American millionaire Richard Garriott, a video game developer, blasted off in a Russian Soyuz rocket for his first time on Sunday. The Russian Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppes at the scheduled hour, 1:01 p.m. (3:01 a.m. EDT). The craft entered orbit about 10 minutes later and space officials say the Soyuz rocket will dock with the International Space Station in about two days.

Alongside the millionaire were U.S. astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov. Garriott, a video game developer from Austin, Texas, paid about $30 million to fly into space. Even though he couldn’t be an astronaut, due to poor eyesight, he managed to overcome his deficit with laser surgery and paid this trip to follow his father’s footsteps.

Owen Garriott was an astronaut himself and he spent nearly 60 days aboard the American Skylab space station in 1973 and another ten days in 1983. Owen and Eve, Richard’s parents, and Kelly Miller, Richard’s girlfriend, are watching him from the Control Center in Moscow.

After 10 days in space, Garriott will return to Earth with the ISS’s former crew, aboard a Soyuz re-entry vehicle (TMA-12), a three-person ride who gave previous millionaires creeps before landing. Garriott will join Volkov and Kononenko for their trip back to Earth on October 23.

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, when he was aboard the ISS.