Today, you’ll hear our interview with Richard Garriott, the president of The Explorers Club. Garriott is not only the first American second generation astronaut, but also the first person to visit both poles, outer space and dive to the Mariana Trench. He started out as a video game designer, and as soon as he made enough money, he began investing in human space flight, creating a company called Space Adventures.
Today, you’ll hear our interview with Richard Garriott, the president of the Explorers Club. Garriott is not only the first American second generation astronaut, but also the first person to visit both poles, outer space and dive to the Mariana Trench. He started out as a video game designer, and as soon as he made enough money, he began investing in human space flight, creating a company called Space Adventures.
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Calli and Nate — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/explorers-club-richard-garriott
TITLE:
EXPLORERS CLUB – RICHARD GARRIOTT
CALLI: Nate, I’m so excited for our guest today.
NATE: Why’s that Calli?
CALLI: Well, we are lucky enough to have in our midst the first American second-generation astronaut.
NATE: Second-generation? So… an astronaut that is the child of another astronaut.
CALLI: Exactly. His father was an astronaut! Can you imagine what that must have been like? My six-year-old self would have lost my mind if my dad was an astronaut. But that’s not the only thing that’s super interesting about our guest, I’ll let him explain.
RICHARD: And I've been to both Poles. In fact, I'm my my tiny, slight you know, if you're an explorer and want to, you know, brag about what you've done and claim any first, now you have to split it pretty finely. But but my my, my, my individual claim is yes. Pole to pole. Space to deep is the I'm the first person to done all four. That is.
NATE: So, he’s a bit of a renaissance man. He’s been to space, the deep sea, and each pole. That’s incredible, I’m dying to know who we’re talking to, I have so many questions.
CALLI: Well, let’s start the show then!
CALLI: Take it away, then, Nate!
[SFX: MUSIC IN/ WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: So Calli, you never said - who are we talking to today?
CALLI: So the man I mentioned, the first American second generation astronaut, first person to visit both poles, outer space AND dive to the Mariana Trench is none other than the Explorers Club President Richard Garriott.
NATE: What an incredible achievement for one person.
CALLI: Nate, that’s not even all he’s done. He started out as a video game designer, and as soon as he made enough money, he began investing in human space flight. He began a company called Space Adventures.
NATE: So he was an early believer in commercial spaceflight.
CALLI: Yep. He started planning flights back in the late 90s, but didn’t get to space until 2008 when he finally made it aboard the Soyuz and spent 12 days in orbit on the international space station.
NATE: The Soyuz of course being the Russian spaceflight program, our equivalent being NASA.
CALLI: Yep. And Richard was a space tourist on the Soyuz Mission that launched on October 12, 2008.
NATE: That’s fascinating. Okay, so back up. How did he even get to be a space tourist?
CALLI: Great question Nate. He’s definitely had a unique journey, I’ll let him explain. You were sort of the astronaut for most people. Your childhood was incredible. But what was it like knowing that your father's office was in Earth Sky?
RICHARD: Yeah, well, you know, I think every kid thinks whatever they grew up in is normal, right? So, you know, my my upbringing felt pretty normal. Although not only was my father an astronaut, my right hand neighbor was Joe Ingle, another astronaut left and neighbor who. GIBSON Another astronaut. And in my neighborhood, which was right outside the front gate of NASA, you know, all my other neighbors were either astronauts or people working for the prime contractors involved in putting people into space. And so I sort of grew up believing everybody goes to space because literally everyone I grew up around either went themselves or was involved in putting people into space. And so it was for me was kind of culture shock when I went off to college and suddenly met what I thought were the Sesame Street people, meaning people who had jobs like Butcher, Baker, firemen and policemen and all these things sort of watching on TV. They were like, Oh, that's normal. You know, that's not a fantasy. That's that's actually the normal neighborhood, which it was completely alien to me. And and pardon for a little length in this story. But, you know, I was about 13 years old when one of the NASA doctors told me that because I needed glasses, that I was no longer eligible to be an astronaut. And for the doctor, he was like, you know, most people aren't eligible to be an astronaut. So that's not a big deal to say. For me, I was going like, well, wait a minute, I'm not old enough to have decided what I want to do when I grew up and I assumed we all go. And I was just kicked out of the club that every adult I knew was a member of before I was even old enough to think about it. And so I was I was honestly, you know, angry and sad and had all the, you know, seventh birthday stages of grief, you know, sort of thing going on. And and I resolved at this young age that, you know, if I can't go by the NASCAR rules, I'm going to build my own space agency. And at the age of 13, you don't do much about it. But within two years, at the age of 15, I had found computers and personal computers. The first wave of personal computers. And. And it's a whole separate story about how I managed to build some of the very first computer games ever and had a very good income and due to that rise of the digital era. And immediately, even as a teenager, I began to invest in opening up commercial space flight. But it still took about 30 years of building companies, many of which failed, having strategies to try to get mass to change their mind, to take civilians, most of which failed until finally, actually through the Explorers Club, met up with a variety of people, many of which will be coming here to our annual dinner to speak. Uh, built the companies like the X Prize, zero-G Corp and Space Adventures that actually opened up commercial space flight and then ultimately flew myself in 2008.
NATE: Space Adventures is a private Space Tourism company that helps people travel to space, including Richard. And while commercial space flights seem relatively new, they’re not. The first non-government employee to fly on a space mission was back in 1984. NASA has given away a few seats on flights over the years, but for the most part you have to purchase a seat to be able to fly.
RICHARD: First of all, trip to space is not cheap. It was very difficult to arrange. It also costs the entirety of my life savings, literally. And then after I had already paid all that money to Russia. So I'm not going to get that money back. That was part of the contract is that, you know, whatever is paid is used and you don't get it back. They were doing a medical scan of my entire body and discovered that I had a birth defect on one lobe of my liver. And that birth defect was that each lobe of your liver has an artery that feeds it and a vein that drains it. And I was missing one vein. So one leg of my liver was basically a dead end blockage. And on earth you wouldn't care about that. But in the case of a depressurization event that might occur in space, that depressurization could make that loop of your liver bleed and you wouldn't be able to detect that. And even if you could detect it, you couldn't fix it. And so it would be fatal. And so they basically called me up and said, Hey, Richard, thanks for the money. You have a medical defect, you're off the flight. And of course, that was a pretty horrible catastrophe.
CALLI: That may have deterred most people but not Richard, who had come so far since the 13 year old kid with glasses who was told he would never fly. He pushed to find a solution to finally get himself to space.
RICHARD: And so after getting that disastrous call a couple of hours later, I got a call from my medical team saying we've negotiated a solution, but the solution involves on Monday, you're going to the hospital and removing that love of your liver. And I was like, sign me up. And so I now have a scar from my sternum to my belly button to the side of my body where they want to do major surgery to you know, they had to peel back all my abdominal muscles and everything to get down in there to my liver and remove that little of my liver. And then within about six weeks, I had to prove that despite the surgery, I could survive a9g centrifuge ride before they would allow me to start my training. That's where they spin you really fast and and effectively, you know, take you up to, you know, in this case, about nine times the weight of gravity. So it's like nine more of you lying on your chest. And that's a lot of a lot of weight.
CALLI: To make sure that you would be able to handle that.
RICHARD: To make sure you could handle it. We actually had some problems even through that whole period, but ultimately got past.
NATE: That seems like a lot of work just to get to space. Why was that so important to Richard to do? Like major surgery just to go to space?
CALLI: I had the same question.
RICHARD: I grew up with a, you know, a lot of other astronauts, children. And interestingly, I don't know any of the others who decided they needed to go to space, including my own siblings. I mean, they have truly no interest. And and so for me, I really think the thing that really drove it home was that doctor that told me that I was not going to be allowed. And I, I think that put the fighting spirit into me to say, you know, like, you know, who are you to tell me what I can't do in that case? Now I really want to do it exactly right. And so so it but it's a but what's interesting is that it it sort of I was learning these lessons along the way. That didn't just happen in space. I also happened in games and it happened in some of these other things that have done, which is that if you know the old adage of, you know, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, the the way my spin on that is that if you try something and it fails, but you understand why it failed. And so therefore you can imagine a way around that particular failure. If you were to do it again, then what a shame it is if you wouldn't try it again. And so that's what I kept doing. I kept going, you know, for example, at first I was investing behind the smartest people I knew. You know, astronauts often who were leaving NACA. Because they were frustrated they couldn't get these kinds of commercial activities started inside of NASA. So they were going to leave Nassau to do it on the outside. And I'm going, Great, I'm here. I'm making money in games. You can have my money. Let's go open up commercial space. But universally, those generally failed. And the lesson, as I as a few of these would fail, I'd look at them, go like, well, these are really smart people. They're insiders to the business. But on the other hand, you know, if they couldn't convince Nassau to do it when they were inside of Nassau, their ability to convince Congress to change the rules about who can or cannot fly on the space shuttle, for example, you know, they are completely unarmed, either as entrepreneurs or as politicians to tackle this problem. And so I soon, soon learned that I needed a different set of allies. And that's, again, where the Explorers Club came into play, which is here is where I met people who were who were used to opening up frontiers. In fact, I helped when I joined the club, I started helping people open up frontiers. Like from the deep oceans. We started building companies to charter deep submersibles for commercial operations. We we started opening up frontiers in Antarctica with companies that helped to start flying planes and fuel and food around, to set up logistics for people to hike or ski or kite surf across Antarctica or to climb, you know, the seven highest summits and things that needed logistics. And then it was only another step to go from there to like, how can we open up space? And so finding entrepreneurs who could organize these much bigger, private and commercial activities turned out to be a much more successful strategy.
CALLI: I have to ask, what is one thing that people don't tell you about spaceflight? What is something that that you would just be like, oh, that's something I didn't know was going to happen?
RICHARD: Well, you know what? Well, there's a few there's lots of interesting things to talk about. You know, almost everything about flying in space is amazing and spectacular. You know, from the awesome launch to floating around zero G, 24 hour, seven, 24, seven to looking back to the beautiful earth, to the fiery reentry and either a splashdown or impact on the ground when you when you land. I mean, the whole journey is awesome. You have I landed on land, so I actually hit the ground in a six ton vehicle that bounced and rolled when it hit at 30 miles an hour. So it's a whack but and so all that's amazing but but there are a couple of areas that are unique to describing one is that, you know, even growing up, I knew this would come, which is malfunctions happen all the time. You know, these are test vehicles. They're compared to a car or an airliner. They've you know, I'm fact up until the new round of reusable vehicles, all of them on their maiden voyage at the time you're riding in it. And so you're still working out the bugs a lot. And so I don't think people really kind of realize how common pretty serious malfunctions are in space operations. But the but the areas that are probably the the unfun aspects the the often not described unfun aspects is food and personal hygiene. You know, food is basically military rations, you know, food they've stored at room temperature onboard the space station for a year. And and, you know, that's just not particularly inspiring food. It's not that bad. It's that your taste buds and your sense of smell are all kind of wonky and you're opening up a package. It's been in there for a year to room temperature, meal, you know, that's shelf stable and you're like, okay, that's just not that great. And then the other one is personal hygiene, which is the which is the big one because, you know, I know about you, but I enjoy getting up in the morning and taking a shower and brushing my teeth. And you feel fresh for the morning, but there's no shower in space. There's no sink, there's no running water. You know, you're using baby wipes as your method of cleaning every day, even brushing your teeth. You just spit that water out somewhere. There's no sink, so you spit it back into the bag that you took the baby wipes out of and hope you don't get too much backsplash in your face. And then when you want to do things like go to the bathroom, you know, gravity is actually pretty helpful to take things that come out of your body into the toilet. And without gravity, you know, it's a much more tricky problem, shall we say?
CALLI: What did you do while you were in orbit? Like what wasn't worth the wait? Was it worth everything you went through to get there?
RICHARD: Oh, totally worth. I mean, it's still to this day, you know, I'm an explorer, as we've discussed. I've been all over pole to pole before, going above the atmosphere or below the water surface. And and, you know, the surface of our worth of our world is phenomenal right there. There's amazing things throughout the world. You know, this the summer we're having an event in the Azores, which I think is the most beautiful islands of. Ever seen in the on the planet that I've been to yet the interior of Antarctica to me is the most profoundly unusual and beautiful place that I've ever been on the surface of the earth. But seeing the earth from space is, you know, orders of magnitude beyond anything I've ever seen on Earth. It is phenomenal, truly life changing. Phenomenal. And but when I was going up there, I also knew that, you know, I'm sort of the one of the people trying to open up commercial spaceflight, not just for myself, but I knew and I knew I couldn't go once, much less get a chance to go again unless we make it affordable and hopefully even profitable to spend time in space. And so I took on a very heavy commercial and scientific workload voluntarily, both to help offset the incredibly expensive price of the ticket that I paid for, and also to hopefully find businesses that I could set up to fund future trips to space. And so, you know, among the long list of experiments I did, you know, a couple of interesting ones were that I did something called protein crystal growth. It turns out that if you want to grow crystals of complicated molecules and you try to do that on Earth, the phase change from liquid to solid creates a little bit of heat, which creates a little bit of turbulence in the fluid that is crystallizing, which makes those crystals harder to grow. But if you do that in zero gravity, there's no convection because there's no up. And and so you can grow better, bigger crystals in space. And so that's something that's happened to be particularly useful for medical research. And another fun one I got involved with was actually my eyes. I had in the intervening years from when I was told I couldn't go till now, I've had laser corrective eye surgery, but NASA has had never allowed a an astronaut candidate to apply who had had corrective eye surgery. And the reason why is, is corrective eye surgery thins your cornea. And in space, the pressure in your eye goes up by about 50%. And they were worried that if you'd had corrective eye surgery and you're the shuttle pilot and you need to see the runway and your vision is distorted because of this pressure increase, that would obviously be a problem. But modern Lee, they actually didn't think it would be a problem. They just weren't willing to test it. But I was the first person who flew who had they couldn't stop me because I was flying as a guest of the Russians. And so everyone like, hey, can we study your eyes? Because we don't think this will be a problem. But we've never had a test case. We'd love to find out. And so I went through a battery of tests before, during and after my flight to determine that, in fact, there is no change in visual acuity through a zero gravity flight. And so now it's approved for even for NASA. So anybody, any of us who need glasses or choose to get corrective eye surgery can now fly as an astronaut. That's fantastic.
CALLI: So from your vantage as an explorer and astronaut, what do you think would be the next phase in space exploration now? Now that we're starting to have commercial flights and things like that, what do you think is next?
RICHARD: Well, the to me, the big trick, the big, important milestone still remains cost. The good news is we're well on the way to bringing costs down. Peak cost and danger was actually the shuttle where it cost about $200 million per astronaut that we sent into space. And statistically, what was predicted and what happened was one out of 70 flights would end in catastrophic crew loss. And so that's one out of 70 is a pretty fearful odds to face that. Yeah. And so, you know, if I had never flown in space, I might have faced those odds to jump on a shuttle. But now that I've been in space and if the shuttle was still flying, I would elect not to use it because that's just too dangerous and the cost is way too high. And and and the cost right now, interestingly, the price that you pay at retail has not come down. However, the actual cost of the flight has started dropping behind the scenes. And so very soon now, I once there's competition in the loop, the actual retail price will start coming down. So if we if we start at the peak. So I wait for that to happen. Sorry. No, no worries. You know, if we if we started that peak cost of $200 million a seat, you know, we're now back down, shall I say, to approximately $50 million a seat. But with the new, even larger, fully reusable vehicles, it'll clearly come down into the ones of millions of dollars of seat. And some of the makers like Elon Musk, have even stated publicly prices down into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per seat. And and if you start thinking about that and he ultimately believes he'll be able to take a rocket ship and fly point to point somewhere on the Earth for the same price as a current first class seat that you might buy commercially on an airplane. And and so when we get the price of that low, you know, when we get into let's even use 1 to 1 order of magnitude above that lowest possible price. Let's say it's in the hundreds of thousands or even in the low millions. Let's start with the low millions. If you get it down to the single digit millions and you contrast this to like people decided they wanted to leave Europe and emigrate to America as a case study. You know, people who do that, sell their businesses, sell their homes, sell most of their possessions, take it as cash with them into the new world. And those those people would commonly spend, you know, an enormous amount of their personal wealth to make that journey and frankly, taking a more enormous life risk. Back in the old, tall ship days to get over, to quote the new world. And and so when we think about now opening up interplanetary travel and, you know, once you're in space, as you may know, you're basically halfway to anywhere in the solar system, because once you're in zero gravity, it just takes time to get to the other place. But there's almost no resource use to go all the way to Mars. And and so people might decide, you know what, I'm going to become one of the first settlers on Mars, you know, for a million bucks or two, you can probably do that. And it's, you know, anyone who really, truly had the passion to do it. And I'm not suggesting anybody needs to, but, you know, there's not going to be that many ships going that's that quickly. And there's, you know, even if only 0.01% of the population wants to go, that's still way more than enough people to fill up those ships. And and actually, there's a lot more than that they want to go. So so I think that bringing that cost down is the main thing. One more point on the cost. You know, if you look at let's suppose you're an experimenter and you go like, hey, I have a I have an experiment that has that has some value to humanity that can be measured in millions or billions of dollars to humanity. Well, if the cost of getting to space is above that, then I can't really do that experiment. But as that cost comes down, any work you want to do, any commercial development you want to do, any research you want to do, as that comes down by an order of magnitude, that means there's ten times more interesting and worthwhile experiments and activities to do in space. And when it comes down by another order of magnitude, there's again ten times more interesting and useful activities to do in space. And so the amount of activity you see is going to, you know, go up as the price comes down.
RICHARD: So what's fascinating about space is that, you know, while while people are seeing and a lot of people are commenting never negatively on, you know, quote, these wealthy yahoos taking themselves to space, unquote. I think people are missing the broader point, which is that we actually need these, quote, wealthy yahoos to take themselves to space, unquote, to help drive the price down. It's because only with frequent use that safety goes up and cost comes down. And this was true for airplanes. If you think about the emergence of the airline industry, at first, you know, these airplanes were seen as sort of wacky, literally dangerous barnstorming kinds of things for wealthy yahoos to take themselves on. And even the first airlines became only first class people would dress up very nicely to go get on that plane. And it cost them a lot of money to take themselves and their wealthy friends on a somewhat dangerous journey on an airplane. And these exact same issues came out. People weren't like, Hey, this isn't for every person. This is really for these wealthy elites, but bye bye. Flying frequently, the price continues to come down, the safety continued to go up. And now, you know, anyone in a first world country can imagine affording themselves plane rides when needed. And and the same thing coming up for space and why we need space goes back to a, you know, a simple question of resources. You know, here on the Earth, you know, we have a litany of problems, you know, starting with climate change. But that also goes back to energy, that goes back to fresh water. There's resources like metals that, you know, we have to either recycle or find deeper and deeper inside of the earth. And. Which causes pollution, etc.. The nice thing about space is that resources in space are incredibly bountiful. Whether it's energy you pick up from solar satellites, whether it's metals you can bring back from asteroids, where there is water that you can find on comets and asteroids and maybe craters on the moon. All of these resources are actually very abundant in space. But the cost to bring them back right now is incredibly high. And that it's incredibly high because of the cost is incredibly high to get the infrastructure into space necessary to bring those resources back. But, you know, I've been I've been invested in and supporter of a number of the companies that have recently been starting to do things like asteroid mining, which is really going to be a real thing, you know, just using that as a case study. You know, you think about the core of our planet is mostly metals, iron and other metals. And there's very little of those metals near the surface that happen to be trapped in the crust as the earth cooled. Asteroids are many of them are basically broken up. Protoplanets. So some asteroids are the rocky surface of a protoplanet. Some asteroids are the iron and other metal cores of a protoplanet. And so there are asteroids we know are made out of mostly metals and high percentages of things like platinum and all the platinum.
NATE: I remember the planetesimals - we actually talked about one in the very first episode we hosted of Curiosity.
CALLI: That’s right. We don’t know what things like 16 Psyche hold, but it’s only with more exploration and discovery that we are able to find out.
RICHARD: The point is, think about either a gold or platinum meteor asteroid and imagine taking, you know, this table that's sitting in front of us, you know, six foot around table. Imagine taking a ball, six foot around of platinum or gold. And let's just say we would do nothing as simple as tug it back to near Earth orbit and throw it down into the desert and on its way down to the desert. Let's suppose half of it burns up and now we have a three foot diameter or whatever it is, you know, table sized asteroid of solid gold or solid platinum. Well, you've just now flooded the market, you know, so to speak, with an enormous amount of this incredibly rare resource. And so a lot of people have written and I am a believer of, you know, the first trillionaires on the planet or may very well be asteroid miners.
CALLI: So you are the current president of the Explorers Club. What would you say to aspiring explorers who are facing challenges kind of like you were? What is the secret to being a successful explorer?
RICHARD: Well, you know, one of the things I really learned at a pretty young age with my mother, who was an artist and a naturalist, was how amazing science is actually around us all the time. And my family, when we would go to even national parks, you know, there's the old Boy Scout adage of, you know, take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints. But in our family, there was also the but don't forget to bring back scientific samples, you know, and so we were always scooping bits of mud and scum out of ponds to send back to a lab and see what microbes were living in it that might be yet unnamed to science. And, you know, at a young age, you learn that, you know, you can find every one of us can go find meteorites and take kids out to find meteorites all the time in the city. You can because, you know, giant meteorites that kill off the dinosaurs, you know, only happen every couple hundred million years, fortunately. But tiny little, you know, grain of rice sized meteor meteorites land on the roof of your house almost every day. And so so if you go to the where the rain washes off a roof and there might be a down spout out on a sidewalk, and you go out there with a magnet and, you know, some fraction of those meteorites will be iron meteorites. You take those back inside, put them on a microscope, and you can find an unknown to science, meteorites and somebody. And you never know where those some of this came from, mostly from deep space, but some might be from Mars or the moon or sometimes, you know, bits knocked off eons ago. And and and so first I would say, if you're a young person who wants to be exploring, you can start exploring right away. But the other thing to know about it is that we're in this new what I consider a new golden age of exploration where, you know, 120 years ago, a hundred, 18 years ago, when the Explorers Club was founded, people were literally risking and losing life and limb to reach the extremes of north and south and the top of the top of Everest in the bottom of the ocean. We're now in this era where exponential technology is allowing us to explore even the places we've been before in new ways, in addition to profound new places that have never been explored, you know, rockets that can land themselves, submarines. We only just two or three years ago finally now have the first submarine that can make repeated full ocean dove depths to anywhere on the earth. 80% of our oceans had never been, and most of it's still never been explored. But. We now at least have the tools to do it, and we now have pocket sized gene sequencers that can do full genetic sequences of everything you can pick up and a loose scoop of soil that will tell you the entire gene sequence of everything that's in that piece of soil and that little tiny piece of dirt. And. And so the tools are now available for, I think, for explorers to do much more. And and I think we're in a time where it's really critical more. I think the need for explorers is greater than ever before because we're facing these truly gigantic existential problems that will only be solved by understanding how these problems interrelate, what their causes are, and therefore how we can address them.
CALLI: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. It was an honor to be up there with you.
RICHARD: Oh, my pleasure. Absolutely. Any time. Thank you.
[SFX: MUSIC OUT]
CALLI: Thanks again to Richard Garriott for joining us today, and thank you for listening!
NATE: We’ll be back next week with some new episodes of Curiosity and another exciting conversation with an explorer. Up next, we’re going back to space, but this time we’re leaving orbit and heading to Mars.
NINA: It was my dream to find a piece of Mars and in fact, pieces of Mars have been found in Antarctica. All of our Martian meteorites, or I should say all many of our Martian meteorites have been recovered in Antarctica. And in fact, before we even knew that Martian meteorites could get to us, you know, prior to the eighties, the orbital dynamics were like nothing could come off of another planet and land here. That doesn't happen.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Join us back here next week to hear more to find out who our mystery guest is, and until next time, stay curious!