What will you do if you have more money but don’t know what to do with that money?
If you don’t know how to answer it, then maybe you should ask Richard Garriott. Call him a “space tourist,” and Garriott will grimace. Instead the lanky, 46-year-old computer gaming tycoon thinks of himself as a “private astronaut” — and he’s hoping that hundreds of other people will want to earn the same title, too.

Space travel is getting trendier at the speed of light. Virgin Galactic, a company started by Richard Branson, plans to jet tourists into suborbital space as early as 2009. Tickets will cost $200,000 apiece. So far, 200 people have signed up for flights, including physicist Stephen Hawking and actress Sigourney Weaver. Then there’s Google, which recently announced the first 10 teams of competitors in its $30-million Lunar X Prize contest to send a spacecraft back to the moon.

On Oct. 12, Garriott plans to be the sixth private citizen to head into space. He will be joining an elite group of astronauts, including several billionaires and fellow millionaires such as telecom entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari and former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi. Now this is what I called a rich people!

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