Simonyi, 60, along with an American and a Russian astronaut, was launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppe, in what could be the last space tourist trip for some time.
"I feel great and I am looking at the Earth," he told mission control in Russian after lift-off, as his wife, Swedish millionaire's daughter Lisa Persdotter, tearfully joined the cheers on the ground.
He previously travelled to the space station in April 2007, becoming one of a select group of wealthy civilians, most of them from the United States, to have pioneered space tourism.
