Space Flight, A Family Tradition

By Davie Barret
20:58, October 15th 2008

Richard Garriott, an American game designer known for his imaginative RPGs, has successfully boarded the International Space Station on Tuesday. The notorious game designer reached the orbiting space station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft along with astronauts Mike Fincke and Yuri Lonchakov where he will embark in several scientific experiments and some personal research. Richard Garriott is planning to take photos of the Earth in order to highlight the changes that have occurred since his father, Owen Garriot, spent 60 days on Skylab. Richard Garriott is among the first people to have made space flight a family tradition.

Interestingly enough, the game designer is going to spend some time on the space station with first man to have taken up space flight from father to son. Russian astronaut Sergei Volkov is the first to have made being an astronaut a family affair, as his father, Alexander Volkov, served on the MIR space station when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. Both parents were present when the shuttle took off and it is safe to say that seeing their offspring follow their steps makes the immensely proud.

Though Garriott and Volkov have in common a family history of space travel, the ways they got here couldn’t have been more different. Richard Garriott dreamt of outer space since childhood, but his dreams were almost completely shattered when he was disqualified from becoming an astronaut by his poor eyesight. He invested heavily in Space Adventures, a company that is known to have sent other millionaires in space. Richard Garriott invested approximately $30 million for his current space trip. On the other hand, Sergei Volkov took a approached the issue in a more traditional way. He finished high school in Star City, entered the air force and today he is an astronaut. The fact that space is now meeting a different generation of astronauts, who have space flight literally in their blood, makes us wonder how far things advanced from the time when the sky was the ultimate frontier.