Many thanks to Kevin Fishburne for bringing this article at Ars Technica to my attention:

Richard Garriott was the 483rd person to go into space, and to get there he had to spend the majority of this fortune, undergo corrective eye surgery, and fix his fused kidneys and liver hemangioma in order to pass the medical tests. His body is heavily scarred from the procedures. It cost tens of millions of dollars, made from selling over a hundred million games. This is not a man with a lack of will.

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Back in the time of Columbus it took the money and power of governments to fund and outfit these expeditions, and the value of that long-distance travel was murky at best. “That’s how hard it was. It took a government to fund it. It was dangerous, and required huge expense.” 

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It has to be science and industry that takes us to space, Garriott explained to me. Tourism just won’t cut it. “The current price is so high, we’re going to run out of billionaires who can afford the ticket price. So the price has to come down to sustain the tourism market. The real problem with space is cost.”

And governments are simply unwilling to pay what’s required, so the opportunities for private expeditions are great. The United States government has opened the equipment on the space station to anyone who wants to go up and use it, but those brave souls also have to pay for the privilege. Garriott wanted to go online when he was in the space station, but he found out it would cost $300,000 to send the first byte of information. This frustrated him, and he still seemed exasperated when he described the situation. “[NASA] is not even using a fraction of their bandwidth, so your marginal cost is zero, because the infrastructure is in place! The money you spent to put all this in orbit is sunk, it’s sunk cost. It’s too late to amortize it. The cost to use anything in spaceófrankly, I can’t think of any business that can pay those prices and be profitable.”

He spent tens of millions of dollars to go, and earned singles of millions with the work he did, paid for by private companies. “Relevant, but not profitable,” he said. He went because he wanted to go, and had a fortune to spend on the trip. There simply aren’t many people able and willing to do that to go into space.

I’ve excerpted a tiny bit here (yes, it’s a long article), but do go and read the whole thing. It’s probably one of the most insightful glimpses into the inner workings of Lord British’s mind I’ve ever had the fortune to read.