Why tech nerds are especially drawn to rocket travel.

Richard Garriott is a geek. He loves fantasy; he has two thin braids running down his back that, for pictures, he swings over onto his chest for maximum effect. Back in the 1980s, he developed a series of fantasy role-playing video games under the Ultima umbrella, making him, perhaps, the Henry Ford of gaming. He made a fortune, and he used it to build two houses in Austin, Texas, named after the home of the hero of his video games, Britannia Manor. (The one he lives in now, Britannia Manor Mark 2, is equipped with a set of secret passageways, artificial rain, underwater caves, an authentic 16^th-century vampire-hunting kit, crossbows, armor, two skeletons, an observatory, and a lock of hair from a wooly mammoth.)

And, because Garriott is a geek, he has also used his millions to pursue his love of space. In 2000, he shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to be the very first self-funded tourist in space. But then the dot-com bubble burst, and he lost most of his money and had to sell his seat on the rocket. But Garriott loves space so much that, once he regained his financial footing, he decided to buy back that trip rather than resume construction on the still half-finished Britannia Manor Mark 3, the other casualty of the bust. This time, it would cost him $30 million—up from $20 million—and the training would take about a year out of his life, but it was space and, goddamn, it was worth it.

"It's so important to see Earth from orbit," he told me recently. "It's a truly life-changing event."

He says he has also noticed a pattern: All those other tech geeks thirsting for the same view. For instance, when Garriott finally went up, in October of last year, he was already Space Tourist No. 6. But Nos. 1 through 5 were all tech geeks, too. Space Tourist No. 1 was Dennis Tito, who bought Garriott's first seat in 2001. Tito made his money by bringing mathematical analytics to money management. (He also had a bachelor's in astronautics and aeronautics.) Tito was followed by Mark Shuttleworth, the Web-security millionaire; then came Greg Olsen, the optoelectronic millionaire; Anousheh Ansari, the telecom millionaire; and Charles Simonyi, the millionaire responsible for Microsoft (MSFT) Office. Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin has reserved a flight but hasn't yet found the time to go, and tech venture capitalist Esther Dyson just plunked down $3 million to train for five grueling months—including a tundra survival mission, a machete and all—just to be Simonyi's understudy for his second flight, in March 2009. (Guy Laliberté, the tech-savvy founder of Cirque du Soleil, is the next space tourist, scheduled to go up on Sept. 30.)

And these are just the travelers. There is also a shadow NASA out there, made up of tech geeks who are investing their second entrepreneurial wind into beating NASA, Boeing (BA), and Lockheed Martin (LMT) by building lighter, faster, cheaper, and, amazingly, reusable rockets that will supplant the space shuttle when it is retired in 2010. First, there is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon (AMZN), who in 2000 founded Blue Origin, a secretive company focused on making suborbital space tourism affordable and accessible. (First qualification for working there? "You must have a passion for space.") There is also Armadillo Aerospace, founded by John Carmack, of DOOM and Quake fame. And there's the Big Space Cheese himself, PayPal co-founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose space company, Space Exploration Technologies (or SpaceX), has become adept at scoring massive government contracts to build rockets that will make space deliveries of things like supplies and satellites for NASA and the Department of Defense. (Musk recently made his ultimate destination clear: Mars.)

So why do tech geeks love space? Though they may have the resources—a trip to space will now set you back some $45 million—this can't be the full answer: You don't see Donald Trump or P. Diddy signing up for an astro-mission. What makes it worth it for the tech geeks? Garriott, for one, has thought about this extensively. In part, he loves space because his father, Owen, was a NASA astronaut. But then there's the social conditioning.