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Dan Kennedy (1:08)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. The Moth features true stories told live without notes and all stories on the podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit, and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org this episode of the Moth.

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Dan Kennedy (1:57)

Story you're about to hear by Richard Garriot was recorded live at the Moth main stage in 2010 as part of the World Science Festival. The theme of that night was Gray Matter Stories from the Right and Left.

Richard Garriott (2:17)

Well, when I was about 13 years old, I also went to the doctor and the doctor told me, he said, you know, your eyesight's getting bad. I'm afraid you're going to need either glasses or contacts for the rest of your life. You know, that's not terribly unusual. But he went on to say, you know, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you're no longer eligible to be a NASA astronaut. And that might seem like an unusual thing for your doctor to say, but in my case it wasn't that unusual because my doctor was the NASA doctor, which is because my father was a NASA astronaut. And in fact, my neighbors were all astronauts. My right hand neighbor was a man named Joe Engel, who was another shuttle astronaut, left hand neighbor, Hoot Gibson, another astronaut. You know, nearby. People like Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong lived, you know, relatively nearby. And all my neighbors who weren't astronauts were either scientists or engineers, usually for NASA or a prime contractor involved in putting people into space. And so when I was told that I was no longer eligible, that was like being told that you are no longer welcome in the club that your father, your neighbors and all your friends are a member of. And while before that moment I probably would have never said, you know, when I grow up, I want to be an astronaut, because I just assumed everybody went to space, because everybody I knew did go to space. But suddenly I was, you know, I said, look, you know, if I can't go, that's clearly disappointing. I was angry and, you know, as depressed as a 13 year old can get, you know, which isn't that depressed really. But within a couple of days, I resolved myself to the following thought. I said, you know, if I'm not welcome in the community of NASA astronauts, you know, who are they to be the gatekeepers to space? If I can't go as a NASA astronaut, I'm just going to have to bring into existence a civilian spaceflight capability. And at the age of 13, that of course doesn't sound nearly as impossible as I'm sure you understand that it really proved to be. But of course, also at the age of 13, you're not really prepared to begin pursuing it with vigor. So even though that became my goal in life, I did more normal things that a teenager would do. But in my neighborhood, normal was still a little different. For example, you know, my father, when he would come home from work at NASA, he would go into his study until late night. And when he did emerge in the evenings, he usually brought out with him into the living room some of the techno toys or experiments he was working on for space flight, which were usually things that, while they seem normal to me were science or technology that was, you know, decades ahead of when other people in other neighborhoods would ever get to see it. For example, one of the toys he brought home one time was something called a photo multiplier tube, a little cylinder of aluminum that we put a camera lens on one end and a telescope ocular on the other end, and you could use it to go out in the middle of the night and hunt the cat in the backyard at midnight. And of course this actually became the basis of what a decade later became night vision scopes. But that word didn't even exist when we were playing with it in the backyard. And it was just one of many, you know, such experiences. But when I entered high school, I had another kind of pivotal life moment I had my sister in law gave me a book, the Lord of the Rings. In that same year a game called Dungeons and Dragons was published. And that's also the first year that personal computers came into existence. And I actually fell in love with all three of those. And so in the early 70s or mid-70s, I became one of the very first ever people ever to begin to write computer programs and games on personal computers. And what was funny about the school I went to is we had one computer terminal back in the 70s, but there was no class that used it, no teacher knew how to use it, there was no curriculum for it. But I fell in love with it. And since I was an active student of science at the time, I competed in science fairs and things, you know, throughout my tenure in school. So the faculty knew that I was a self starter and could do independent projects. So they let me have my own classroom. No teacher, no curriculum, nothing to turn in. All I had to do was show them what I did by the end of the semester, which was usually make some games. And they gave me a guaranteed premium, a credit, which was mighty convenient for me. But they had to count it as something how to classify this class. And so for four years while I was teaching myself how to program games, they counted it as my foreign language credit. So I actually never took a foreign language in school. But by the time I entered college, another kind of interesting thing occur, which is that don't forget, up until now I'd lived within this little NASA enclave. And when I went to school or went to college, when I went to college, I met what I used to call the Sesame street people. You know, the butcher, the baker, the policeman, the fireman. All these things that I thought was a fantasy on television, I now learned was actually real normal life. And that my little sheltered existence was what was abnormal. And another kind of thing happened at that time too, which was I began to publish my first games. I wrote a series of games called Ultima. It was one of the very first ever and longest running fantasy role playing series that existed. And as my income level began to skyrocket, my grade point average began to crash. And I knew that there Was a real problem that came up when I flunked my first programming class. And programming is what I was doing all night, every night by myself at home. So I clearly knew the material, but I just wasn't interested in the class. And so I contemplated dropping out of school. And for me, this would be a pretty tough decision because every other member of my family has advanced degrees, and they're things like astronauts. And here I was considering dropping out of school to go play games for a living, which is what I did. But the side effect of that was that with the income that I was getting out of these games, it allowed me to begin to pursue my passion of exploration. And I went down to the sea floor. I've been down to the Titanic, been at hydrothermal vents. I've been on safaris in Africa. I've dug out, canoed down the Amazon. I've been on meteorite hunts down in Antarctica. But, of course, space was always the thing that I really had this passion for. And I have made many investments down through my entire gaming career, Most of which never went very far towards the privatization of space. But finally, right about the end of the 90s, right about 2000, started a series of companies that cracked the door open. First one was called the X Prize, where we paid a $10 million prize for the first private vehicle that flew twice to space. We started a company called Zero G Corp. That actually has a 727. We fly people on parabolic flights. So, for example, all of you can go do that. It's great fun, by the way. But we also started a company called Space Adventures. And with my money, Space Adventures went over to Russia and negotiated a contract with the Russians to be able to fly civilians on the Russian Soyuz to the International Space Station. And this was right when I sold my first game company, Origin. I had the money. I arranged the ticket. I was going to become the first private citizen to ever fly into space. Then came the 2001 Internet stock market crash. And with it went all of my wealth. And so not only did I have to stop construction on a home that I've still never finished, but I had to sell my seat to space that I spent 25 years in pursuit of. I sold it to a man named Dennis Tito, who became the first private citizen in space. Very sad day for me. But then I went back and I said, okay, I know what to do. I know how to make games. So I went back and started another game company, built some more games, sold some more games. And as soon as I had enough Money to pay for a ticket to space. First thing I did with all the wealth I generated to date was I plunked down my deposits, my non refundable deposits on my trip to space. But just because you want to go, just because you've arranged the business to be able to go, just because you've paid to go, doesn't mean they will let you go. There's one more major hurdle, which is medical exams and to go in space, which is challenging physiologically. They study your body in great detail. And when they did this on me, they found something they found fairly alarming. They found something called a hemangioma on my liver. And in this case, in the case of rapid depressurization of a spacecraft, it would represent an increased chance of internal bleeding which you could neither diagnose nor cure and therefore it would be fatal. And so they said, Richard, you can't go to space with that. So you either have to give up your large deposits you've already made now to go to space, or you have to undergo life threatening surgery. So what do you think I did? I now have a 16 inch scar as a memento of my quest to find my way into space. And so finally, after that hurdle was passed, I finally began my training in Russia. Spent about a year in Russia in preparations. Then finally, escorted by my father, I actually went out on October 12th of 2008, Columbus Day. A good day to go exploring. Put on my own custom made spacesuit, walked out to a fully fueled rocket. It's covered in frost because of all the cryogenic fuel on board and all the air coming nearby. It is condensing into fog that's streaming down to the fire pit down below it. And then while everybody else gets as far away as they can, me and my two crewmates crawled up inside, squeezed inside this very claustrophobic little capsule, went through a brief checklist, lit that sucker up, and then took the very brief 8 1/2 minute ride from standing still on the ground to traveling around the earth at 17,000 miles an hour. At that speed, you orbit the earth once every 90 minutes. You see a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes. You cross the entire United States in only eight minutes. You go around the world 16 times every day. And I spent 12 days floating around all day and all night like Superman, performing experiments and looking back on the Earth. Until finally the fiery re entry and the impact back on the surface where my father was again waiting for me in the rescue helicopter. So it was kind of a very cool father, son moment for us. And my father was actually influential in another way, since he had experience in flying wind space before he helped me put together my entire science program. And he knew that one of the most important things to get the chance to do while you're in space is to be at the window and look back at the Earth. And so we planned lots of experiments where I beat the window and got a chance to look back at the Earth. And there's something called the overview effect that most every astronaut describes when. Which is really this series of epiphanies that you get from this great, wonderful vantage point you have in space. Looking back at the Earth, for example, as soon as I saw a place on the Earth that I knew well, in my case, it was Houston, Austin, Dallas, and the Gulf coast and the entire planet, I immediately said, you know, I now know the true scale of the Earth by direct observation. And that actually means a lot more to you personally when it happens than it even does to hear it said. But then as you go around the Earth over and over again, just by looking out the window, your knowledge about what are called the grand scale systems of the Earth goes up very rapidly. Things like weather, the results of tectonic plate movement, erosion by water, erosion by wind. All these things, you know, are just pouring into your brain at 17,000 miles an hour. But the most impactful thing doesn't happen until you've been looking out the window for a few days, which is that every part of the Earth that you can see from space, every fertile part of the Earth you can see from space is fully occupied by people. There was no fertile part of the Earth that I saw that wasn't either a city or a farm. Only things like alpine mountains or vast deserts or really swampy parts of the Earth weren't fully occupied by people. And it really inspires you to come back to the Earth afterwards and kind of redouble your efforts towards environmentalism, you might say. Broadly. You know, I would have described myself as an environmentalist before I flew, but my lifestyle has been changed profoundly since I've flown. But, you know, of all the experiments that I did in space, which at another time, I'd be happy to recount more tales of. Of course, the most ironic is that, you know, no NASA astronaut who's flown in space has ever flown who's had laser corrective eye surgery, which in the intervening years I have had. And so the one thing that NASA would have blocked me from ever flying into space for became the number one thing they were interested in. Studying about me as I prepared for my space flight. And so I submitted to and participated in a very extensive test, a sequence of tests on my eyes. And since my flight, NASA has now approved for all astronaut candidates laser corrective eye surgery. So the thing that NASA of course banned me for has kind of become my 1 contribution back to the fold. So thank you.