Kin of ex-NASA astronaut to travel in space

MOSCOW: Son of former NASA astronaut Owen K Garriott will travel into space on board the Russian segment of International Space Station (ISS).
 
UK-born Richard Garriott, developer of the Ultima computer game series, will be the sixth tourist to travel to the ISS on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft for a weeklong space venture holiday in 2008.
 
He had bought a voucher of USD 20 million from a US-based space tourism agent involved in global marketing for the Russian Space Agency, according to RIA Novosti.
 
Dennis Tito, an American businessman and former NASA scientist was the first space tourist who visited the ISS in 2001.
 
Tito was followed by South African IT millionaire Mark Shuttleworth (2002), Gregory Olsen, a US entrepreneur-cum- scientist in 2005, Anousheh Ansari (40), an American citizen of Iranian origin and a telecommunications businesswoman in 2006 and Charles Simonyi (58), a US citizen of Hungarian descent who had a key role in developing MS Word and Excel applications in 2007.
 
Meanwhile, Russia has said that the price for commercial space flights would go up from USD 20 million to USD 25 million.