At the age of 13, Richard Garriott was told he would never be an astronaut.
The family physician, a NASA doctor in Houston, delivered the blow following aroutine eye examination. The mere fact that he’d need glasses was enough to dash any hopes of space travel. Countless kids harbor a fervent, if abstract, fantasy of exploring the cosmos, but for Ga rriott,t hes ono fan astronaut, that dream was more of a blueprint for life, and the diagnosis seemed a cruel injustice. But it also set him on what would prove to be a single-minded, if roundabout, quest.
“Everyone we knew was an astronaut or somehow involved in putting people into space,” says Garriott, 60, at home in New York. “It felt like I was being randomly kicked out of this club before I was even old enough to decide if this was the future for me. Iwent through the seven stages of grief—anger, sadness, denial...—before finally thinking, ‘Who is this doctor to tell me that I can’t go into space? If Ican’t go by their rules, I’m going to make my own space agency.’” And that’s exactly what he did.
Garriott’s is a story of wily creativity and dogged determination, multiple space-oriented enterprises and a litany of false starts. It took him 34 years to achieve his goal, but in the process he became one of the world’s most dedicated, unsung explorers of the land and sea. Only now, having recently been elected the 45 th president of the Explorers Club—an elite society of scientists and explorers, founded in 1904 and headquartered in Manhattan—are his travails getting the recognition they deserve.
From an early age, Garriott showed an inquisitive and explorat ive nature. Some of his earliest memories are of crawling through caves in Arkansas, lighting the way with a pack of matches. His mother was an artist and anaturalist, sovacations wereoften spent in Yosemite National Park. His father, a physics professor at Stanford University, became one of NASA’s first scientist-astronauts, spending about 60 days—twice the duration of any previous mission—on board the Skylab space station in 1973. He returned to space in 1983 on a 10-day flight of the shuttle Columbia, carrying NASA and the European Space Agency’s Spacelab-1 module.
“I have great memories of my dad going into space,” says Garriott. His house was wired with squawk boxes, which enabled the family to listen into NASA communications when his dad was on a mission. “And my mom had alittle black ‘Batphone,’ with one button. If you pressed that one button, it dialed the mission control at NASA, and if it wasn’t abusy time, they would immediately phone directly up to my dad at Skylab. I could literally dial and ask him how to solve a math problem. Only reflecting on that as an adult do you realize, ‘Wow, that was not that normal.’”
After his ocular blacklisting, Garriott focused his curiosity on the emerging tech field, and by his early teen she was an accomplished computer-games designer. Bytheage of 15, he was running a successful gaming company. During his time studying attheUniversity of Texas, G ar riot tear ned serious cash. He also coined the term“avatar ,” among a number of other more esoteric expressions, and later sold his first company, Origin Systems (most notably behind the critically acclaimed Ultima series), to Electronic Arts for around $30 million. Indeed, Garriott genuinely stakes a claim to being one of the founding fathers of video games.
His business expertise and impressive income led to a parade of NASA alumni, including Buzz Aldrin, knocking on his door looking for investment in their various commercial space projects. “Over a decade, I invested in quite a few of these attempts,” Garriott says. “Pretty much all of those were a bust but one. These guys may have been great scientists and engineers, but they were not great entrepreneurs .” And he was nonearer to boarding a rocket himself.
Despite his obsession, the young Garriott wasn’t entirely blinkered; he developed quite a reputation for one or two of his spending habits. “I’ve still had ahealthy attraction to material objects but perhaps not in the usual way,” he says. “I’ve never had megayachts or planes, but I’ve always had really exotic homes full of secret passage ways, observatories and dungeons .” His collections include natural history, automatons, antique scientific apparatuses, medieval arms and armor, and, of course, space oddities. “My homes are mini museums.”
Of all his admittedly speculative investments, only one managed to get off the ground. Spacehab was a40-person commercial research module that could attach to a shuttle’ s payload bay. It flew on three shuttle missions, according to NASA, but then, Garriott says, “NASA told me, ‘We’re not in the business of taking private people to space.’ So close, yet so far.”
Meanwhile, Gar riot th ad been attempting to cajole his way into space via the Ansari X Prize. In 1995, he was part of the board of trustees that offered $10 million to the first nongovernment organization that could build a vehicle capable of flying 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, into space twice within two weeks. Actor Tom Hanks, a patron of the project (last awarded in 2004), has called the prize a masterstroke, adding, “What X Prize could very well do is jump-start a part of space exploration that is based on the active participation of regular Americans.” Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites won the competition with SpaceShipOne, an entry funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. The technology was subsequently bought by Richard Branson and became the precursor to Virgin Galactic.