Expedition 18, formed out of game designer and space tourist Richard Garriot and astronauts Mike Fincke and Yuri Lonchakov, has successfully arrived at the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft.

Richard Garriot will be spending ten days on the space station, time that he will use participating in different experiments and taking photos of the Earth in order to highlight the major changes the planet suffered since Owen Garriot, his father, went to outer space and photographed the planet. Richard Garriot, the man behing games like Tabula Rasa, is the sixth person to pay for space travel and among the first to have made travelling into outer space a family tradition.

The notorious game designer will return to Earth with Expedition 17, who have been orbiting our planet since 8 April. The other two members of Expedition 18, Yuri Lonchakov and Fincke, will be spending 6 months on the space station, this not being their first stay on the orbiting station. Flinke is at his second visit to the station while Lonchakov at his third. Unfortunately, the ISS will retire in the year 2010 and until then NASA has planned other eight shuttle flights to the station.

Owen Garriot spent 60 days in outer space, on Sky Lab in 1973 and now that his son is also going to be able to see the Earth from orbit proves that space travel and ambition runs in the family. Besides all the official experiments, Richard Garriot’s trip to the International Space Station also has some emotional background as he was previously disqualified from being an astronaut by his poor eyesight.