游客花3亿美元游太空 称无怨无悔

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　　Richard Garriott, the world's latest space tourist, said on Monday from orbit that he's gotten his money's worth.

Richard Garriott

　　U.S. space tourist Richard Garriott gestures after donning his spacesuit at Baikonur cosmodrome October 12, 2008

　　Garriott, an astronaut's son and computer game wizard, paid 30 million U.S. dollars to fly to the international space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on Oct. 12.

　　"It's been great icing on the cake to actually take the rocket ride, which was very exciting, and, of course, the view from up here is spectacular," he told reporters in a news conference.

　　Garriott said it's been especially gratifying speaking from space with his father, retired astronaut Owen Garriott, who flew on NASA's first space station, Skylab, in 1973.

　　Richard Garriott is the first American to follow a parent into space.

和宇航员们在一起

　　Spaceflight participant Richard Garriott waves goodbye along with International Space Station crew members (back row, L-R) Gregory Chamitoff, Sergei Volkov, and Oleg Kononenko and (middle row, L-R) Mike Fincke and Yury Lonchakov after a crew news conference October 20, 2008. Garriott who made a fortune designing computer games paid 30 million U.S. dollars for his 11-day visit to thestation and is the son of NASA's Skylab Astronaut Dr. Owen Garriott.

　　The two have chatted several times each day by radio hookup arranged by Russian Mission Control outside Moscow.

　　The younger Garriott will see his father face-to-face at the Soyuz landing site in Kazakhstan on Friday.

　　"It's been a great opportunity for us to bond, so to speak, as adults in ways that we haven't had a chance to do in many years," he said.

　　Garriott said the training with astronauts and other space professionals had made him felt fulfilled even before he was rocketed to space.

　　Garriott, who lives in Austin, Texas, is the creator of the Ultima computer game series and an executive producer of the American branch, NCsoft Austin.