Richard Garriott, some of you may recall, evidently holds the record for the highest-altitude geocache. That is to say, he set up a geocache whilst aboard the International Space Station, which to this day until just recently has evidently gone undisturbed.

NASA flight engineer Rick Mastracchio intends to pay it a visit, however:

The same Russian spacecraft that will lift off Wednesday evening (Nov. 6) with three crew members and an Olympic torch for the orbital outpost is also carrying a “travel bug,” a device used to mark the location of a hidden cache or container. On the ISS, it will serve as a tool for students and enthusiasts to track the astronaut who is bringing it to space.

“We are going to bring up a geocache travel bug, which is basically just a small dog tag,” NASA flight engineer Rick Mastracchio said in a televised media interview. “The kids are going to follow it online and I’ll answer questions while I’m on orbit with them. It gives them a reason to follow the mission and learn about NASA.”

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Mastracchio’s travel bug, number TB5JJN1, has a slightly different mission than all the rest: to travel to the space station and then return in six months to Chase Elementary School in Waterbury, Connecticut. The school’s fifth grade class, working with the Waterbury Police Activity League, recruited Chase alum Mastracchio to fly the bug.

In space, Mastracchio will unite his tag with the first travel bug flown in space, which has been orbiting the Earth for five years.

In October 2008, computer game pioneer Richard Garriott, the first second-generation U.S. astronaut, funded his own trip to the space station and brought a travel bug with him. He used the token to mark a geocache that he established on the ISS.

“I left the bug on the exterior of a panel, which is a generic storage container,” Garriott said after his return to Earth. “The cache is the container itself. In my mind, it is only a question of time before another geocacher flies.”

This is evidently a big deal for the geocaching community; there are, according to Mastracchio, “over a thousand parties worldwide to watch the launch of this travel bug”.

Well, then.

The First Age of Update: The Geocaching website has officially recorded a log event at the ISS geocache:

The geo space bug (TB5JJN1) has made it to the Russian Service Module, panel 218. He traveled from Waterbury, CT to Houston, TX to Cologne, Germany to Moscow, Star City Russia, to Baikonur Kazakhstan where it launched on a Russian Soyuz Rocket to the International Space Station. He has traveled around the space station and will continue to do so for the next 6 months. When he is not traveling he will be staying with me in my very small crew quarters. He hangs/floats on my wall and waits for more adventures while I do research and perform experiments here on ISS.