Richard Garriott is a computer game designer from America whose childhood dream is to visit space inspired by his astronaut father. He achieved his ambition on Sunday when he arrived in space on the Soyuz TMA-13.
This craft also carried two other crewmembers and DNA sequences which were digitized of a few of the world’s famous minds.
Garriott aged 47, paid for his travel to space being a multimillionaire from Texas. Paid travel to space though rare is possible. He is the sixth person paying and traveling to space. This spacecraft was blasted off from the Balkonur facility in Kazakh steppe.
Garriott is British born and will spend his ten days aboard conducting certain experiments. These include experiments for sponsors who partly funded his trip. He will also be photographing Earth and compare his pictures with what his father took in the year 1973 from the Skylab, a US station.
His departure to space was watched by his father aged 77 with a binocular. Owen Garriott was overwhelmed with excitement even as Soyuz settled into orbit ten minutes after launch.
Richard Garriott mobilized a huge part of his trip price, almost around $30 million through his experiments and said he hoped a feasible model for those aspiring to travel to space in future would emerge from his trip.
Digitized DNA samples and details of some of the most famous minds ever lived on Earth would be saved on a type of a time capsule on the space station in the eventuality that something should happen to completely wipe out the earth.