demanding eight-hour days in Moscow, was great.

Pointing to a standard desk, Shuttleworth said: "It is very real. We are in a tiny capsule as wide as this desk, on our backs with our knees up on our chins looking at a console panel and using pointers to press the buttons."

"The controls are primitive, from the 1960s when they did not have computers," the computer tycoon said with a smile.

A business graduate, he started 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.

He became the first to provide a worldwide full-security e-commerce web server, providing software for encrypting information and authenticating Internet transactions.

In 1999, he sold the system to US-based competitor VeriSign. Each of his 57 staff got one million rand (165,000 dollars) as a Christmas bonus, including the two office cleaners and the gardener.

"While rockets and space were most exciting, I was also fascinated by computers and the Internet and accidentally got drawn into that as a career," Shuttleworth said.

"I was very lucky with the timing and in 1999 found myself with the means to pursue the original dream, to fly in space.

"So I guess my head's always been up there, it's the rest of me that has to catch up now."

All rights reserved. � 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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