It is very easy to fall asleep in space. When you’re at your desk at home and you’ve been working for hours and you nod off, your chin bumps your chest and you wake up with a start. In space, your head doesn’t fall. You simply fade into sleep; if you’re untethered, you float away.

This is the sort of thing you hear when you speak with Richard Garriott, a man you may know better as Lord British. He’s made millions of dollars creating and selling videogames and spent most of it going to space.

He says there is no ground on the International Space Station, nor is there a ceiling. There are instruments and all sorts of other things attached to the walls. You can tell who is new to space flight by how they bump into things, sending them spinning in zero gravity. They zoom around like benign spacefaring shrapnel. It collects by the air vents if no one picks it up. Sleeping bodies find their way there, as well.

This is where Richard Garriott wants to take you, and he is much closer than you think.

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Aboard the International Space Station.

Flying Poets

It’s hard not to romanticize a man like Garriott. His father was an astronaut, and only poor eyesight stopped the son from following the father into space. He began working with computers and went on to create many of the games many of us grew up playing.

For some people the title “Avatar” has nothing to do with James Cameron and everything to do with our adventures in Britannia. We remember when he was killed by his own people.

This is how Garriott speaks when describing what it was like to fly into space on the Soyuz rocket: “You know, unlike television where it’s always loud and has lots of vibration or you might imagine it feels like a dropping the clutch on the sports car as you take off at a green light, it’s actually much more cerebral. It’s almost perfectly smooth. It’s almost perfectly silent and feels much more like a confident ballet move, lifting you ever faster into the sky, than something scary or threatening.”

This is in stark contrast to the vision of space flight we’ve been sold by Hollywood, the violent and overwhelming cacophony of liftoff, as if man was by his very will pushing the earth away. As Garriott explains it, liftoff is simply man taking his rightful place in the heavens.

Returning to Earth also is different than you’d imagine. There is almost perfect silence as you hit the atmosphere at 17,000 mph. “That creates plasma around the vehicle that is hotter than the surface of the sun. Literally, my right shoulder was against that window,” he told us. “And that window is, you know, about five panes of glass and quartz and a few other things. There is a gap in the window that’s a vacuum, and that’s why the material doesn’t melt.”

This is where Garriott sat as he fell back to Earth, intellectually aware that something so hot and ferocious was just a few inches away. If something went wrong, he would have to go to work.

He knew the craft as well as the astronauts with him. There is no such thing as a passenger seat in space; if you fly, you work. He spent months training in Russia, and he knows that until they touch down on land, not water, there is radio silence. The reason is disturbing: If you’re talking when you hit land, you’re likely to bite through your tongue.

The landing did not go smoothly, as debris was knocked loose and kept his seat from operating normally. Smoke began to pour into the capsule from under an instrument panel, a moment Garriott called, “a little alarming.”

“When you hit the ground, even under a big parachute like that, that’s a six-ton boulder that hits the ground really, really hard,” he said, explaining what it’s like literally crashing back to earth. “And it really is like a car crash into a brick wall.”

His father the astronaut was there to greet him and Garriott learned that it was just as hard getting used to being back on land as it was getting used to being in space. “When I would lie in bed, since the inner ear fluid sloshed to the back, it makes you feel like you’re accelerating forward so you feel like you’ve got the bed spins after a bad night of drinking,” he said. This goes on for three days.

He and his father talked about what it was like to fly into space.

Richard Garriott was the 483rd person to go into space. Getting there required spending the majority of this fortune, undergoing corrective eye surgery and fixing his fused kidneys and liver hemangioma in order to pass the medical tests. His body is heavily scarred from the procedures. It cost tens of millions of dollars he earned by selling more than 100 million games.

Richard Garriott is not a man with a lack of will.

Talking With Richard Garriott

I met with Garriott in a small hallway during the DICE Summit to chat about space flight and what it taught him. Garriott is a thin man, with an intense speaking voice and a fierce intelligence.

I mentioned a chart compiled by aviator Burt Rutan that shows how long it took us to go from the Wright Brothers to the average person flying, and how that transition took far less time than it’s taking to get the middle class to space. Garriott shook his head, unhappy with the timeline.

“There’s a counter-graph that I talk about, which is when tall ships first started crossing the Atlantic,” he said. Back in the time of Columbus only the money and power of national governments could finance such expeditions, and their value was murky at best. “That’s how hard it was. It took a government to fund it. It was dangerous, and required huge expense.”

The expeditions required the work of governments and scientists, and brought gold, slaves and other possibilities. Once the value of these dangerous trips was understood, private individuals began making them and the technology needed to cross the sea became more affordable.

It took 50 years to happen, and those who made it happen were wealthy champions seeking business and research opportunities. This, Garriott argues, is the same path space flight has taken.

It must be science and industry that takes us to space, Garriott says. Tourism won’t cut it. “The current price is so high, we’re going to run out of billionaires who can afford the ticket price. So the price has to come down to sustain the tourism market. The real problem with space is cost.”

And governments are unwilling to pay what’s required, making great opportunities for private expeditions. The United States has offered the equipment on the space station to anyone who wants to go up and use it, but those brave souls also have to pay for the privilege.

Garriott wanted to go online when he was in the space station, but he found out it would cost $300,000 to send the first byte of information. This frustrated him, and he still seemed exasperated when he described the situation.

“[NASA] is not even using a fraction of their bandwidth, so your marginal cost is zero, because the infrastructure is in place,” he says. “The money you spent to put all this in orbit is sunk, it’s sunk cost. It’s too late to amortize it. The cost to use anything in space — frankly, I can’t think of any business that can pay those prices and be profitable.”

Garriott spent tens of millions of dollars to go and earned a fraction of that with the work he did, paid for by private companies. “Relevant, but not profitable,” he said. He went because he wanted to go, and had the fortune needed to do so. There simply aren’t many people able and willing to do that.

The Cost

Space flight is a hobby for the insane and rich. It costs $250 million to go up on the space shuttle, assuming the U.S. government would let you. It will only cost you $50 million to take a ride on Soyuz. “Already darn good savings!” Garriott said.

These are government spacecraft, however, and they weren’t designed for profit or with modern-day materials and know-how. Conversely, going up in Elon Musk’s SpaceX Dragon capsule will cost half that, according to estimates. Garriott claims the more easily reused spacecraft being designed today will bring the cost of flight into single-digit millions.

“That’s still not pocket change,” he says, “but an important thing happens when you go from hundreds to ones. If I only had to pay ones of millions to go into space, I already would have been profitable.” He could have funded his own trip by doing research and experiments for third parties, and made money on his time in space

At this point, I begin to notice how electrified Garriott gets when talking about space. He doesn’t want us to make money in space in 100 years, and he doesn’t want our kids riding in sub-orbital ships. He wants these things right freakin’ now.

He leaned forward as we spoke, and listed real projects being pursued by real people right now. The cost to send someone into space is crashing in a measurable way. Bigelow Aerospace already has two modules orbiting in space and is on track to create a privately owned space station. Jeff Bezos has a privately funded program called Blue Origin. Armadillo Aerospace has been active in creating suborbital crafts.

Garriott names these men and their projects in his speeches as he goes around the world evangelizing space flight, ticking off the wealthy visionaries and über-geeks pouring money into private space flight.

In a few short years, if these trends continue, the possibilities for business and research from the private sector will explode. Soon, you won’t need the government to make you an astronaut. Intel may be able to turn you into one. Google? Why not? And we’re going to be traveling on ships paid for, in part, by money made creating videogames.

Garriott talked about how expensive it is to send a person to an oil platform and how the promise of oil is enough to make that expenditure worth it. The logistical and safety nightmare is offset by the profits, and space is no different.

“Business will work in orbit,” he said flatly.

The important thing is to get the cost down. The cost of the Soyuz is immense, because it takes thousands of people to create it and then it’s thrown away. Garriott explained this would be like buying a new car every time you go to the gas station.

“Once we get to true reusability, the price will drop enormously,” he says. That’s the trick: creating a ship that can be flown over and over, safely and cheaply. Even if corporations take over space, the possibility of flying in orbit goes up for those interested, and Garriott pointed out that we will all be able to afford seats on a suborbital craft very soon.

What We Will Learn Once We Go

Your worldview changes significantly once you orbit the planet, but it takes time to sink in. “The Earth changes scale. It goes from being infinite in your mind’s eye to now … not only finite, but frankly pretty damn small,” Garriott says.

Pollution and forest fires become much scarier. Garriott described just how thin our atmosphere looks from space, and how you can watch the smoke rise from the land, hit the gases in the atmosphere and spread over large distances. “If that’s one fire, think of the amount of industrial waste, the volume of air we’re filling with junk over and over again. Your perception of whether or not we can fill the air with crap changes.”

The next big epiphany was weather. Half the earth always is covered in clouds, and you notice clouds are not the same.

“Over the Pacific there are giant laminar fronts, there is nothing but water of relatively similar temperature,” Garriott says. Over the Atlantic, with more chaotic landmasses with weather formations, the clouds are nowhere near as stable.

Garriott described what it was like to learn about meteorology passively, simply by looking out the window and watching how clouds formed and to observe the plates of the Earth and how they fit together. He noted land erosion, long plumes of matter at the mouths of rivers. “You get a sense of the scale, of how much mass is being washed into the world’s oceans,” he says.

Garriott says everyone who ventures into space not only experiences what he calls the “overview effect,” but also changes their behavior back home. He said his own lifestyle was terrible, despite donating to environmental causes and considering himself a conservationist. He owned several sports cars, generated a lot of trash and lived in large houses that sucked down a lot of energy.

Since going into orbit he no longer drives the cars and is building an electric SUV. He has added solar panels to his property to become energy neutral. “I’m not there yet, but close,” he says.

This is where it gets interesting. Garriott is a big evangelist for people who can afford to do it right, to choose to do it right.

“There’s a lot of things we do I’m not sure are very helpful. Ninety percent of the water we waste is from agriculture. I would rather have a toilet that works and fix [the agriculture waste issue] than install a low-flow toilet or shower,” he says. If you have the money to make the changes, it’s going to spiral out to everyone.

“Now, to become energy neutral is not cost-effective on an individual basis. If those who can afford to can get close, to elect to do it, that will help get the industry moving to where it is more and available to a broad audience,” he says.

This change in behavior and thought doesn’t happen instantly. “It would require everyone to have a few orbits,” he explains. It would also take many, many people going into orbit. “More than 1 percent of humanity,” he says. “It has to be a large amount of people, millions of people into space. I can assure you it will change life on Earth.”

People who are religious have religious thoughts, but space flight does not cause you to open to the idea of God, Garriott says. When people get back, they share the story and change their lifestyle. It’s a holistic, apolitical process.

There is also the matter of pollution in space, an issue that’s only getting worse. “If you ask where the space station is going to be six months from now, they can’t tell you. Every few months they adjust the orbit to remain a safe distance away from a known piece of debris,” he says.

Garriott claims it’s only a matter of time before someone is killed in space by debris, and it won’t happen when they’re in the spacecraft. You can tell how old the windows on a spacecraft are by the number of pockmarks left by small collisions with debris. Were a piece of junk to hit the space station, fixing the hole is not as difficult as you’d think.

“We’re only talking about a difference of 32 pounds per square inch pressure. Unlike the movies where you get sucked through the window, that just wouldn’t happen.”

But a piece of space junk hitting someone’s suit and causing decompression is much harder to survive.

We’ll Go

During his talk, Garriott showed video of a vertical takeoff and a landing craft. It’s a design John Carmack, creator of the Doom series of games, is developing and Garriott’s company is selling seats.

“And this vehicle — you can literally just refuel and refly. There’s no wear parts on it of any kind,” Garriott tells the crowd. “This vehicle will fly so frequently that it really is just the fuel costs that you have to cover because it’s so efficient from an operational standpoint.”

They’ve already sold tickets for rides, Garriott tells me, and the cost is reasonable considering the tens of millions he spent: $100,000 is all you need. Garriott believes he can get that down to $50,000, maybe even $25,000. “It’s just a multiple of the fuel cost,” he says.

The room was spellbound watching the rocket take off and land. It’s beautiful. This is the magic of speaking with Garriott and hearing his passion for exploration and testing the limits of what we can do on the planet — and beyond it. Suddenly you’re looking at the future, and it’s beautiful.

“How’s that?” he says during the video. “You want to go for a ride on that one?” The room erupts in cheers. I keep my mouth shut and my tongue still, thinking about what it would be like to bite through it.

This story was written by Ben Kuchera and originally published by Ars Technica.

Photos courtesy Richard Garriott