Like Father, Like Son

Owen Garriott belongs to a very exclusive club: one of the first six scientist-astronauts selected by NASA in 1966.  He was an engineering professor at Stanford at the time, and scholars of his type did not readily fit  into the hot-shot pilot culture of the early astronauts on the way to the moon.  But he did fly for 59 days on the Skylab space station in 1973, and then again on a shuttle flight, STS-9, in 1983. Now, his son Richard, barring surprises, will become the first American to follow his father into orbit. Richard Garriott’s name will be familiar if you’re a serious computer gamer.  The Ultima series of  role-playing games began with him.  The brand has passed from his hands, but made him both wealthy and legendary in gaming circles. Richard is now, among other things, on the board of Space Adventures, the company that brokered the flight of Dennis Tito and other early space "tourists."  He’ll be their sixth orbital client.  His flight, on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, is currently set for October 2008. “I am dedicating my spaceflight to science,” he says in a release on their site.  “It is my goal to devote a significant amount of my time aboard the space station to science, engineering and educational projects. I understand the necessity for conducting research in extreme environments whether it is collecting microorganisms from deep sea hydrothermal vents to carrying out experiments in the continuous micro-gravity of Earth orbit.” He continued, “We need to be adventurous in mind and stimulate our intellects to answer today’s most daunting scientific questions and to invent tomorrow’s technological marvels.” There is already a well-produced website, richardinspace.com, very much like sites for previous Space Adventures clients.  (Look at this one for Charles Simonyi, the developer of Microsoft Word, who flew last year.) You can argue about the merits of commercial space trips still being the province of the very rich (and you’re welcome to weigh in below), but there does seem to be a moment of passage here.  There have been astronaut offspring who served on the staff of Congressional committees, and I knew one who worked in NASA’s public affairs office.  But now we genuinely may have two generations of space flyers in one family. Keith Cowing, who runs the NASAWatch website, posted an item about this, and received a reader comment:  "actually he will become the SECOND second generation astronaut. Sergey Volkov, who is the son of cosmonaut  Aleksandr Volkov, is scheduled to fly in April 2008 (Soyuz TMA-12). This is half a year before Richard  Garriott’s flight."
(NASA photo of Owen Garriott outside Skylab in 1973.)