An Interview with Richard Garriott: Life’s a Game and Then You Die on Mars

Richard Garriott launched his career by creating giant, wild virtual role-playing games, and his whole life has looked like one ever since. In 2008, he followed in the footsteps of his father, the NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, when he underwent months of training, strapped into a Soyuz rocket, and became one of the first private citizens to float into the most expensive mansion ever built, the International Space Station. The trip is chronicled in a fantastic new documentary, Man on a Mission, (you can watch it now on iTunes and video on demand.)

At his own castle-like mansion back on Earth, in Austin, the programmer-turned-gaming impresario, known by his handle Lord British, has created a modern-day wonder cabinet (chronicled here), replete with dinosaur fossils, a 16th century vampire hunting kit, automatons, a Sputnik and an observatory — all things he's taking to the bigger palace he's built down the road. He's also the proud owner of a Russian lunar rover, which technically makes him the only private owner of an object sitting on another planet (stay tuned for more on that soon). The claim is a taste of a future in which private individuals and commercial entities — not just politically-ensared government agencies — help support the great expansion of mankind into the far reaches of the solar system.

Before he scores a one-way ticket to Mars though, Garriott has his sights set much lower: a rocket ride to a mere 50,000 feet or so, at which point he plans to dive back through the atmosphere wearing a spacesuit. Of course.

• See more in the Motherboard documentary with Richard Garriott.

I really really enjoyed the documentary. What’s the reception been like?

So far, fantastic. It's been great to see the reception that it's had, and I think most people are walking away with the message I was hoping to bring forth, which is not only just how, a great behind-the-scenes look at what space flight is really about, but more importantly, how I really do strongly believe that anyone can tackle challenges that are this monumental, like fly themselves into space just with the persistence, dedication, and constantly working to solve the problems that might hold you back from being able to accomplish it.

And money, of course. Your ticket reportedly cost $30 million dollars. Do you have the resources to go back up?

I expect I'll fly multiple times in the future. For example, probably the soonest will be, if I can get my wife into the sport, its something called space-diving. We're going to use some of the suborbital vehicles – our most likely target is the Armadillo Aerospace Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing Rocket – to create a skydiving platform that can go to any altitude, from normal skydiving altitude, which would be 10,000 feet, up to special altitudes, and skydive, or space-dive, with a spacesuit, and parachute from 15,000 meters up.

How long until we're all space diving?

Not as long as you'd think. I think depending on how pessimistically or optimistically you look at the suborbital vehicles coming up, I think if you were an optimist, you'd think that they're two or three years out. Even if you're a pessimist, I don’t think most people doubt that they're coming within the next five years.

The spacesuit is easier to create. We have two makers who have already signed on to provide suits, and we're now putting together the consortium of jumpers who will fund the suits. We really have a couple of years before we have to have all the money in the till to have the suit prepared while we wait on the rocket, but the two main engineering firms have already done the basic design and engineering for the suits. So as soon as we have the vehicles available, we should be able to do the jumps.

The record is still held by Joe Kittinger. Do you know him?

Very well, yep. I met Joe a couple times. He set his record before I was born, actually. It's been a long time since anybody's attempted something like that, and what's interesting is that there are companies like Red Bull and others that have been trying to do this, but they've all been trying to do it with hydrogen balloons. In my mind, those are still not space jumps, even though they will occasionally bill them as a space dive. In my mind that's false advertising.

Why is that?

Based on the fact that, by definition, if you're in a balloon, you're not in space. I think what's interesting about what we're doing is once you have one of these rockets, it basically takes you to whatever altitude you want, up to its maximum. If you jump out at 10,000 feet, it's a normal skydive. If you jump out at 25,000 feet, that's a normal skydive with an oxygen bottle, which I myself have done out of high altitude hot air balloons.

Then if you go up to 50,000 feet. You need a spacesuit, but that's not a dangerous altitude to dive out of as long as you have a pressure suit, and you can do that with these simple little rockets. And then you can push on not only up to 100,000 feet, or a little more than Kittinger's record, but you can push on up to the suborbital level, and make true space jumps. And you can do it incrementally, so we can be testing along the way, and make sure we have parameters of safety throughout the whole profile.

Where else do your commercial space interests lie?

That's what we're working on now. But in addition, I think that a number of the commercial vehicle makers – my favorite being Elon Musk's SpaceX, and his Falcon 9 and Dragon combinations – already point to being the most cost-effective way ever to get to orbit. And with the following generations, Elon believes, and the math works in my mind, too, that he can get the cost of orbit down to closer to a million dollars per passenger, as opposed to what was most recently on the shuttle, which was about thirty million dollars per passenger, and if he does that, I'll be going to space a lot more often.

Because even though that's still a large amount of dollars, the fact is, you can earn more than that with your trip to space than we did before. So if Elon succeeds with his fully reusable rocket, I think you'll see the door swung wide open as far as commercial activity in space.

Are you going to buy a ticket to go…farther?

It may or may not be able to occur within my adventuring lifetime, but if it were, I'd be one of the first people headed over to Mars. I'd take a one-way trip to Mars to help settle a new planet.

That being said, there's still plenty of opportunities left on Earth. I'm going back to the Titanic this summer for the one hundredth anniversary of the sinking. I hope to — I've been trying to get it for a few years now and haven't made much progress — but another big terrestrial adventure I've been trying to put together is visiting disappearing indigenous populations of the Earth.

There's really very few truly remote and isolated civilizations, but there are some. Before they're all completely absorbed, I have a strong interest in seeing some truly non-Westernized cultures and really understanding some of the differences of cultural identity and belief and organization has evolved in the earliest forms of humanity.

Where will that take you exactly, do you think?

Well, there are two general areas: There are quite a few such tribes in South America, and there are some on some of the larger islands in the South Pacific. There are a few in Southeast Asia, but those are the ones I know the least about so far.

Speaking of indigenous people, I've heard about how the construction of the space port in French Guiana had caused considerable frustration among the locals. Did you ever hear anything about that?

I have not heard that. I wouldn't be too shocked to hear it, but no, I haven't heard that. That sounds interesting and very plausible.

There is, right now in this country, no certain plan for going to space. What's your sense of what the end of the Space Shuttle has done to the astronaut corps, and to NASA?

What's interesting is we're in a very temporary anomaly in my mind, and what I mean by that is I think there's a lot of misinformation about what the new era of human spaceflight will be. When you think of the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers on Mars, there's no doubt in any person's mind on Earth that those are a NASA mission. They're NASA rovers, put up there by NASA, doing NASA work, and all the pictures come from NASA.

Nobody really minds or cares that the boosters of those things were made by private entities, or that commercial boosters are the same as the boosters that put up every communications satellite used for our cell phones or cable TV. It does not diminish the NASA mission to have used a commercial booster. The only place that NASA doesn't use commercial boosters has been their human launches.

The result of that is, if someone offered them a half-price booster, or a booster during the shuttle era, NASA was really not prepared to utilize it because they sort of already owned their own infrastructure for the booster that they owned, the shuttle. It wouldn't have made any sense for them to kind of switch horses midstream, so to speak. Similarly, they're not set up to be a reseller of launch services.

So what's really changing is, from the old era to the new era, is their procurement method for buying the shuttle. They bought the shuttle in parts and then operated it themselves. They bought the orbiter from Boeing, they bought some of the rocket boosters from another company, they put them together and launched them on their own pad.

Now they're going to the same people, and saying 'Boeing, you can build us a capsule? By the way, we'll buy use of your capsule in the next round, but if SpaceX comes up with a capsule that's half the cost or twice as safe, next year we might buy from them instead.'

And so what that means is immediately the cost for NASA has dropped tenfold. The new offers being made to NASA are literally ten times cheaper. In addition to ten times cheaper, it now means that companies like Boeing, who might be selling NASA four launches a year, come to companies like my company, Space Adventures, and say "Hey Space Adventures, if you can sell one flight a year, that increases by 25% our flight rate, and that means everyone will get this much cheaper, and it means higher flight safety for all users."

So NASA is very pleased with this, Boeing is very pleased with it, Space Adventures is very pleased with it, and all the astronauts are very pleased with it, because that means everyone is going to get greater access to space at a fraction of the cost.

We're talking about low earth orbit, nothing farther.

If anybody is going to get to go to an asteroid, it’s going to be NASA. If anybody is going to be the first people to land on a moon around Mars, it's going to be NASA. If anyone is going to put out challenges to land material on Mars or eventually some people on Mars, it's going to be NASA.

There's reason to go to low earth orbit – we built a space station there. But why are we continuing to send people there unless there is value to bring back that is greater then the cost? And if that is true, start turning it over to private industry. Once NASA goes to an asteroid, when you get there are either going to be valuable minerals to mine and bring back to the Earth or there won't be. If there are, private industry will fall behind and do it, and if not, you say 'Congratulations, we’ve been to an asteroid. Now let’s go on to another mission, move on, and don’t go back.'

What this new era is going to do is it's really going to let NASA focus on exploration, as they used to and will in the future, and let the private sector worry about ultimate exploitation. Which is the only way you get the efficiency is to make it a workable business.

Do you think that the public still needs to shift the way it thinks about NASA and the way it thinks about space in general?

We are turning to the right track. The right track is ultimately happening but here’s the difficulty of turning the ship. When NASA was started as a great national effort to put people on the moon, NASA facilities were opened in many states across the country, or half a dozen states anyway. A huge amount, multiple percentage points of the entire nation's GDP, was put into NASA to reach the moon.

Well, part and parcel of shifting to this new model, which is going to actually ultimately make more jobs, and more activity in space, and more economic successes surrounding space, is making changes. For example, if SpaceX is building some of the boosters of the future, you are moving personnel employment from one state to another. And that means all of the previous states, of course, are not in favor of this plan. And those previous states are all the states whose congressmen are on the committee to do appropriations for the government spending in space. So this is running completely against political power.

Right.

And so what we’ve done has sort of been a hybrid. We have split the baby, and we have half of the budget going towards sustaining old programs and we have half the budget going to starting new programs. Well, what is going to happen is the half that is going to new programs is succeeding wonderfully. Although it is only taking half the budget – it could have succeeded twice as quickly – but it's now at half speed and the half that is being spent on the traditional launches is keeping half those jobs for awhile.

So, you know, it’s too bad that the political reality is slower to turn, but don’t forget it’s okay if the price we have to pay to get there is to not cause further job catastrophes in some states where historically we’ve had these job programs running, that’s an acceptable political reality.

Speaking of politics, you're known as Lord British, but if you were actually Lord American, what are some things that would change under your rule?

I think we've just emerged out of a era where fundamental science and technology was ignored and defunded. And now we're moving back to a model where science funding, fundamental science research and exploration, are now being considered and are funded more appropriately. So the trend is actually very good. The only real big changes that I would make is how you do accounting for it. In other words, what are your expectations on the backside of that, how you measure success, how you decide which things to invest in.

How quickly do you send research off and say, 'look if this is really a good idea, it needs to be self-sufficient, it can’t be riding on the back of the taxpayers.' In my mind, as taxpayers, what you will invest in, what the government invests our tax money in, is to open new frontiers that are very risky, what no individual or no company could do because there are reasonable odds.

If we are going to go to an asteroid, no one has made the compelling case yet to know if the asteroid is worth visiting other then for exploration itself. And so the government has to do the research and exploration as a way to discover new opportunities for our community of individuals. However, once we’ve determined that there is or is not something of value behind that research, it very quickly needs to get off the backs of the tax payers and back into the hands of the private industry. To make work or whatever is to be made of it.

I wish, for instance, that we were participating in a lot of these supercollider activities. If you think about some of the fundamental particle research as a terrestrial area of research, determining the fundamental laws of physics is what has allowed us to create incredibly small microchips and a lot of the other foundational technologies that we are all using right now. And whoever owns the next round of fundamental understanding of physics will be the owners of the next generation of technology that we’ll all probably have in our homes and in our phones.

Because for the last ten years we in the United States have ignored that, there’s a lot of European or other countries that are now ahead of us. The same thing is true for biology. I think one of the greatest values of space science is biological research, as well as one of the greatest areas of research on the ground. And we’re just emerging out of an era where areas like stem cells, you know fundamental biological research, have been either ignored or banned, within the United States. I much more favor the current orientation. But we need to make sure that after discoveries are made, we get them into private use quickly.

You're involved with the X Prize, which challenges anyone to do things like building a spaceship that can land on and take off from the moon. Do you think that kind of challenge, and private investment in general, is a sort of template for big science and engineering in the future?

I think it is, and let me give you an exact example of that. I’m a big believer that humanity must become a multi-planet species. I think that within a millennia or so, if we don’t, there are reasonable odds that life could be threatened on Earth. So even though that is not next year or even a century from now, I think there is no time like the present to start to encourage humanity to become multi-planet. And the first opportunity for that probably is Mars.

We used to have a 30 year plan to get to Mars, during the Bush Era. But the problem with a 30 year, many billions of dollars plan to go to Mars is that it was not only un-fundable during one President, but that even if he had gotten it funded the probability that a 30 year plan with such an increase in budget surviving every 4 years, through every new regime for 30 years is, I think, close to zero.

So I don’t think it’s sustainable, no plan like that is sustainable. The biggest kind of plan that we’ve ever pulled off are more like the moon missions, where it is all within one decade. Within two presidents. And so for me the way that humanity moves on to Mars is you create decade-long plans. In the first decade we will visit an asteroid. You may not find a mineral there worth bringing back to the Earth, so you hand it off to private industry. And either way NASA then moves on to their second decade plan which is to go visit a low gravity moon. Somewhere near Mars for example.

The third decade plan is Martian. In anticipation of the third-decade plan, NASA could put together a 1 billion dollar prize, like the X Prize, for the first people to sequester on the surface of Mars a certain amount of oxygen or hydrogen. And you put another billion dollar prize out there, for the first group that builds, lets say a self sustaining greenhouse on Mars. And you put another billion dollar prize out there for whoever makes a machine on the surface of Mars that begins to build radiation hardened holding habitats, on the surface of Mars. And whatever else you might need, power, an electrical power grid, or a solar power grid, whatever it might be.

The point is, for only a few billion dollars, as we’ve already proven with the X Prize, you get about a hundred fold increase in spending. People will spend a hundred times the value of the prize in order to try and win the prize, if you include all of the people who have been beat. And so you’ll get a hundred billion dollars for each one of those prizes, because of people like Boeing or SpaceX. Who believe that they can lead the group and land that coal collector, or culminator, or igloo, or whatever it might be on Mars. So about thirty years from now, before NASA ever decides to spend a bunch of their money on going to Mars, they already have the infrastructure on the surface. And then NASA says, "we're going to send the Mayflower."

Back down to Earth: what was the descent like in your Soyuz craft? That seemed to me to be the most intense part of the entire adventure.

No question it is, but you know what is interesting about launch and descent, is that they are much more cerebral and serene then violent and scary. Even as you enter the Earth’s atmosphere, and suddenly the orange glow begins out the window as you plunge into the atmosphere, you know it is still silent and smooth. And then only very slowly do the G-forces pick up, and only very slowly do you begin to hear the wind whistle as the atmosphere gets thicker and thicker. But it is still very smooth, so out the window you see the heat shield melting around you, which is very surreal but it feels very gentle and non-scary.

But then, when the parachutes open that’s the first time you get cracked like a whip, and spun around on the inside. You drop the heat shield and then the equalization valve pops open, and smoke is pouring into the cabin. And we had a couple other malfunctions that occurred at that moment. The rock and roll part of it only began fairly close to the Earth, and then of course, the violent thump on the ground, which is really more like a car crash then a landing. But still, there was never a point in there where I would really say I was scared for my life, but there were a few points where you’re going, "this could potentially become pretty uncomfortable."

Right. Some cosmonauts lost their lives during those landings.

But that was 35 years ago, very, very early on in the program. The Soyuz is actually now considered a hundred to a thousand times safer then the Shuttle.

Is that right!

Yeah. They’ve had a 35-year perfect record of safety now in the Soyuz since a couple of early failures. And the Space Shuttle killed 2 out of 150 crews, which is about a 1 out of 70 or so death rate. And so Soyuz, mathematically and even by NASA, is said to be extremely safe, where the shuttle is seen as extremely dangerous, even by NASA.

What is the hardest part about being in space, I mean what is the thing that most people don’t get about the life of an astronaut in Space Station?

Well, most of the things in space are very joyful and fun, the only things that aren’t what I’ll call better then things on Earth. The food that you take to orbit is all basically military rations that can stay unrefrigerated and remain fresh for a year at a time. The bathroom facilities are in a dramatic need of redesign – you can’t really take a shower or bath, you’re kinda wiping off with wet towels. So I would say that the creature comforts of eating, sleeping, and hygiene are definitely the deficiencies. But the view, the joy of floating around all day everyday, the amazing experiments you can perform, just with simple objects, much less sophisticated tools, the views out the window, that is all spectacular.

You made a film in space, but NASA didn't want you to release it. What will its fate be?

I’m glad you asked, because of the recent release of the documentary, I've also just these last few days been contacted by NASA. Headquarters is now saying, look we don’t want to be seen as restricting something as innocuous as this. So they are now doing a review, they are reviewing that ruling and hopefully we’ll be able to release it here soon. I’ve asked them multiple times before and they have always turned me down.

Why did you make a sci-fi film on the Space Station, apart from the sheer fun of it?

I have a story to tell about space that goes beyond my father's era of space. His era was run with a specific political objective: beat the Russians. We've now been stuck for a period of deacdes where it's still a little bit political – can we all get along together in space? – and a jobs program that's about how do we keep these jobs alive, while trying to justify our existence based on inspiration. I'm very bullish on space, I'm hugely pro-NASA — I'm on the civilian oversight committee, called the NASA advisory council. I very much believe in the mission of NASA. But I also believe it has to be told better, and the public has to help NASA move towards a more sustainable future.

How's your dad?

Very well. In fact, after I spoke to Elon Musk over the holidays about his re-usuable rocket, my dad said, if he succeeds, you and I are flying together next. So maybe I'll fly with my dad.

You coined the term Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. What do you think about the current breed of MMORPGs?

I think we’re now in the third grand era of gaming. I was one of the major participants in the first grand era, so called solo player games. You know for 20 years all games were solo player games. Then I helped create the second grand era, of massively multiplayer games, you know with Ultima Online being arguably the first among many. And MMO’s are ten times bigger then solo player games, so it’s been a major success in the trend of gaming.

Now we are entering the third grand era, which I’ll call mobile and social games. And what is interesting about this era as opposed to previous eras is that where you had to pay fifty dollars to subscribe to a game every month, mobile and social games are games that you play for free or a low entry fee. Only when you find that the game is worth your time do you pay for it. And as opposed to it being multiplayer, now it's about asynchronous multiplayer. In social media games, you're playing with your real friends, with whom you don't have the ability or time to devote to play with them at the same time.

What have you been doing on the gaming front since your departure from NCSoft in 2008?

We're working on a variety of names already. Either Akalabeth or Lord British's Ultimate Role Playing Game, just to do a tie back to the past. I have a game in production now that will set the stage for a ten-times-larger audience, aiming to do what we did before with MMORPGs, bringing ten times more people into role playing games.

Have you played some of the hot new RPGs, like Minecraft or Skyrim?

Love Minecraft. Haven't played Skyrim, but from what I know it's also phenomal. What I love about Minecraft is that it's an open ended sand box that I enjoy making and playing personally. Skyrim has absolutely first class production valeus, but the company seems devoted to a depth of storytelling that I am, so I'm a big fan of both of those.

How has the conversation around gaming changed in the past few years?

I go back to the time when playing games of any kind were seen not just as a waste of time, but potentially truly evil, when Dungeons and Dragons was seen as a form of devil worship. If you look only a decade back, at best games were still seen as a true waste of time. But only in the past decade, have you seen that people have figured out that games can be ways of connecting to each other, that games can be literature, in the same way that reading a book can hold a mirror up to yourself and the human condition and really have a positive influence on the participant. People are starting to realize that that's becoming possible in the artform of games, even though most games don't do it.

Just to keep space in your system though, do you occasionally have to hitch a zero G ride?

Absolutely. Whenever Space Adventures has someone interested in chartering a zero-G flight, they know very well: I'm already pre-voluneetered so that if they want an astronaut to fly along with them, they can call me up and I'll be there. I fly zero-G two or three times a year.

If you ever need a potential “astronaut” to join you, you know how to reach me.

Excellent! I'll remember that.

• NASA Signs Up For More Russian Space Taxi Rides
• Richard Garriott: His Biggest Game is Space
• Does a $60 Million Soyuz Seat At Least Include a Meal?