MOSCOW, September 28 (RIA Novosti) - U.S. computer game developer Richard Garriott will become the sixth tourist to travel into space, Space Adventures announced on Friday.
The British-born developer of the Ultima computer game series, whose father is former NASA astronaut Owen K. Garriott, will be taken to the International Space Station on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2008, the company said.
U.S.-based Space Adventures Ltd., the only company currently providing opportunities for space tourism, charges around $20 million per Russian-organized private trip.
Dennis Tito, an American businessman and former NASA scientist, became the first space tourist when he visited the ISS in 2001.
He was followed by South African computer millionaire Mark Shuttleworth in 2002, Gregory Olsen, a U.S. entrepreneur and scientist, in 2005, Anousheh Ansari, 40, a U.S. citizen of Iranian origin and a telecommunications businesswoman, in 2006 and Charles Simonyi, 58, a U.S. citizen of Hungarian descent and a key figure in developing Microsoft's Word and Excel applications, in 2007.
The space tourists have paid about $20 million each for the pleasure of spending a week on the orbital station, but Russia said the price for commercial space flights would go up in the future, reaching $25 million.
