Probably feeling a bit overshadowed, Richard Garriott surfaced two days after the WhiteKnightTwo rollout to remind everyone that, unlike Virgin Galactic’s customers, he won’t have to wait another two years for a brief 300-second taste of space travel.
In fact, the son of Skylab’s Owen Garriott will only have to wait another two months before he flies to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on October 12. Instead of spending $200,000 for five minutes of weightlessness aboard SpaceShipTwo, the millionaire software developer will spend $3 million per day for the 10-day trip into orbit.
In this update from MSNBC, Garriott explains how the $30 million joyride will eat up the “majority” of the fortune he’s accumulated developing medieval fantasy games. Since “majority” can mean anything from 50.01 to 99.99 percent, that really doesn’t tell us very much. It’s highly likely the millionaut will make a good amount of that back in terms of publicity, speaking fees and the like.
The other interesting piece of news: Garriott will carry “the immortality drive” to the space station. The article describes it as “a computer project that will include a list of humanity’s greatest achievements, digitized human DNA and personal messages from Earthlings. The program will be stored on the space station in case calamity were to one day wipe out Earth.”
They will basically use ISS as a backup drive for the planet. There’s some merit to it. You want some record of your civilization. However, in the worst-case scenario, it doesn’t do very much.
Imagine something awful going wrong on Earth while Garriott is up on his orbital vacation. He’s stuck with five colleagues on a station that can’t survive very long without ground support, which has been wiped out along with everything else. The crew might have difficulty even getting back to Earth - providing there was anything to return home to. Meanwhile, they have no capability to start again on the moon, Mars or anywhere else.
Would the stranded astronauts spend their last few months ruminating over the contents of the ironically-named Immortality Drive, wondering how such a grand civilization could be so rapidly and utterly destroyed? What would it be like to look down on Earth every day, knowing that everyone and everything you ever knew was gone? How would you prepare for the end as the station’s food and water began to run out?
In video games, there are always “cheats” that can allow players to fight another day. Know the right codes, and you can go into the “God mode” of invulnerability or obtain an almost infinite amount of resources. Real life is a little different.
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