Space Adventures: Richard Garriott de Cayeux

Gather around the fireside, kids! It's time to hear Lord British regale us once again with his true adventures in outer space (now on YouTube)!

No spoilers here since what you're about to read is my own synopsis from this "preview" talk hosted by The Austin Forum and held at the AT&T Conference Center on the UT-Austin campus on February 5, 2013. This event previews before his 2013 South by Southwest Interactive Presentation.

Any omissions are mine so feel free to throw meteorites. This post is haste enough! Onward!

Yes, I agree. This photo is terrible, but, hey, it's
Richard Garriott de Cayeux talking about his dad & space!

At this preview, there are about 200 people in rapt attention to hear Richard's 30-year vision for space travel:

10 years: Land on and study asteroids

20 years: Colonize our moon (and, perhaps Titan)

30 years: Colonize a planet (a one-way trip)

A bit more on this in a moment. For now, just know that NASA can only do so much. For example, right now, it takes about $10 million to put one person into space. The hope is that public-private partnerships may eventually reduce this cost and make space exploration and space travel much more affordable.

He says that when he goes to space, he doesn’t want to go as a tourist but to study and to contribute something meaningful including virus study. It turns out that viruses are even more virulent in space than on Earth! As the 165th person to travel into space (after his father, Owen, a skylab astronaut), he also recalls the neighborhood where he grows up near NASA and nearly everyone is an astronaut!

 Upon seeing the Earth from the Russian-spacecraft, Richard says he no longer has reservations about how important it is to protect the planet even though he's the first to admit that his own recycling habits have been far from perfect over the years. In space, while flying 10,000 mph, he says you circle the globe once approximately every 10 minutes. When they fly over Texas in the Russian spacecraft, he sees the areas he’s driven so many times “the Austin/Dallas/Houston triangle” in addition to all the weather patterns, fires (rainforests), and pollution over China and India and elsewhere but it’s his home turf that has the most impact since it dawns on him how small we humans are. 

Perhaps we know this already but he feels space travel and eventual colonization are a must if humankind is to survive. Eventually, when the sun dies, we’re going to need to leave Earth. 

The Japanese are planning to build an enormous solor collector in space to harness energy (a device that I think he says is at least a mile across). He also feels this is a bad idea since it’s not enough power for anything useful; plus, it’s an eyesore that only adds to the space junk. 

So, why a 30-year space plan?

The reason he wants to explore and perhaps to colonize asteroids is to gather mineral samples and hopefully learn more about astrobiology including human and Earth chemical compositions. Also, it could be an efficient way to travel through space without power (maybe). 

The reason to colonize moons is because it’s the next logical step as practice for planet colonization and we can learn how to live in and research lunar surfaces. 

When he asks the audience: “If given a chance today, with reasonable safety measures (not to die), how many of you would agree to a one-way trip to colonize another planet knowing you could never come back to Earth?”

Curiously, and as he expects, only about 30 percent of the audience raises their hands. And you? 

If you'd like to see more about what these "Space Ex" companies are doing, please visit:

Space Adventures - founded by Richard Garriott

BlueOrigin - founded by Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos

SpaceX - founded by Elon Musk, PayPal founder and Tesla (automotive) developer