Soyuz With Richard Garriott Successfully Launched 56
Toren Altair writes "Soyuz TMA-13 with ISS Expedition Crew 18 and Richard Garriott successfully launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 7:01 UT (3:01 EDT). The Soyuz capsule will dock to the ISS in two days. Garriott will return to Earth with Expedition 17 crew members, Commander Sergei Volkov and Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko on October 23."
With the extra attention on this launch, the Russians have gone out of their way to say that the return of the Soyuz vehicle will be safe, after a couple of different malfunctions in the past year. Garriott is in space partly for recreation, and partly as a promotion for his latest MMO, Tabula Rasa. He took with him a hard drive filled with information about humanity, as well as DNA sequences from Tabula Rasa players and various celebrities (including Stephen Colbert and Stephen Hawking) to 'preserve' that data in case of a disaster on Earth. Garriott will also spend time running and participating in experiments. Coverage of the Soyuz mission is ongoing at NASATV.
Sanity on the planet. (Score:5, Insightful)
By my definition, this makes Richard Garriott the most sane man on the planet, literally by escaping it for a short time.
For years, I've been baffled by the rat race millionaires and billionaires who seem to do nothing with their copious amounts of cash than collect more of it. It isn't sane IMHO unless you do something big and spectacular with that amount of excess. At most, some of them retire and give a portion to charity (not bad per se, but even then watch them coldly calculate how they dole it out).
Richard Garriott isn't super rich on a gigantic scale compared to some, but he's always done stuff that others may define as eccentric. Seriously tho, he's more sane than the rest of that upper margin.
Kudos to him.