Space has no frontiers for people with money. Richard Garriott, 47, a computer game developer from Austin, Texas, will be the sixth tourist in space, as part of a joint venture between Russia's Federal Space Agency and the U.S. firm Space Adventures. Garriott says that the whole "fun" will cost him $30 million. The shuttle, a Russian Soyuz, will be launched October 12 from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The previous Soyuzes, one in October of 2007 and one in April, landed safely, but not before giving the creeps to the passengers. Even so, Garriott is confident to trust his life to this vehicle. It seems that the pleasure of space is genetic, and that's because Owen Garriott, Richard's father, was an astronaut. He spent nearly 60 days aboard the American Skylab space station in 1973 and will support his son from the Mission Control in Moscow. Even if he couldn't follow an astronaut career, like his father, because of an eye problem, Richard made a fortune out of video games and managed to pay his 11-day trip to space.

Garriott will be joined by NASA's Mike Fincke, the station commander, and the Russian Space Agency's Yuri Lonchakov, the flight engineer. He is scheduled to depart at 1:03 p.m. on Sunday. He will travel back with an outgoing ISS crew on October 24. On his journey to the International Space Station, Garriott will take photographs and conduct a range of medical and physical experiments. The photographs will then be compared with the ones his father took almost 30 years ago.

Sure, it looks like a safe trip, but anything can happen. Richard is not at all worried and he's taking all the risks Owen Garriott had to face when he used to be an astronaut.