JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, recently interviewed Ultima creator and private astronaut Richard Garriott, and has posted Lord British’s answers to their many questions online.

And in truth, it’s a very lengthy, wide-ranging interview, almost entirely focused on Garriott’s second career as a private astronaut (a term, he explains, he prefers be used, as opposed to “space tourist”). It covers his desire to explore the unknown, being a private astronaut (and a second-generation astronaut at that!), what space flight was really like, the medical and physical requirements of space travel, the view from the International Space Station (and where the view is best), space flight, the emotional impacts of the experience…and Garriott’s dream of space travel that is much, much cheaper and therefore open to more members of the general population.

Here’s a taste:

Q. Your private space trip reportedly cost $30 million. Why did you decide to spend so much money on this trip?

Well, I helped start the company Space Adventures specifically so that I could find my way into space. And all of my investment in that company was towards the idea of reaching space, which is a desire I’ve had since I was quite young. So I knew even before we started that the price would be very high. And no matter what the price was, if I could afford that price, I intended to take this trip.

Why did I want to go to space? Because I like adventures into unknown worlds. Going into the unknown I find to be one of the most fascinating aspects of human possibility that I can imagine, whether that is exploring a cave in my own backyard in Texas, or exploring a rarely visited part of the Amazon jungle, or visiting space, or even visiting a virtual reality on a computer. I find all of those explorations to be similarly motivating.

As we say online, read the whole thing!