$30 million buys Austin resident a ride on Soyuz mission (original) (raw)

Richard Garriott will depart on the Soyuz Sunday.DMITRY LOVETSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

An Austin space tourist will blast off early Sunday with an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a voyage to the international space station.

Richard Garriott, 47, who made a fortune designing computer games, and the two professional space fliers have different objectives in space.

NASA's Mike Fincke, who becomes the station's commander, and the Russian Space Agency's Yuri Lonchakov, the flight engineer, will supervise the lengthy startup of new life-support equipment for the space station.

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If they're successful, the 15-nation American-led space station partnership plans to increase the full-time occupancy of the orbital outpost from three to six astronauts in May.

Garriott, the son of astronaut Owen Garriott, is paying the Russians $30 million for an 11-day trip, an expense he intends to offset in part by carrying out experiments for drug companies.

"This is the goal I have been working toward for a significant portion of my adult life," said Garriott. His father, 77, spent nearly 60 days aboard the American Skylab space station in 1973 and will support his son's flight from Moscow.

"As you might imagine, this is an incredible opportunity," the younger Garriott said. "I'm getting to follow in his footsteps, and flying to space is meaningful to me, but also to him.

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"We've worked quite hard together in preparing me for flight. He'll be in Mission Control in Moscow. I'll be able to speak with him directly every day."

The Austin resident is the sixth person since 2001 to pay his way to the space station through Space Adventures Ltd., a 10-year-old Vienna, Va.-based company that brokers the missions with the Russians.

His youthful desire to follow in his father's footsteps in joining NASA's astronaut corps was blocked by poor eyesight, a condition he had corrected 15 years ago with photorefractive keratectomy, a laser procedure.

In September 2007, NASA announced it would begin to accept applicants to the astronaut corps who have undergone the same corrective procedure.

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While he flies, Garriott has agreed to participate in a NASA experiment that monitors his internal eye pressures to determine how the surgical procedure responds to weightlessness.

His mission will feature another wrinkle.

The short voyage will unite Garriott with Russian Sergei Volkov, who became the world's first second-generation space traveler in April. Volkov, the 35-year-old son of former Soviet cosmonaut Alexander Volkov, is nearing the end of a 198-day mission as the station's commander.

Garriott will join Volkov and cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko on Oct. 23 when they depart for Earth aboard an older Soyuz capsule on Oct. 23. The spacecraft will aim for a parachute descent into remote Kazakhstan.

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Over the past year, NASA shuttles have launched European and Japanese science labs to the station, where they have joined the station's American research module and greatly expanded the room available for physics, biology and medical experiments.

Full-time occupancy of the space station has been limited to three and sometimes two astronauts since the launch of the Russian dormitory eight years ago. That should begin to change in November, when a NASA shuttle arrives with water recycling hardware, a second galley and toilet as well as the sleeping quarters to house more astronauts.