Entrepreneur Astronaut: Here’s How You’ll Get to Space

Richard Garriott, age 50, was the 483rd person to leave planet Earth — and he’d like you to be one of the first thousand.

[More from Mashable: SXSW Tour: Rain, Food Trucks and Whimsical, Bizarre Promotions [PICS]]

Garriott, creator of the popular Ultima videogame series, spent a good chunk of his fortune visiting the International Space Station via Soyuz rocket in 2008 (with ground-based assistance from his father Owen, a former NASA astronaut). Now he acts as an advisor to both NASA and commercial space companies.

Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin Saturday, Garriott laid out his vision for the next 30 years of space travel. He said while the cost of his flight was in the tens of millions of dollars, competition will bring the cost of a sub-orbital trip down to the same as a round-the-world ticket within a matter of years.

[More from Mashable: Documentarians: KONY 2012 Achieved Its Goal]

What’s going to take us there: entrepreneurial spirit. “If I could make a profit in going to space, I would go all the time,” Garriott said. Indeed, he made several million dollars while in space — partly by developing a new kind of earth-imaging software for NASA, partly by growing protein crystals for pharmaceutical companies.

That didn’t offset the cost of the $10 million-plus trip, but Garriott outlined the new technologies that will bring costs down — such as SpaceX‘s reusable launch rocket components and private Space Shuttle-like vehicles that are 10 times cheaper than the NASA version.

Armadillo Aerospace, a private venture by fellow game designer John Carmack, is building its rockets largely from components it is ordering on the Internet.

“All of the cryogenics from the Apollo mission are now in the AC unit outside your house,” Garriott said. “Pretty much any kid who can build a robot can build a rocket that will fly to space.”

All that remains: figuring out how to make more of a profit when you’re up there. Garriott suggested vaccine development and solar satellites — small ones that could power a military base, say — as low-hanging fruit.

“A lot of you are smarter entrepreneurs than I,” Garriott told the SXSW Interactive crowd, “and will make more money than I did.”

Want to know more? Check out Garriott’s documentary Man on a Mission, as of this week available on iTunes and Netflix.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Views: 0

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Reply

Powered by WordPress | Designed by: Premium WordPress Themes | Thanks to Themes Gallery, Bromoney and Wordpress Themes