FanDominion

Video game designer and avid space enthusiast, Richard Garriott was profiled by National Public Radio (NPR) this past week. It wasn’t for his game production skills; the creator of Ultima and producer of City of Heroes, City of Villains and Tabula Rasa was noted because a junker car he bought in the 1990s that had been missing for years had finally been found – on the Moon (yes, The Moon … Luna).

That “junker” is the Lunokhod 2, a Soviet-era space exploration vehicle was abandoned by the USSR space program in 1973 after it broke down during one of its missions.

In 1993, for $68,000 Garriott bought the Lunokhud 2 vehicle at an auction at Sotheby’s in New York.  At the time, that purchase was widely derided in the international press as an embarrassing showing of American hubris – especially because the lander/rover was lost and unseen for decades.

Unseen, that is, until earlier this month when a team at the University of Western Ontario, using photographs from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter,  discovered the rover – after 37 years of being lost in space.

But now that it’s been found, Garriott has no interest in returning the rover to Earth.

A true Heinlein-esque capitalist, he says the rover is much more valuable as a stake of claim on prime Lunar real estate. And, he says, international treaties back this claim up. You can hear more about this in this attached audio link.

For a transcript:

http://ww.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=124956591

Here’s an interesting bit of tivia: This was not Garritt’s first brush with space.

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The son of Owen K. Garriott, a NASA astronaut who spent more than two months in space back in the 1970s, the younger Garriott instead made a name – and a fortune – for himself in entertainment gaming software. In 2008, some of that high-tech fortune was spent paying the Russian space agency to take him up on a trip to the International Space Station in 2008 – making Richard the first second-generation man in space.

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