In 1999, Mark Shuttleworth became a millionaire when he sold his Internet security firm, Thawte Consulting, to Verisign for $575 million, equivalent to R3.5 billion at the time.
With a $20 million budget, Shuttleworth traveled to Russia to arrange one of the first “space tourism” deals.
Shuttleworth also shared that he signed separate contracts with all parties involved in his space journey.
“I bought a spacesuit before I even had a clear path to use it,” he mentioned. One contract allowed him to be tested by the institution responsible for evaluating cosmonauts.
“Only at the very end did I finalise a deal with the group that could actually take me to space,” he added.
That group was Space Adventures, the same company that facilitated American space engineer Dennis Tito’s trip to the International Space Station (ISS) on a Russian Soyuz mission in 2001.
At 61, Tito became the first commercial space traveler. A year later, Shuttleworth followed as the second, and the first African in space.
Despite being labeled as space tourists, both Tito and Shuttleworth had to work aboard the ISS.
Shuttleworth also trained and qualified as a Russian cosmonaut, undergoing a year of training that included learning Russian and spending seven months in Star City, Russia.
During his 10-day space mission, he conducted several experiments, including the first to study the effects of zero gravity on stem cells and embryos, the impact of microgravity on the cardiovascular system and muscles, and an attempt to crystallize HIV proteins in weightlessness for better structural analysis.
There was some debate about Shuttleworth’s status as the first African in space, with some arguing for Cameroonian-born Frenchman Patrick Baudry.
However, Baudry is officially recognised as the second French citizen in space and served under the French flag.
Shuttleworth, on the other hand, flew under the South African flag, making him the first citizen of an independent African nation in space.
Born on September 18, 1973, in Welkom and raised in Cape Town, Shuttleworth’s interest in technology began with computer games during his childhood.
After high school, he considered careers in particle physics, software engineering, and biotechnology before opting for a business science degree in finance at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
While at UCT, he discovered the Internet and, in his final year in 1995, founded Thawte Consulting as an Internet consulting business.
As the World Wide Web gained popularity, Thawte shifted focus to providing security certificates for encrypted online communications.
Shuttleworth claimed that Thawte was the first company to offer a full-security e-commerce web server commercially available outside the United States, operating from his parent’s garage.
Thawte had an edge over American competitors, who were restricted by regulations from providing strong encryption outside the U.S. Shuttleworth capitalised on this market gap to offer robust security for web transactions.
This led Shuttleworth into the realm of public key infrastructure, catching the eye of Netscape’s security team.
This recognition allowed Thawte to become a global certificate authority for the web. By the time Verisign acquired it, Thawte had become the fastest-growing Internet certificate authority and the leading CA outside the United States.
With his newfound wealth, Shuttleworth founded a venture capital firm named HBD, inspired by the phrase “Here Be Dragons” used on old maps to denote uncharted territories.
He also created The Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit organisation aimed at fostering African innovation in education.
In 2004, two years after his space journey, Shuttleworth established Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system.
Canonical was created to provide commercial support for open-source projects.
Shuttleworth expressed his desire to give back to the open-source community, which had greatly benefited him during Thawte’s development.
Canonical’s first major initiative was a desktop operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution, named Ubuntu.
Each version of Ubuntu was named after an animal. The first version, released in October 2004, was called Warty Warthog, while the latest version, released in April 2024, is named Noble Numbat.
Ubuntu quickly rose to become the world’s most popular Linux distribution. According to Google Trends, it remains the most searched-for term among those looking for “Linux” in 2024.
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