Creator of the "Ultima" Video Game Series Flies into Space for $30 Million

The sixth space tourist ever is a magnate of the video game industry, a game designer and the creator of the successful "Ultima" series. He has spent a fortune for the privilege of sharing the cabin of the Russian spacecraft Soyuz TMA-13 with 2 other astronauts. His father, Owen Garriott, was a trained astronaut who has been in space 2 times, for a total of 70 days.

Garriott Jr. will spend about 2 weeks aboard the International Space Station (ISS), just like the other 5 private space travelers did before him. After that, unlike his predecessors, he is supposed to return to Earth with a Soyuz re-entry craft that was reported to have malfunctioned on its last 2 similar endeavors, due to its explosive bolts' failure to detonate. That failure caused the ship to land abruptly, on both occasions, pretty far away from its intended landing site.

But, despite that, the 47-year old gaming industry mogul Richard Garriott proved to be highly optimistic: "The Soyuz is truly a wonderfully built craft (with) a long series of backups. I'm extremely confident in trusting this vehicle with my life. […] I'm a devout believer in scientific, statistical study," explains "Lord British", as he is also known in the gaming world, calling as evidence the 35-year long fatality-free history of Soyuz missions. "There's no question that I learned what I'll call that scientific approach from my father," he added.

 
Physicist Owen Garriott was NASA's choice as an astronaut for 2 missions, due to his scientific training. The first one from 1973 lasted for 2 months, while the second took 10 days to accomplish, 10 years later, back in 1983. He watched through a binocular his son's launch into space on Sunday at 7 a.m. GMT, accompanied by Garriott Jr.'s girlfriend, Kelly Miller, who was crying for joy: "I am very happy for him. It is one of the things he really wanted to do." The gaming mogul will be a member of a crew of 3, also including a Russian cosmonaut, Yury Lonchakov, and a US astronaut, Michael Fincke. He will take photos of exactly the same features of Earth as his father did 30 years ago, and he will also repeat his zero gravity protein crystal growth experiments.