On Oct. 23, computer game entrepreneur Richard Garriott landed in the Kazakhstan steppes after a visit to the International Space Station. After blasting off Oct. 12, Garriott returned to Earth aboard the Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft with Expedition 17 crewmembers Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, cosmonauts who spent six months aboard the ISS.Garriott, son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, paid some $30 million for the trip arranged by Space Adventures, a Virginia company in which he has invested. Garriott, long a proponent of commercial space travel, hopes to fund a second trip to space by performing work for commercial clients.
Q - How did the protein crystal experiments work out?
A - "I took basically a two-liter thermos full of a thousand little capillary tubes, filled with protein and precipitant. In 12 days, I have substantially increased the total number of crystals that have ever been grown in space.
"A whole other suite of them were done to specifically create commercial products. A good number of those we have pre-sold to pharmaceutical companies. The space-born crystals are more numerous and larger, but we have not defracted any of them, so we don't really know if the quality is demonstrably better.
"If it proves to be true, not only will I earn a little bit of my money back with my flight, but it will then set up our ability to do this on a much larger scale."
Q - How valuable is the space station?
A - "In my mind there is a real risk. As we begin to turn our attention to the moon, I think it really important we don't just throw away the laboratory we've just finished building with ten years of effort and hundreds of billions of dollars. Anyone who can actually pay to take payloads all the way to space, like me, ought to be encouraged to make use of this national asset we now have in space. Right now the policies are not set up to do that."
Q - How could NASA encourage commercialization in space?
A - "The first thing I would do is sit down and talk with the potential commercial clients. Private industry needs to understand what's available on station. Conversely, NASA needs to understand where the areas of commercial development might be.
"Then we've got to figure out a strategy by which a politically and rationally fair business structure can be sustained between businesses who want to do business in space and the current owners, the public.
"It just takes a measure of political will to push it into existence."
Q - What are your plans for the next trip?
A - "We'll look at the results we got from the handful of personal scientific and commercial experiments I ran. Now that I've been though the process of flying in space I'll take a more methodical look.
"I'll begin to talk to some of the commercial partners I began to work with on this flight and go off in search of more similar partners. Then I'll get out a spreadsheet and add it all up.
"If I'm fortunate, I'll add up a spreadsheet that says there's enough work for me to do in space that I get to fly again."
Q - When will we see this in your computer games?
A - "My games are filled with little parallels, little vignettes into those experiences I've had on Earth. I'm sure that my trip to space will affect the creative output of my gaming life. However, it's still a little too early for me to speculate exactly how. It's usually something where I take the awe you experience with some aspects of the revelation and find a way to create a parallel in the virtual world."
Q - What most amazed you?
A - "One of the inspiring things to look at, oddly, are the vast deserts of the Earth. There are deserts that do fill from horizon to horizon, even from space. Some of them have these long waveform sand dunes. The ones I found most interesting were these vast expanses of rocky plains, where the wind had sculpted these vast tracks of the Earth over a long time scale.
"There are these forms on the Earth the scale of a state."
Q - What's the state of space politics?
A - "The crew very much is apolitical. International politics were the furthest thing from everyone's mind.
"But, there is also no question that we all felt a little bit pushed around — and I know I felt a lot pushed around — by international politics, but the details of how and why I felt pushed around I don't think I can talk about because I think it might cause further exacerbation of those issues.
"I was somewhat disappointed, you might say, that things that had little to do with us living and working as a crew found their way into messages we all would receive about how we were told to live and work in space.
"World politics seemed to influence the crew adversely.
"(However), among the crew there is (no political turf). The crew is absolutely unified. We are in this incredibly unusual and dangerous location together. There was never any politics onboard the space station."
Q - What are the joys of weightlessness?
A - "It never became run-of-the-mill. The first minutes were joyous. Then you have this fluid shift. Days three, four and five, I actually was somewhat uncomfortable. That kind of passed. The last seven days were really, by far, the most pleasant, where I could really fly around the space station like a super gymnast and really enjoy it to the fullest."
Q - Did the experience of being at the International Space Station match your imagination?
A - The interior of the space station very much did match my expectation. That's only because there're really excellent simulators both at NASA and in Russia. It was very familiar and felt very comfortable.
"If you talk about what you saw outside the window, that has really never been simulated.
"I didn't really realize that from space you could so easily see airplane contrails, the wakes of ships as they came in and out of San Francisco Bay.
"You're really just skimming across the top of the atmosphere, fairly close to the atmosphere. As you watched the world go by at 17,000 miles an hour, you can really get a sense of the tectonic plate movements.
"You can see the weather of the planet as one complete integrated whole. All of the fertile areas of the earth are pretty well occupied globally.
"And as you travel by and see the entire United States in eight minutes coast to coast, I was regularly struck by how close together everything was."
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