On Sunday, Richard Garriott blasted off into the outer-space aboard the Russian Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The rocket, which was launched shortly after 3 a.m. EDT, will be taking Garriott, along with United States astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov, to the International Space Station (ISS), where the three of them are to perform experiments.

Richard Garriott, a video game magnat from Texas, has paid $35 million for his journey into space and has completed his training period at a space center near Moscow.

For his blast off, both his father Owen and his girlfriend Kelly Miller were present, the former having watched the launch from an observation platform.

The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft has entered the orbit and will be docking with the ISS in approximately two days, space officials have announced.

Garriott, 47, is scheduled to spend 10 days in space, being set to return to Earth on October 24, aboard a Soyuz re-entry rocket (the TMA-12) , along with the International Space Station’s former crew.

The video game tycoon is the son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who spent 60 days in space aboard the first space station that the U.S. launched, on May 14, 1973.

He afterwards spent another ten days aboard Spacelab-1, back in 1983.

Richard Garriott is the the sixth space tourist, following the steps of Dennis Tito (who blasted off on April 28, 2001), Mark Shuttleworth (April 25, 2002), Gregory Olsen (October 1, 2005), Anousheh Ansari (September 18, 2006) and Charles Simonyi, who spent two weeks in space last year, from April 7 to April 21.