On October 12, Richard Garriott will be the sixth private citizen into space. The creator of the Ultima series whose known ingame as Lord British is one of the founders of Space Adventures Ltd., which will send him on a two-day ride in a Soyuz rocket up to the International Space Station, where he'll stay for a week.

Garriott is connecting his trip to his most recent game, Tabula Rasa, though the somewhat silly but clever Operation Immortality. Consider that if aliens wipe out life on planet Earth, we're kind of screwed. Shouldn't we make provisions for such an event? Hence, the Immortality Drive. This little flash drive will be an "offsite backup" of humanity. It'll include a time capsule detailing historical milestones as voted on by people on the Internet (look for human history to span from ASCII art on Usenet to Leeroy Jenkins to Rickrolling), as well as character data for everyone in Tabula Rasa.

But by far the weirdest bit of the Immortality Drive will be the genetic sequencing of forty Tabula Rasa players, gathered via cheek swab and encoded onto a tiny flash drive that will live on the International Space Station. If the human race is wiped out, this is what will be left.

You can read my interview with Garriott after the jump, in which he explains that space suits are a pain in the ass and elsewhere, how Dennis Tito ninja looted his seat to space, what's for dinner, and where's he's going next.

Tom Chick: You've got another two and a half months before you leave. What are you doing these days? More training?

Richard Garriott: Yes, in fact, the training gets more and more intensive the closer you get to launch. I started going over to Russia in January. It began with what they called theoretical training, which really means in a classroom with textbooks. Then I moved on to practical training, where you actually sit down in a simulator and work with one system at a time, the system where you've recently had the theoretical training. For example, it might be the radios or it might be the water purification system or the air scrubbers, the CO2 scrubbers, things like that. And then finally you move into the third stage, which is what I'm in now, which is what's referred to as simulation, where you're usually with your flight crew and you go through the entire sequence of, for example, launch, or rendezvous, or docking, or re-entry…while all the trainers are trying to trip you up by throwing in malfunctions.

TC: Is all of this strenuous, tedious, or fun? Or all of the above?

RG: Definitely all of the above. For example, I'm having to take four hours of Russian per day because the instruments on board the Soyuz are Russian. The commands from mission control are in Russian. The flight data files are in Russian. That is hard and tedious.

There are very exciting moments, like zero-G flights, or when I got my own custom-made space suit and we got to test it out in the vacuum chamber for a few hours. But there are parts of these tests that drag on. When you test your space suit, if you end up inflating [it], that means you've had a depressurization invent inside the Soyuz, which also probably means you're turning around that craft and you're heading back to the ground as quick as you can. And you'll probably stay in it for about two hours. So one of the tests they make you do is you sit in that seat, you properly pressurize your suit, and you sit there for two hours. In a pressurized suit. Even though it's really custom fitted to you, you cannot move. You can move your hands, but from your head to your toes is effectively immobilized. Often there are pressure points where the suit is pressing against bones, joints, or muscles with a fair bit of pressure, and just sitting there for two hours actually can be fairly agonizing.

TC: I want to ask you a couple questions about the mundane elements of going into space. You're there for like ten days. Is that correct?

RG: Right.

TC: So what do you eat?

RG: The food looks the same as you may have seen back in the Apollo era. It's tin cans and foil pouches full of food that's largely had the moisture removed. The canned foods look like glorified tuna fish with some random meat, some random vegetables, and a random sauce in a can. I've done the taste tasting and selected the pieces I want. I must say, the food is not particularly inspirational.

TC: Well, I guess you're not going there for the food. Where do you sleep? Is it a hammock? What is sleeping like in zero-G?

RG: That's interesting, too. The Russian segment [of the International Space Station], one of the very first pieces they got, has two bedrooms in it that are about the size of a phone booth. However, I'll be in space with a total of six people, including myself. So the rest of us basically take the sleeping bags we're provided and a couple of bungie cords and you go find a place to camp out somewhere inside the space station as your sleeping quarters.

Sleeping [is] physically comfortable. There are no pressure points or springs to worry about when you're just floating around. On the hand, it turns out that sleeping can be a fairly hazardous activity. Here on Earth when you fall asleep, when you exhale, the carbon dioxide-laden air you exhale is also warm and rises away and fresh air comes in behind that to give you oxygen to breathe. In space, if you don't have forced air ventilation, you'll breathe in and out the same little pocket of air and the carbon dioxide level will slow increase, and it becomes quite dangerous to fall asleep in a place that's not well ventilated.

TC: You're on the International Space Station for seven or eight days. I know you've got some plans for scientific, environmental, and educational programs, but is there a lot of down time? Is there leisure time? And what do you do?

RG: Well, as a private flyer, of course, I can make my own schedule. If I wanted to, I could plan quite a bit of down time. In my particular case, no. I have a pretty long science, commercial, and educational plan, a pretty lengthy set of activities I want to accomplish. So I've been stripping out as many non-essential things as possible, including knocking out a fair bit of sleep. Blogging is one of those default things people do while they're in space. I've opted out of that. Instead of burning a few hours each day doing a blog, I'm instead going to use a digital voice recorder to capture everything in real time, but I'm not going to type it up and edit it until I get to the ground.

TC: So I'd like to know a little about the immortality Drive…

RG: Operation Immortality. The Immortality Drive, yes.

TC: Physically, what does this look like? Is it a flash drive? I imagine you're very limited in terms of what you can bring up there.

RG: Scale-wise, it's basically a flash drive, just a few inches on a side, a couple of memory sticks. Physically it's a very small device.

TC: And this is related to Tabula Rasa?

RG: Having recently released a science fiction space game, and going into space as the person whose name is on the box, it would be terrible not to find a way to connect to the community of players we have in Tabula Rasa. In addition to calling down from space, and having messages sent directly to the players during my flight, we also have a bunch of ingame events planned that relate to my flight, including a bunch of new objects and missions and things that'll be deployed.

But then, of course, the pinnacle piece is Operation Immortality and the Immortality Drive, where we're going to be taking all the player data from the history of players in Tabula Rasa, plus all the players that play during the month of August. Not only are we taking their character data into space, we're also letting players vote on what pieces of history are the most important to preserve. And then we're going to get about forty of those players and have them gene sequenced. We're going to take the data of their gene sequence on the Immortality Drive so that in case the future Tabula Rasa predicts for the Earth, which is that some day we may be invaded and the aliens horde known as the Bane may wipe out most of life on the surface of the planet, then we'll at least have preserved the names and characters and ideals, as well as the genetic information of many of the players of Tabula Rasa.

TC: How will you determine the forty or so players who get their genetic information put on the drive?

RG: I'm not sure that's been announced.

Janna Bureson, NCSoft PR representative: I think it's a random drawing of current players.

TC: On that week of October 12, what will the average player in Tabula Rasa see in terms of what you're doing and how the game is relating to your trip?

RG: I'm going to be a little bit vague on you only because we haven't made a lot of the detail public. But what I can tell you is that we have a large list of items and assets that will be released into the game at the time of my flight and a whole bunch of missions and events that will take place during my flight as well that directly relate to what is happening in space and directly relate to the back story of the game, Operation Immortality, and the Immortality Drive. All those things come together in the events that take place inside of Tabula Rasa.

TC: Once the drive gets up there, where does it live? You leave it there, right?

RG: Yeah, the drive will remain a permanent part of the space station. As you can imagine that was quite an interesting negotiation. They're very worried about slowly accumulating stuff on the ISS that slowly adds to its mass that requires more and more energy to hold in orbit. And so we do have approval to add this object permanently as part of the International Space Station.

TC: Your trip is through of the company that you're on the board of directors for, Space Adventures Ltd. Can you tell me how this came about that you're the sixth private citizen in space?

RG: Absolutely. And I'll begin that by telling you that I was really intended to be the first private citizen in space via the story I'll now tell.

I have been investing in the privatization of space since the beginning of my computer game career. After I sold Origin to EA, I was feeling particularly wealthy at that moment, so we [Space Adventures Ltd.] contacted the Russians and said, 'Hey, how'd you like to let us take our citizens into space?' and they said 'Forget it'. But their 'no' came with qualifications…it would require significant research study.

We said, 'Well, how much research study?' And they said it would take a year or two and a couple hundred thousand dollars of investment. And so I personally made the investment with the full intention of being the first orbital client. And [after the research], when they came back and said 'yes' and they had a price on it that was about what we expected, I still intended to be the first.

And then the internet stock market bubble burst. And with it went, basically, all my personal wealth. And very tragically, we ended up selling my seat, so to speak, to Dennis Tito, who became the first. Since then, I've been slowly building my personal empire, you might say, and waiting for a good time. So I waited till after Tabula Rasa [launched], and now here I am.

TC: It's estimated that [Dennis] Tito paid between $12 million and $20 million. I heard you in another interview say that right now the cost is up to $30 million when you consider the exchange rate of the dollar and the price of fuel. Is this $30 million from you own pocket?

RG: It's basically $30 million from my own pocket. The only offsetting aspect is that I'm doing some commercial work. For example, I'm doing this research project for protein crystal growth. I've presold a number of the results of those experiments. I'm also working with Seiko with their new spacewalk watch…So basically, you might say I'm doing some work for hire that's offsetting a fraction of that.

TC: I can't imagine how nerve-wracking and exciting it must be to have those rocket boosters behind you when you're taking off. You've said the landing is a 25G impact, which is the equivalent of a car wreck at 35mph. What part of the trip makes you the most nervous or gives you the most trepidation?

RG: Well, you're correct that the two broad events that are the highest risk are launch and landing. And the eight minutes it takes to get from the ground to orbit are very eventful. It's not a smooth ride to altitude. Those four strap-on boosters burn out in thirty seconds or so, then the escape tower on the top has pyro bolts that separate it and it launches on its own. Then a minute or two later the second stage burns out and the third stage fires up with what they call a hot separation that actually blows the second stage off by firing. And then finally the third stage burns out and is separated by pyro bolts when you finally get to orbit. So the launch sequence is quite eventful with the kind of booms and bangs and changes of acceleration. By its very nature, it's high risk.

The re-entry is another moment of high risk, especially since the last two Soyuz re-entries have both been what's referred to as ballistic re-entries, uncontrolled re-entries [slowed by the force of drag rather than by aerodynamic design]. That's definitely a statistical area of concern. And then the actual touchdown is a 25G car crash. That's how your flight ends. A lot of the people I've talked to who have gone through it have said, 'Yeah, it's like you're in a car wreck, it's not fun'. That's just the way it ends.

Those are all things that might give you cause for alarm, but everyone I've talked to who's been up before tells me that at those times when you would get the most nervous, just before or during those events, you're so busy going through checklists and monitoring equipment and even dealing with malfunctions, because every flight has malfunctions or one kind of another. You're watching numbers and watching counters and throwing switches and responding to real time events, nobody seems to think about what's going on beyond what they need to do.

TC: I know NASA balked about training Dennis Tito. Have they eased up at all or is NASA still an obstacle?

RG: No, NASA has definitely come full circle. I think they truly endorse [this]. All of the NASA people I've spoken with are genuinely pleased civilians are flying. They seem genuinely interested in helping to make sure I have an enjoyable safe and successful flight. I think they believe private citizens who fly are great spokespeople for space travel and a great part of the science and engineering being done on these international teams. So I think it's in their best interest to be supported.

TC: You're the son of an astronaut. Your father is known for his time on Skylab. Can you describe to me how he feels about this? You two must talk about this.

RG: He's my chief scientist on my flight. Literally two minutes before I talked to you, I was having an exchange with my dad about minus 50 degree shipping containers, with which to take this protein crystal growth experiment that he's helping to develop in Huntsville, Alabama. How we're going to get it to me next Thursday and then I'm going to turn around on Saturday morning and take it to Moscow. We're going through details about how to pull that off. We're working together very closely on a daily basis on the breadth of the experiment package that I have.

My dad knows I've been trying to pursue this, and in fact, he advised me on some of the early investments. He knows this is an interest of mine. That being said, he also knows it's a pretty expensive undertaking. I'm not sure he would have advised me to take the step based on the extraordinary expenses. But once the decision was made, he's been fully on board with making sure I get everything out it possible. He's very pleased to get a chance to work with me on planning the flight.

TC: You've done the arctic, the deep sea, and as of October, space. Once you've visited the final frontier, what's left?

RG: A trip to visit disappearing indigenous populations. Just as I've enjoyed surveying the geography of the world, I very much enjoy the sociological aspects of the world. Visiting indigenous tribes, unadulterated by Western ideals, and living with them for more than a couple of days at a time. I think it will be a very enlightening time. [It will be] something I can do as an observer, but find a way to provide value through research and study.

You can read more about Garriott's trip on his site here. And you can read more about Operation Immortality here.