Astronaut follows father into space

When the American astronaut Owen Garriott photographed Earth from the Skylab space station in 1973 he never would have thought that three decades later his son, Richard, would follow him.

As a young boy, Richard had dreamt of boldly going where his famous father had gone but, owing to his poor eyesight, they both knew that Nasa would never have taken him on. Instead, he went on to develop a series of fantasy computer games and became a multimillionaire in the process.

But yesterday morning Owen Garriott, a veteran of numerous space flights throughout the Seventies, looked on as a rocket carrying his son blasted off from the dusty plains of southern Kazakhstan and headed towards the International Space Station, making him the first American to see his child follow his example and reach space.

Mr Garriott's 47-year-old son has shelled out a reported $30m (£17.5m) for the 10-day voyage during which he will conduct a number of experiments including taking photos of the same areas of Earth his father photographed to see whether the world has changed. He becomes the sixth "space tourist" to have blasted off from the cosmodrome in Baikonur, once the Soviet Union's space hub and now leased to Russia by Kazakhstan.

When the Soyuz rocket docks with the International Space Station tomorrow, Richard Garriott will be met by another son whose father was also once a space traveller.

In April, Sergei Volkov became the world's first second-generation cosmonaut after he blasted off from the same cosmodrome to spend six months on the International Space Station. Unlike the tourists, Mr Volkov was trained as a professional cosmonaut but will return to Earth with Mr Garriott on 24 October.

Mr Volkov's father, Alexander, left for space at a time when his mother country was falling apart. He blasted off to the Mir space station in 1991 as a Soviet citizen but by the time he returned six months later he was a Russian citizen as the Soviet Union had collapsed while he was away.

For Richard Garriott, a seat aboard the Soyuz spacecraft is a dream come true. He has invested much time and money into the idea that space travel could be made into a profitable tourist venture. The Texan multimillionaire is a board member and investor in Space Adventures Ltd, a US-based company that has organised flights aboard Russian craft for five other millionaires. The Russian authorities are happy to accommodate these space tourists because the money they bring in helps fill a major funding gap.

As she watched the orange line of burning rocket fuel ark its way towards space Mr Garriott's girlfriend, Kelly Miller, shed tears of joy. "I'm really happy for him," she said. "It's one of the things he's wanted to do most in his life. I spent a lot of time listening to him about when he goes up in space. He's like a kid in a candy shop and I already want him to come back."

But the return to Earth is the most dangerous part of the journey. In April, Yi So-yeon, a South Korean bio-engineer and the last fee-paying astronaut to go into space, had a hair-raising ride back to Earth when their landing capsule failed to separate on time sending it into a steep trajectory known as a "ballistic descent". The capsule ended up 230 miles from the landing site and Mrs Yi spoke of how she thought she was going to die.

Yesterday Mrs Yi, who was also present for Mr Garriot's launch, played down any concerns. "We already had a lot of training for ballistic re-entry so it's not a big deal. I guess if he also has a ballistic landing he will feel lucky because he will also be a member of the ballistic landing club."

Reaching for the stars: the Skylab mission

*Owen Garriott spent 60 days on Skylab in 1973. The first space station was occupied by a series of three-man crews and it was the site of nearly 300 scientific and technical experiments. Six years later Skylab re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, breaking up over the Indian Ocean and western Australia. The Shire of Esperance, a local government area in the state of Western Australia, fined the US government $400 for littering. The fine remains unpaid.