Richard Garriott Becomes Latest Space Tourist

Richard Garriott has become the latest space tourist to travel to the high frontier. Along with another American, Mike Fincke and a Russian, Yuri Lonchakov, Richard Garriott blasted off on board a Soyuz space craft for a stay on the International Space Station.

Richard Garriott made a considerable fortune designing computer fantasy games, starting right out of high school. This has allowed him to pay the thirty million dollars charged by Space Adventures Ltd, an American based company that, in cooperation with the Russian Space Agency, organizes tours of the International Space Station for paying customers.

Richard Garriott is also the son of Owen Garriott, himself a former NASA astronaut who served on a tour of the Skylab space station in the early 1970s. Owen and Richard Garriott therefore constitute the first father and son astronauts. They also represent two very different ways of traveling in space. Owen Garriott was part of the NASA space program, trained by and working for a government. Richard Garriott is part of the new, still unfolding era of commercial space flight, where people fly into space on their own, financed with private money.

Previous private space travels include California businessman Dennis Tito, billionaire American software engineer Charles Simonyi, and Iranian born Texas entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari. Richard Garriott intends to conduct a number of scientific experiments during his stay on the International Space Station.

Space tourism is an exciting development that has the potential to open up commercial space travel. A number of companies, including Virgin Galactic, are working on space craft capable of sub orbital jaunts for paying customers. SpaceX, which recently successfully launched its Falcon 1 rocket, is working on a space craft in cooperation with NASA that would take paying customers, including NASA astronauts, to the International Station. Bigelow Aerospace is developing a private space station, to be built of inflatable modules, where paying customers may stay in low Earth orbit.

Flights by private space travelers like Richard Garriott constitute the future of space exploration, just as much (if not more so) as any planned NASA missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. It is hoped that as more companies compete to build and operate private space craft, the cost of space travel will come down and its reliability with increase. Thus more and more people will travel beyond the Earth on their own, outside the purview of government space programs.

Some private space travelers, like Richard Garriott, will combine adventure travel with private research. Others will try to find ways to make money from the experience. Eventually some private space travelers will choose to stay in future space settlements, to build new lives, as travelers to other frontiers have done throughout human history.

Of course, on the other hand, the current economic crisis, plus the prospect of an anti-business administration in the form of a President Barack Obama, might put a temporary crimp in the development of private space travel. But, it is hoped, that any impediment will only be temporary.

Sources: American space tourist blasts off in Soyuz rocket, Peter Leonard, AP, October 12th, 2008
SpaceX's Falcon 1 Soars to Low Earth Orbit, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, September 29th, 2008
Toward the First Private Space Station, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, October 6th, 2008
Space Tourism: What's Next for 2009, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, June 4th, 2008
The Next Fifty Years in Space, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, August 13th, 2007
A Brief History of Private Space Travel, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, October 6th, 2006
NewSpace and the Financial Crisis, Jeff Foust, Personal Spaceflight, October 11th, 2008