What you may not have realized is that Richard Garriott is also the son of an astronaut, Owen Garriott. Now, Lord British plans to follow in his father's footsteps as a space tourist in October 2008. His flight to the International Space Station is being brokered through Space Adventures, the same company that has already sent five other private citizens to the station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for an estimated $30M USD each. Garriott will probably take some of his games on the trip as souvenirs, but he plans to spend most of his time working on commercial experiments from his father's biotechnology company.
Richard Garriott may be the first game designer in space, but he's not the first one to get involved in the space industry. John Carmack, the programming genius behind Doom and Quake, splits his time between id Software and Armadillo Aerospace, an engineering firm he founded. Armadillo's stated goals are to develop suborbital space tourism and eventually orbital capability, but their current work is focused on a Lunar Lander vehicle that competed in the 2006 X-Prize Cup.
