BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan - Martha Stewart is sending gracious living into orbit, picking a gourmet space meal of duck breast confit and semolina cake with dried apricots for her billionaire space tourist "best friend" and his comrades in the international space station.
Stewart came yesterday to the bleak space town of Baikonur to say goodbye to Charles Simonyi, a software engineer and developer of Microsoft Word who paid between $20 million and $25 million for a 13-day trip to the space station.
Simonyi, one of the 400 richest Americans according to Forbes Magazine, is to lift off today aboard a Soyuz space capsule with two Russian cosmonauts.
Stewart and Simonyi have been friends for about a decade, and some celebrity-gossip publications have suggested they're romantically linked.
Samantha Schabel, a spokeswoman for Stewart, declined to elaborate on the relationship, saying only, "They're best friends."
In March 2005, Stewart completed a five-month prison term for lying to federal investigators about a stock sale.
After arriving at the gritty spaceport set in the seemingly endless Kazakh steppes, she shared a private moment with Simonyi, 58, through a plate-glass window protecting him and his crewmates from germs.
"He's in excellent spirits," Stewart, 65, told the Associated Press after their tete-a-tete. "He's very fit and very well-trained."
Stewart's arrival in Baikonur inspired wide speculation the two would announce their engagement before liftoff. *
