Yusaku Maezawa has purchased a flight to the International Space Station
He is a Japanese billionaire who has made his wealthy in the fashion industry
Maezawa is set to launch aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in December
He is bringing a production crew to capture life on the orbiting laboratory
Maezawa has also purchased the first flight of SpaceX s Starship rocket
The rocket is set to take off in 2023 and take the crew around the moon
For years, most people who knew
Richard Garriott knew him by his game industry alter-ego: Lord British. Under that name, Garriott made some of the best games in the early days of the hobby. His early effort
Akalabeth: World of Doom paved the way for his
Ultima series, a collection of games that still influences role-playing game development today. Garriott coined the term Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game as he developed
Ultima Online, and in doing so helped shape the future of the game industry.
But there’s more to Garriott than gaming. He is the son of astronaut Owen K. Garriott, who took part in Skylab 3 and Space Shuttle missions. Richard Garriott wanted to be the first private citizen to go to space and nearly made it, until the dot-com bubble broke and devastated his finances. But he made it to space in 2008.
NASA Astronaut Says Floating In Space Is Like Being a Superhero: It Is That Cool
On 5/5/21 at 10:15 AM EDT
Imagine having a job so good that you never wanted to come home from work.
For Mike Fincke, this is a reality. Fincke, 54, is a NASA astronaut who has spent over a year in space at one time holding the national record.
Since reaching space for the first time in 2004, Fincke has travelled aboard Russian Soyuz capsules and NASA s Space Shuttle Endeavour orbiter. He is also due to fly on the first crewed flight of Boeing s CST-100 Starliner capsule at the end of this year or the start of 2022.
Seeing the Earth from space “turns you into an environmentalist”, former NASA astronaut Andy Thomas says.
Thomas, a native Adelaidean, flew four space missions, spending about six months in space, much of it on Russia’s Mir space station.
He describes what it’s like to get such a different perspective – it’s been dubbed the “Overview Effect”.
“You get an appreciation of the finite resources represented by the Earth,” he says.
“I remember one day I was flying and there were some fires burning in Central America, in Nicaragua. They use slash and burn farming practices there and the deforestation is a tragedy.