Chicago (IL) - Game designer Richard Garriot has reached space onboard a Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft along with two astronauts, Mike Fincke and Yuri Lonchakov. Garriot and the crew are carrying digitized DNA sequences of some of the most famous minds of the world, including athletes, scientists and yes, video game players as well.

Among the individuals are Steven Hawking, physicist, Matt Morgan from American Gladiators, and Stephen Colbert, comedian. The DNA is a portion of “the immortality drive” which is acting as a time capsule that will hold a list of the greatest of the world’s achievements and a message from Earth to anything that might be ‘out there’. The drive will be held on the space station in the case our planet Earth were to be destroyed.

Garriot, 47 years old, is the sixth individual to pay for space travel and he is the first to follow a parent into space. His father Owen Garriot was an astronaut. On Tuesday, the spacecraft will dock with the international space station. Garriot is expected to spend around ten days researching and conducting experiments. He will also be photographing the earth to try and measure the differences since his father traveled into space aboard the U.S. station Skylab in 1973.

As a child, Garriot reportedly dreamed of traveling into space, and he was upset that he’d never be a NASA astronaut because he has bad eyesight. His dream came true through his participation and investment in Space Adventures, a United States company that has organized trips on Russian spacecraft to the space station for five other millionaires since 2001. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, for example, flew into space in April of 2002.
 
In June of this year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a $5 million deposit at Space Adventures to secure his space flight. The deposit serves as a reservation for a future “orbital spaceflight” which could cost up to $35 million. Space Adventures also offers a Lunar mission for $200 million or $100 million per seat.

Garriot is scheduled to return to Earth in a Soyuz capsule on October 24.