Rocket Man

You won’t believe how many rich mavericks with roots in Texas are trying to make private space travel a reality. But only one of them, Austin video game visionary Richard Garriott, has a shot at being the first second-generation astronaut. And he seems willing to risk his fortune to make it happen.

by Jan Reid

January 2006

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Down on Back Bay Court, Richard, his older brothers, Randy and Robert, and his younger sister, Linda, kept up everyday routines under the care of their mother, Helen. (Richard attributes his creativity and exotic view of the world to his mother. Other people looked past a dead animal, he told me, but she saw a sculpture, and so taught herself taxidermy. “We’d come home from school and open the freezer to get an ice cream bar. Wow! A raccoon!”) But a special phone in Helen’s bedroom was connected to Mission Control. If the astronauts weren’t busy, their family members in Texas were patched right through. Richard laughed and shook his head, remembering: “I’d call Dad and ask for help with a math problem. He’s up in space, and he’s helping me do my homework.”

NASA had also installed a squawk box that conveyed every radio transmission voiced and heard at Mission Control. The family listened raptly as NASA revealed to its crew that the option of a rescue mission had been analyzed and scrapped; instead, they would gamble that Bean could control the craft and it would survive the flight down. The risk paid off, and the astronauts returned unharmed after fifty-nine and a half days. Owen arrived home a hero to his family, entertaining them with stories about eating ice cream and strawberries while watching the cradle of our civilization, from Spain to Greece, framed in Skylab’s one big window.

A few years later, Richard was in college at the University of Texas at Austin. Owen, whose favorite perk as an astronaut was the use of a sleek jet called a T-38, would sometimes stop in Austin to refuel and have lunch with his son. On one occasion, Richard remembers watching as his dad, the sober scientist, took off from the runway, then shot the white T-38 almost straight up and performed some loops and rolls of farewell. How could Richard not have space travel in his veins?

The pursuit of commercial space travel has existed for decades, but only in the last decade has the talk turned serious. The fall of communism helped. By the late nineties, the cash-strapped Russian space program realized that taking along a paid passenger for $20 million could help finance a mission. But so far, only three tycoon space voyagers have ponied up and made the weeklong flight. Of more significance, Space Adventures was launched in Arlington, Virginia, in 1998 by a trio of brainy dreamers—Eric Anderson, Michael McDowell, and Peter Diamandis. Anderson, an aerospace engineer, had just finished a coveted internship at NASA. McDowell ran an Arctic cruise company. Diamandis was a Harvard Medical School graduate with two degrees in aerospace engineering from MIT. The primary objective of their company was to make money selling tickets to space tourists, not to design and build the rockets. (Anderson arranged the orbital vacations of Dennis Tito and the Russians’ second client, Mark Shuttleworth.) But the St. Louis–based Diamandis had his eyes on the means of getting to space as well. Two years before he helped start Space Adventures, he had founded a nonprofit called the X Prize Foundation. It proposed a $10 million cash award to the first private group that could send a reusable craft capable of carrying three passengers into space twice within two weeks. His model for spurring research and development was the $25,000 Orteig Prize, which had motivated the 1927 transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh. To raise money, Diamandis and his associates started guaranteeing reservations on a future flight for $10,000. It would hold a seat—if there ever was a seat.

The opportunity seemed tailor-made for Richard Garriott, who was enjoying a remarkable run in the video game industry. By 1979 he had already discovered how to make money with a computer. The recent high school graduate worked that summer at a computer store and spent spare hours designing a rudimentary obstacles game called Akalabeth that could be played only on an Apple II. He self-published and distributed 200 copies in ziplock bags. A California publisher picked it up and sold 30,000 copies, which earned the astonished teenager $150,000. A couple years later, his defining moment came when he flunked a university class in computer programming; during a test, he couldn’t remember the difference between what he’d taught himself and the professor’s terms and methodology. “Dad and Mom were great,” he said in one of our interviews. “They told me, ‘If creating computer video games is what you really want to do, then of course quit college. Go for it.’”

He did, and soon became one of the pioneers of a brand-new art form and entertainment phenomenon: the video game, an industry that now generates $11 billion a year, more than the movies. Richard and his business-wise brother Robert founded Origin Systems in 1983; Richard and his Ultima dreamworld were soon written about in Time, Newsweek, and People. In 1992 the brothers sold the company to Electronic Arts for $30 million, though they both continued working on Ultima. They soon took the game online—the first ones to try that—where their charmed business empire thrived on virtual anarchy. Inside Origin’s Austin headquarters, more than thirty “game masters” puffed cigarettes, gulped sodas, and matched wits around the clock with Ultima players all over the world. The game allowed competitors to slay dragons, collect treasure, build homes, and even go fishing. Eventually that freedom became a nightmare. Ruthless experienced players started luring newbies out into the virtual woods of Britannia and killing them for kicks. “The result,” wrote Elizabeth Kolbert for the New Yorker, in 2001, “was a lot of players whose experience of the game consisted mostly of being dead, a condition that discouraged them from continuing to pay their monthly fees.”

In 2000 Garriott finally quit working on Ultima, yanking the plug on his creativity in the process. Then his wealth started pouring from the stock market like salt from a hole. The next year, he and Robert started a new company, Destination Games, then in a blur sold it to NCsoft, a Korean online gaming company that was looking for a toehold in the U.S. market. Destination Games became NCsoft North America, the company’s new U.S. division. Robert is CEO and manages a large product line built through acquisitions and partnerships. Richard and fellow designers and illustrators are at work on a not-yet-released game, Tabula Rasa, on which the success of their new business venture is riding. But in the frantic course of the past few years, Richard’s yearning for space has become his real passion. Along with Robert and his retired astronaut father, he’s been investing in private space ventures. Through those endeavors, he became a friend of Diamandis’s, who encouraged him to reserve a seat with Space Adventures. “At the time, I didn’t have ten grand that I was eager to part with,” Garriott told me. “But I wound up paying it. Then I met Eric Anderson at an Explorers Club meeting in New York. He really explained it all to me, and I said, ‘Okay, I’m in.’ I invested three hundred thousand in Space Adventures. And every year since then I’ve given the [X Prize] foundation at least twenty-five to thirty thousand.”

In 2004 Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian American telecom industry veteran whose venture capital firm, Prodea, is based in Richardson, pledged along with her husband, Amir, to pay the insurance premium on the $10 million, newly named Ansari X Prize. Garriott was raring to go.

BUT ON WHAT ROCKET? And where would it take off and land? Even before the $10 million was assured, about a dozen start-up companies had been racing to build a craft, and their Texas connections started popping up like alien gunships in a computer game.

The prize for impudence could only go to a 34-year-old Californian named Elon Musk. An immigrant from South Africa, Musk’s “particularly Darwinian experience in the business world,” as he put it, was building two Internet companies in Silicon Valley and selling one to Compaq for $307 million, the other to eBay for $1.5 billion. In 2002 Musk then became the CEO of a start-up called SpaceX that proposed to blast a 68-foot rocket into low orbit. A year later, the company started testing its two-stage rocket on a three-hundred-acre site near McGregor, a small town west of Waco. Musk traveled to Washington in 2004 and lectured U.S. senators and House members on what he termed the obstructionism and failed imagination of NASA. He demanded that the government stop shackling this vibrant new industry. Also, he said, the feds should protect entrepreneurs such as him from juries and plaintiff’s lawyers who might take advantage of, say, an explosion. “We believe it is appropriate,” he told the politicians, “that a limit be placed on liability such that, notwithstanding clearly egregious conduct, [compensation for] a mistake or force majeure event resulting in third-party injury, loss of life, or damage to property be limited to a reasonable dollar figure.” Musk did not say what the value of human life might be.

In Mesquite, meanwhile, was the co-founder of id Software, a tall, thin man named John Carmack. Originally from a Kansas City suburb, Carmack, who is now 35, made his fortune by designing computer games modeled on Garriott’s Ultima. But Carmack’s creations, Doom and Quake, had little of Garriott’s fancifulness and studied moralism. A Wired editor cooed that Carmack’s first-person shooters “napalmed the path for everything that followed” in the games industry. Doom and Quake are alleged to have inspired the hard-core gamers who fired real bullets at schoolmates at Columbine High. But Carmack shrugged off his critics, created new games, and immersed himself in Armadillo Aerospace, whose Web site identifies Carmack as “our fearless leader.” The company’s idea is to build a suborbital rocket controlled by computers and fueled by hydrogen peroxide. Carmack and his pals have reportedly gotten the rocket off the ground in at least one test flight.

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