Just Another Guy in a Suit
At the age of 13, Richard Garriott was told he would never be an astronaut.
The family physician, a NASA doctor in Houston, delivered the blow following a routine eye examination. The mere fact that he’d need glasses was enough to dash any hopes of space travel. Countless kids harbor a fervent, if abstract, fantasy of exploring the cosmos, but for Garriott, the son of an astronaut, that dream was more of a blueprint for life, and the diagnosis seemed a cruel injustice. But it also set him on what would prove to be a single-minded, if roundabout, quest.
“Everyone we knew was an astronaut or somehow involved in putting people into space,” says Garriott, 60, at home in New York. “It felt like I was being randomly kicked out of this club before I was even old enough to decide if this was the future for me. I went through the seven stages of grief—anger, sadness, denial . . .—before finally thinking, ‘Who is this doctor to tell me that I can’t go into space? If I can’t go by their rules, I’m going to make my own space agency.’ ” And that’s exactly what he did.
Garriott’s is a story of wily creativity and dogged determination, multiple space-oriented enterprises and a litany of false starts. It took him 34 years to achieve his goal, but in the process he became one of the world’s most dedicated, unsung explorers of
