Community | October 12, 2008 | 6 comments

Space tourist blasts off in $30m odyssey

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TravG73
A British-born tycoon made history today as he became the first offspring of a NASA astronaut to go into space.

Richard Garriott, 47, will dock tomorrow at the International Space Station, 225 miles above Earth, 35 years after his father Owen flew aboard one of NASA’s last Apollo missions to Skylab, America’s first orbiting laboratory.

The multi-millionaire computer-game developer, who began his working life as a kitchen assistant at Burger King, blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today as a private passenger aboard a Soyuz capsule, having paid the Russian space agency $30 million for the privilege and undergone a year’s training.

He will be the only the second person to wear the Union flag in space; Helen Sharman, a chemist for Mars confectioners, was the first when she flew to Russia’s Mir space station on a privately arranged trip in 1991.
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