WASHINGTON
-- When he was growing up in Houston, the son of an astronaut who lived in a
neighborhood filled with astronauts and aerospace engineers, Richard Garriott
always assumed that he would fly in space. After all, it was an experience his
father described in very fact-of-the matter terms as a "nominal" experience.
Garriott,
now a multimillionaire
video game developer, will achieve his life-long goal of traveling into
space in October 2008, but it was not an easy road -- or inexpensive.
Garriott,
46, is the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who participated in two space
missions including the 1973 Skylab 3 mission that orbited the Earth for 59 days
and smashed the previous record for manned spaceflight duration. The younger
Garriott is scheduled to become the sixth paying
space tourist and the first offspring of an American astronaut to visit
space.
Growing up
near the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Nassau Bay, Texas, Garriott's
neighbors on three sides were all astronauts. Everyone he knew was a NASA
engineer in one way or another, so it seemed inevitable to him that he would
grow up and go to space.
"It was a
shock to me that as I got older, there were lots of reasons why going into
space was such a rare commodity," Garriott said Tuesday in a media roundtable
event in Washington sponsored by the Space Foundation.
His poor
eyesight alone was enough to disqualify him from a NASA space mission. So he
understood early in life that if he were to go into space, it would not be as a
government astronaut, it would be through a private enterprise.
Passion
for World Building
Garriott's
passion for computers and building worlds to explore within them made him
wealthy from a young age. He developed his first video game when he was in high
school, one that generated $150,000 in personal revenue. He is also the creator
of the popular Ultima series of online games and has started and sold two video
game companies.
Garriott
paid $30 million for his trip to space tourism firm Space Adventures of Vienna,
Va., a company for which he sits on the board of directors. A Russian Soyuz
rocket will launch him up to the International Space Station where he will
spend several weeks. Garriott is contemplating paying another $15 million to take a spacewalk.
In January
Garriott will leave for Star City, Russia, where his mission training will
begin. He will learn spacecraft operation, survival and experimental training
there as well as undergo medical testing to ensure he is ready for space.
The hardest
part of his training will not be the physical rigors, he said. As a high-school
computer prodigy, Garriott was permitted to develop his own self-taught
computer curriculum in lieu of the two-year foreign language requirement. So
learning his first foreign language, the Russian he will need to operate his
space capsule, will be his greatest challenge.
Bonding
with Dad
The thrill
of being one of the first 500 humans to leave the planet is not Garriott's only
goal. He is a true believer in the commercial value of manned spaceflight and
will be taking with him a series of experiments he hopes will generate profit.
In one experiment his father helped design, protein crystals will be made in
the zero-gravity environment. The crystals form perfectly under these
conditions, and accurate images of their structures are extremely valuable to
pharmaceutical companies, he said.
"We're in
the search for more and more of these activities that are not just research,"
Garriott said. "We're trying to find something that has resale value."
Owen
Garriott is now serving as his son's chief scientist for the mission, helping
his son find and verify the best commercial and scientific research activities
for the mission.
"It's a
great father-son bonding time," the younger Garriott said. "We haven't had the
chance to really work closely together like this. So it's very cool from my
perspective that I've got one of the world's leading experts close at hand who
also happens to have such a deep personal relationship [with me]."
Expert
Advice
Several
weeks ago Garriott had a conversation with astronaut
Alan Bean, who flew with Garriott's father on Skylab 3. Bean emphasized how
important he thinks it is for people who are not military pilots to go up and
experience space travel, as they will be well-suited when they return to talk
about space travel and how it can be expanded in an entrepreneurial way.
Bean also
told Garriott he does not expect him to experience the emotional letdown some
astronauts have felt after achieving their long-time goal of getting to space.
Garriott has had similar conversations with all five previous space tourists
who told him the same thing.
"The
feedback I'm getting from those I consider close to me imply this is going to
do nothing but add to my life experience," Garriott said.
Garriot
said his father is separated enough from his time in NASA's space program that
he now regards the experience as more than just a nominal.
"He clearly
gets a much bigger gleam in his eye when he reflects on some of the early
pioneering work he had the chance to do."
Garriott
is chronicling his spaceflight training and mission at his personal Web site: www.richardinspace.com.
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