Probably feeling a bit overshadowed, Richard Garriott surfaced two days after the WhiteKnightTwo rollout to remind everyone that, unlike Virgin Galactic’s customers, he won’t have to wait another two years for a brief 300-second taste of space travel.
In fact, the son of Skylab’s Owen Garriott will only have to wait another two months before he flies to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on October 12. Instead of spending $200,000 for five minutes of weightlessness aboard SpaceShipTwo, the millionaire software developer will spend $3 million per day for the 10-day trip into orbit.Â
In this update from MSNBC, Garriott explains how the $30 million joyride will eat up the “majority” of the fortune he’s accumulated developing medieval fantasy games. Since “majority” can mean anything from 50.01 to 99.99 percent, that really doesn’t tell us very much. It’s highly likely the millionaut will make a good amount of that back in terms of publicity, speaking fees and the like.
The other interesting piece of news: Garriott will carry “the immortality drive” to the space station. The article describes it as “a computer project that will include a list of humanity’s greatest achievements, digitized human DNA and personal messages from Earthlings. The program will be stored on the space station in case calamity were to one day wipe out Earth.”