Space Tourist

Richard Garriott, son of former NASA Skylab and Spacelab-1 astronaut, Owen Garriott, will become the sixth space tourist when he flies a mission this month with Space Adventures. Richard Garriott will fly a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station where he will conduct experiments in engineering, science and education.

Some of the experiments Garriott will conduct will involve protein crystallization as they relate to human diseases. Space Adventures is also seeking other commercial experiments for Gariott to conduct as well.

Garriott is well-known as a video game pioneer, programmer and designer and early investor in the Zero G Corporation that has flown over 2,500 private citizen at high altitude to experience zero gravity. Richard Garriott is also a self-admitted adventure junkie who has taken a submersible to the Titanic, tracked down mountain gorillas in Africa and traveled the Antarctic.

Richard has started a blog on his website, which he will presumable update with his adventures. You can also ask Richard a question about his mission and perhaps even win a free Space Tourists Handbook just for filling out a short survey. Good luck and Godspeed, Richard Garriott.

It is heading into the 3-month mark when a tragic accident claimed three lives at the Scaled Composites facility in Mojave, California. Glen May, Eric Blackwell and Todd Ivens were killed and three others were injured when an explosion happened during a nitrous oxide injector cold flow test.

The injured and deceased were working at Burt Rutan’s Mojave Spaceport at the time on SpaceShipTwo, which is scheduled to bring tourists to space as early as 2009. Rutan’s company has set up a Scaled Family Support Fund to funnel generous contributions from the public to the affected families. The Scaled Composites employees were the first fatalities in the burgeoning space tourism industry.

This is the first post in the wonderful and sometimes wacky Space Tourist blog. Hopefully, many more posts will follow over the years. This blog is about space travel in general and space tourism in specific.

Space tourists will be covered first as the rich and notable who can afford the multimillion dollar trip, and then as prices come down as those brave souls who wish to take a peak at Earth from low earth orbit. Sit back and enjoy the ride!