Richard Garriott, who earned millions of dollars after he created fantasy games, always had a childhood dream to fly into space, and now he fulfilled his dream in his own way by flying into space aboard a Russian rocket. 

Garriott has to take off on Sunday aboard a Soyuz rocket for the International Space Station (ISS) from the dusty steppes of Kazakhstan. He said in the Soviet-era space base, “I have been working for decades on this.”

For Garriott, space is like a family business, since his father, Owen Gariiott was a US astronaut, who back in 1973 spent two months aboard Skylab, the first orbiting space station. 

Garriot was born in Cambridge and was brought up in Houston, Texas. The 47-year-old balding man with a goatee, said, “I grew up in a family of astronauts and I always wanted to do what my father did.”

Garriott, who created the game called “Lord British”, was quite popular among his classmates due tot his English accent. 

Back in 1980s, a series of role-playing games for Ultima was created by Garriott, and the ruler of this alternative fantasy world was named “Lord British”. 

Space Adventures, a US-based company that specializes in taking rich tourists into orbit, announced in September 2007, that after Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi, who was their space tourist that year, it will be Garriott’s turn to be their next space tourist. 

For this purpose, Garriott had to pay a whopping sum of 30 million dollars (22 million euros) and had to undergo plenty of medical tests and months of training to be allowed to board the flight. 

“It is a goal I have been working on for 20 to 30 years. At the age of 47, I still consider myself a fairly young man, and I believe I will continue to build new businesses which will allow me to continue my exploration of the world,” said an enthusiast Garriott. 

Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov and US astronaut Michael Fincke would be accompanying Garriott during his ten day trip into the space. 

Garriott has planned to perform various experiments on topics including the effect of space travel on the immune system and the sleep characteristics of astronauts, once he is abroad the ISS. 

Garriott feels that private space tourism promotes further scientific research, and he hopes that tourists will keep traveling into space in future. He says that he may visit space in future as well. 

He reported, “Even before my first flight, I have already begun to think of what I would like to accomplish on a second flight.”