Baikonur, Kazakhstan - American computer game designer Richard Garriott has reached space aboard a Russian rocket, fulfilling a long-deferred childhood dream as his astronaut father watched with pride.
The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft carrying Garriott and two crewmates hurtled into a clear blue sky from the Baikonur facility on the Kazakh steppe on Sunday as relatives, friends and colleagues cheered.
Garriott, a 47-year-old multimillionaire from Austin, Texas, is the sixth paying space traveller and the first American to follow a parent into orbit.
"This is so cool, this is so cool," said Garriott's girlfriend, Kelly Miller, as she watched the Soyuz soar away.
As the orange glow of the rocket disappeared, Garriott's 77-year old father studied the sky with binoculars, urging caution before receiving confirmation that the spacecraft had reached orbit safely.
"I'm elated, elated," Owen Garriott said when that confirmation came over a loudspeaker about 10 minutes after the rocket lifted off.
Miller and Garriott's mother Eve shed tears of joy and relief at the successful launch.
"I'm really happy for him. It's one of the things he's wanted to do most in his life," Miller said. "He's like a kid in a candy shop."
Garriott's crewmates on the landmark 100th manned Soyuz flight are seasoned US astronaut Mike Fincke, who spent six months on the International Space Station in 2004, and Russian Yuri Lonchakov.
The Soyuz is due to dock on Tuesday with the ISS, where British-born Garriott will spend about 10 days conducting experiments - including some whose sponsors helped to fund his trip - and photographing Earth to measure changes since his father took pictures from the US station Skylab in 1973.
He said before Sunday's launch that he managed to recoup a significant slice of his trip's price - a reported $30-million (about R277-million) - through some of his experiments and that he hoped his trip would provide a viable model for financing private space travel in coming years.
"What I am trying to do is demonstrate that you can mount a very successful campaign to go into space and beyond because it's good business," Garriott said.
One of his most eye-catching initiatives on the mission has been to take up the digitised DNA sequences of some of the world's greatest minds and musicians - as well as athletes, video game players and others - to the space station.
The eclectic list ranges from famed physicist Stephen Hawking to comedian Stephen Colbert.
The digitised DNA is part of "the immortality drive", a kind of time capsule that will also include a list of humanity's greatest achievements and personal messages from Earthlings. The programme will be stored on the space station in case calamity were to one day wipe out earth. - Sapa-AP