To boldly go where his father went

AS A leading computer game developer, Richard Garriott earned millions creating fantasy kingdoms and out-of-this world storylines. Yesterday, his ultimate dream became reality as he became the first offspring of a Nasa astronaut to go into space.

The British-born tycoon was last night circling Earth at 17,500mph en route to the International Space Station (ISS), 35 years after his father, Owen, rode into space aboard a US Apollo spacecraft.

Mr Garriott, 47, blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as a private passenger aboard a Soyuz capsule, having paid the Russian space agency $30 million (about £18 million) for his ticket and a year's training.

"Today, my dream of following in my father's footsteps to explore new frontiers is being realised," said Mr Garriott. His previous travels include diving on the wreck of the Titanic, trekking Antarctica in search of meteorites, and kayaking down the Amazon.

Born in Cambridge, where his father worked for a year, Mr Garriott grew up in Houston, Texas, the home of Nasa, believing as a child that it was an everyday normality for people to go into space because he was surrounded by astronauts and rocket scientists.

Told by the Nasa family doctor at the age of 12 that he would never be accepted for the US space programme because of his poor eyesight, he was shattered.

In 1983 he founded Origin Systems, one of the world's leading video game empires, which he has since sold, and has also pumped millions into pioneering commercial space travel.

During his ten days aboard the ISS, where he is due to dock tomorrow, he will fulfil a number of projects – including, ironically, an eyesight study for Nasa, which will help astronauts who have, like him, undergone corrective eye surgery to pursue the government career he was denied.

Dr Owen Garriott, a Stanford University scientist appointed to Nasa's elite astronaut corps in 1965, was one of only nine people to serve aboard Skylab, a forerunner to the ISS. His 60-day mission there in 1973 set a record at the time for human duration in space.

He returned to space on the shuttle Columbia, taking up a new laboratory, Spacelab, from where he conducted scores of experiments including measuring the energy output of the Sun and investigating the human body's responses to zero-gravity.

Now retired from Nasa and working in the private sector, father-of-four Owen, 77 – whom his son likens to Spock from Star Trek – will spend the next ten days at Russian mission control in Moscow, acting as his son's chief science adviser.

He said: "Because of my career, it was almost natural for Richard to be interested in space and exploration. I am so pleased that he is able to embrace this himself … I am very proud of him."