CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Former astronaut Owen Garriott, who flew on America’s first space station, Skylab, and whose son followed him into orbit, has died at age 88.

He died Monday at his home in Huntsville, Alabama, according to NASA.

“Dad had a great 88 orbits around the sun!” tweeted son Richard, a computer game developer who paid the Russians $30 million for a ride to the International Space Station in 2008.

Owen Garriott served on the second Skylab crew in 1973, spending close to 60 days in space, a record at the time. He also was part of the ninth space shuttle mission, flying aboard Columbia in 1983 and operating a ham radio for the first time from orbit.

While he never flew in space again, Garriott traveled to Kazakhstan in 2008 for his son’s launch aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. They were the first U.S. father and son space travelers. The first second-generation astronaut, a Russian, launched just months before Richard Garriott and accompanied him back to Earth.