Journalist, successful investor and philanthropist Esther Dyson is the latest in the growing line of people for which a combination of their love of technology and a sizeable (read millions) cash account lead to the natural thing: space tourism. She has been confirmed in an October 7 press release by private space travel company Space Adventures, of which she is an investor, to be the backup crew member for Microsoft bigwig Charles Simonyi, who is going on his second trip to the International Space Station, hitching a ride on the Soyuz TM-14 rocket some time in 2009.

Esther Dyson, born in 1951 in Zurich, Switzerland, is the daughter of Physicist Freeman Dyson, from which she inherited her love of all things aerospace. "My father helped design a rocket-ship when I was a kid,” she says, “and I have always assumed I will go into space myself." After 25 years of editing the computer industry newsletter Release 1.0, she moved on to successfully invest in a number of companies.

She is the chairman of EDventure Holdings, and an investor or board member in various start-up technology companies in the fields of IT, consumer-directed health care/genetics, and air and space travel. Her aerospace investments include Space Adventures, XCOR Aerospace, Airship Ventures, Coastal Technologies Group and Icon Aircraft. She has invested in or lead in the past Flickr, de.licio.us, Medstory and Brightmail and is presently on the board of Russian search engine Yandex, genome company 23andMe, and WPP group. Her philanthropic efforts include the Sunlight Foundation, the Santa Fe Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy.

What’s interesting is that a lot of big names, people who have achieved something in the world of IT, people like Amazon.com Founder and CEO Jeff Bazos, Paypal co-founder Elon Musk, and id Software founder John Carmack, people who incidentally Dyson personally knows, are in her own words “finding a second life, doing stuff in space.” It’s a natural progression when one thinks of it. These are people who pioneered the tech industry during the 70s and 80s, these are idealists who always wanted a challenge, who always sought ways to make things work (case in point here is legendary game series Doom and Quake designer John Carmack, who is now leader of Armadillo Aerospace the first winner of the NASA Lunar Lander Challenge). For these people, space is the ultimate challenge, truly the final frontier.

Beyond being just a business environment, the privatization of space is going to be to it the same thing that it was for the internet. It will open up a whole new world of possibilities, the chance for bold entrepreneurs to change our lives. This author humbly submits this news article as a report on one of the early seeds of human kind’s free expanse into space, limited only by imagination and fueled by the resolve of the human spirit. It’s the sort of vision that people like Esther Dyson and John Carmack, and all those who now are looking up to the sky and are seeing hopem believe in.