THE X PRIZE; ANNALS OF AERONAUTICS

IAN PARKER.

About six years ago, not long after Burt Rutan, an aircraft designer, had begun to think seriously of building a plane that could leave the Earth's atmosphere, he woke up at his desert home, a few miles outside the town of Mojave, California, and said, "I've got an idea." As Rutan's wife, Tonya, recently recalled, "We had been dead asleep--it was three in the morning. He ran to the bathroom with a sketchpad, came out waving a sheet of paper, and said, 'I know how to configure the spaceship! A shuttlecock.' " Her husband, she said, was "real close to my face, looking right in my eyes." Burt asked Tonya to think of the way a badminton shuttlecock falls: how it always falls in the same position, and falls slowly, its feathers causing drag. That would be a smart way, he said, to return a small spaceship safely to Earth. The couple went back to sleep, and Burt, who often starts the day by singing James Brown's "I Feel Good," woke in high spirits.

I was eating lunch with Tonya, a slightly built and pretty woman in her early forties, in the Voyager restaurant, which is attached to Mojave's airport. "See those mountains? We're cut off from the world," she said, nodding toward the nearby Tehachapi range. She said that she would prefer to live in a more cosmopolitan place, adding, "Fortunately, we get to travel a lot." Her home town is a line of gas stations and fast-food restaurants along a hot, flat desert-valley floor a hundred or so miles north of Los Angeles. A new bypass has taken business away from the town; the local Wendy's closed last spring. A resident described Mojave as the kind of place where, if you were driving late at night across country, "your wife would look around and wouldn't let you stop."

But in Mojave the sky is almost always clear. At night, the Milky Way is milky, and it rains only about a dozen days a year. Despite an insistent northwesterly wind that keeps windmill turbines turning on the surrounding mountain ridges, this is a good place to fly. An airport was built in Mojave in 1935; during the Second World War, the Marines took it over. It became a quiet civilian airport in 1961; eleven years later, it was reorganized as the East Kern Airport District, and local farmers occasionally leased space between the runways to dry fruit. It's a frontier-spirit place, perfect for training test pilots, or keeping a privately owned MIG fighter plane.

The view from the restaurant was of two hundred or so commercial jets sitting in the dry air, waiting for an international economic upturn; the airlines use Mojave for long-term parking. The only movement was that of a man riding an undersized bicycle up and down the airport apron. But a videotape running in a continuous, silent loop on a television monitor on the wall pointed to activity inside the hangars and workshops on the airport's grounds: privately funded research into space travel. The film showed a spindly-winged white plane waiting on the runway, with a smaller, stubbier plane slung beneath it, like a missile. They took off; the film then showed a vertical vapor trail streaking way overhead, a thin white line. After this, the smaller plane returned, and Burt Rutan, waiting on the tarmac in jeans and a mustard-colored polo shirt, hugged the pilot, who had just become an astronaut. This preliminary flight, which took place in June, will be repeated on September 29th--this time with ballast equal to the weight of two passengers. Space tourism is about to receive its first official test.

When Dick Rutan, Burt's older brother by five years, crashed his model aircraft as a child, Burt would fix them, and make them his own. Burt, who is sixty-one years old, spent much of his childhood, in the central California town of Dinuba, building spectacular, award-winning airplanes. Dick went on to join the Air Force. Burt flew solo on his sixteenth birthday, took a degree in aeronautical engineering at California Polytechnic State University, in San Luis Obispo, and then, in his twenties, worked as a civilian flight-test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base, close to Mojave. (In one of the audiocassettes he sent home in place of letters during this time, he said, "I really want to make something of myself in aviation. . . . I want to make it before I get too old. I want to get there quick.") He married in 1962, had two children, and divorced not long afterward. He later said, jokingly, that he saw a choice between his wife and the plane he was then building, and "it was an easy decision to make."

Rutan moved to Mojave in 1974. By that time, forty-eight Americans had been to space, and twelve had walked on the moon; Pan Am had placed more than ninety thousand names on a waiting list for future scheduled moon landings, and President Nixon had announced a program to build reusable shuttles that would have the effect of "routinizing" space travel. Rutan, then thirty-one, was confident that before he died he would fly into space.

He went into the hobbyist business, designing avant-garde airplanes and selling the plans (at about a hundred and thirty dollars each) to amateur enthusiasts with large suburban garages. The planes tended to be canards, which have two sets of wings--one small set in front of the other--making them almost impossible to stall. They were designed to be built from light, strong, composite materials--layers of fibreglass and epoxy, for example--rather than wood or metal. With the success of his awkwardly named VariEze ("very easy") and Long-EZ aircraft, Rutan became a revered figure in the "home-build" community. "Rutan is God," one hobbyist wrote.

In 1982, Rutan formed a company, Scaled Composites, that produced single-prototype aircraft for commercial and military clients. Four years later, he became known internationally when he designed Voyager, an aircraft with a wingspan of a hundred and eleven feet, which was built to fly around the world on a single tank of fuel without stopping--something that had never been done before. Voyager's pilot was Dick Rutan, who had moved to Mojave after retiring from the Air Force; he had flown more than three hundred combat missions in Vietnam. While Burt was intense and self-contained, occupied by his private world of aeronautical invention, Dick was social and self-confident. ("I'm the world's greatest pilot," Dick told me, when I met him at the Denny's in Mojave. "I'm the right stuff. I am!") The brothers frequently fought. Dick Rutan still sounds peeved, if also amused, when he recalls Burt's reluctance to install radar in Voyager: "He thought it was just some froufrou thing that I wanted." Burt was more attuned to what a plane needed to fly than to what a pilot needed to survive the flight. "Burt doesn't always understand the human element in design," Dick said. Voyager was difficult to fly, and came close to killing him a number of times--first on takeoff, when its fuel-filled wings bent so far as to touch the ground--but in December, 1986, it made a precarious twenty-five-thousand-mile flight, in nine days. It is now displayed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan presented the Rutan brothers with the Presidential Citizen's Medal.

By the time Rutan reached his fiftieth birthday, in 1993, the prospects for everyday manned space flight and a station on the moon--not to mention a manned voyage to Mars--were no closer than they had been twenty years before. The future had stalled; the Space Shuttle--sold to the country as an exercise in thrift--had turned out to be expensive and fatally unsafe.

Spurred by grievance and by some refinement of the feeling that inspires middle-aged men to buy Ferraris, Rutan began to make sketches of a vehicle that he hoped would be capable of reaching a hundred kilometres, or just over sixty-two miles, above sea level--before quickly dropping back, like a flying fish, pulled by gravity. (In the mid-nineteen-fifties, the World Air Sports Federation had defined this altitude as the beginning of space.) Rutan was not imagining an orbital craft, which would need to reach far greater speeds, and would require many times the level of investment; rather, he was aiming to reproduce the parabolic suborbital flight made by America's first astronaut, Alan Shepard, who spent fifteen minutes above the Earth's atmosphere in a Mercury capsule in May, 1961. Rutan saw an opportunity to become the person who opened up space. "It became very clear that if the little guy didn't do it, it wasn't going to be done at all," he said.

An alternative space community-- predominantly libertarian in spirit, and sometimes Vulcan in its wardrobe--had been pressing since the late nineteen-seventies for an end to nasa's historical monopoly on American spaceflight. That case was reinforced by the destruction of the Challenger shuttle, in 1986. Even those who had once been inspired by nasa began to see the agency's early achievements as disguised disappointments. "The American space program was, for all practical purposes, an attempt to show the Russians that we could do Communism better than they could," Jeff Greason, the president of XCOR, a Mojave-based rocket-plane company, said recently. "I'm not sorry we went to the moon, but there's very little doubt in my mind that had Apollo never existed we would be further along today than we are." In pursuing grandiose projects, he said, nasa overlooked more practical approaches to space travel.

By the mid-nineteen-nineties, more than a hundred civilian satellites had been put in orbit, and the idea of private rockets launching new satellites into space began to seem a realistic business proposition. At about the same time, the wilder idea of entrepreneurial manned space travel started to migrate out of science fiction. Some of those in the generation of cheated Americans--who had regarded the space race as a private invitation to the moon, then seen the party cancelled--began to acquire great personal fortunes, allowing the alternative-space rhetoric to be backed by capital. As Elon Musk, who sold PayPal to eBay for one and a half billion dollars in 2002, and who now runs SpaceX, a rocket company near the Los Angeles International Airport, recently described it, "You had to have some kind of pre-boom to supply the capital to get the rocket boom going, and that only happened with personal computers and the Internet."

In 1996, Peter Diamandis, a St. Louis entrepreneur and space enthusiast, founded the X Prize, which was designed to induce an age of space tourism. Diamandis modelled his prize on the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize, which was won by Charles Lindbergh for the first transatlantic flight, in 1927. The X Prize (in the aeronautical tradition, the letter "X" indicates "exploration" and "experimental") promised ten million dollars to the first privately financed team to take three people to the threshold of space and back, twice in two weeks. The second trip would prove the spaceship's reusability.

Around this time, Burt Rutan met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. Today, Allen is ranked by Forbes as the third-wealthiest man in the world. (He recently spent part of his twenty-one-billion-dollar fortune to found a Science Fiction Museum in Seattle that contains, among other exhibits, the captain's chair from the set of "Star Trek.") Rutan told Allen of his plans for a rocket-powered plane and showed him some sketches. Allen was impressed, and they agreed to speak again.

A rocket is a bomb that explodes neatly, and to deliver someone into suborbital space is neither easy nor safe; fourteen people have died on space-bound rockets since 1960. But Rutan saw the greater challenge as bringing his spaceship back to Earth. As a spaceship reenters the atmosphere, and begins to encounter air of increasing density, it must maintain a precise trajectory, or it risks breaking apart. At first, Rutan pictured a capsule that returned under a parachute, as in the Apollo and Soyuz programs. But, to an aeronautical expert, this method was unappealing, and Rutan began to envision his spacecraft flying back to Earth, not falling. By 1999, Rutan's thoughts had turned to a concept close to that of the X-15--the black, winged, experimental American rocket plane of the nineteen-fifties and sixties that was launched at forty-five thousand feet from a modified bomber plane, rather than starting its flight from the ground. This high-altitude takeoff allowed the X-15 to carry fifty per cent less fuel. From 1959 to 1968, when the program ended, the X-15 took eight pilots above fifty miles, which is the Air Force's designated start of space. In the opinion of many experts, the X-15 represented a future of elegant, low-cost, reusable spacecraft that was sidelined by America's investment in Apollo, which in today's terms amounted to about a hundred billion dollars.

The X-15 showed that it was possible to land a rocket plane on the ground. But a computer system was often used to fly the plane at the precise angle to reenter the atmosphere safely. Rutan did not want the weight, the expense, and the complication of that kind of system. (His brother had, after all, barely won the argument about the need for radar on Voyager.) It was at this stage that Rutan thought of badminton--and of the idea of a shuttlecock and what he calls "feathered" wings. A spaceship could have the wings needed to land on the ground, but they could be hinged, and rotate, like oversized air flaps: this would cause drag, the way the feathers on a shuttlecock do, and would set the craft at a stable, belly-first angle on reentry.

In 2001, Rutan signed a contract with Paul Allen, agreeing to a budget that has been estimated at about twenty million dollars. Rutan had not initially been inspired by the X Prize. Neither was Allen, according to Rutan: "If you see how rich he is, Paul Allen wouldn't do it to try to win ten million." But the prize was there--at least until the end of 2004, when a policy that underwrote the contest would expire--and it would have been foolish to ignore it. So Rutan's designs included seating for three--a pilot and two passengers--as the X Prize required. "I had confidence," he said. "I just marched along at the rate I felt I could do it, not really worried about the competition. And, fortunately, there hasn't been a lot of competition."

By this summer, twenty-seven teams had registered for what is now known, because of sponsorship, as the Ansari X Prize. Nineteen of the teams were from the United States, and the rest were from Argentina, Canada, Israel, Romania, Russia, and Great Britain. Many teams had Web sites showing handsome vehicles far above the Earth: the sky black behind them, the horizon curved, the oceans a lovely blue. Only a few of the competitors had been able to take their adventures further than these hopeful illustrations.

While the Orteig Prize had marked a clear aeronautical milestone, the X Prize, if awarded, would primarily celebrate a moment of economic confidence. In terms of space exploration, Yuri Gagarin's Earth orbit in 1961 was a greater achievement than any X Prize suborbital flight; and the prize's requirement of reusability had been met by the Space Shuttle in the early nineteen-eighties. The X Prize wasn't only about getting people in and out of space; it was about a new way of spending unusual quantities of private money. It championed extravagance; and, in doing so, it demanded unlikely relationships. It called for nongovernmental finance: engineers had to find angel investors, or investors had to find engineers.

In Texas, John Carmack, who amassed a fortune writing video games like Doom and Quake, began developing Black Armadillo, a cone-nosed cylindrical spaceship that, at journey's end, would turn itself around, nose up, then gently settle to Earth using downward thrust. And, this summer, a Canadian team, da Vinci, that had long struggled to finance a project designed to launch a rocket at seventy-one thousand feet from beneath a hot-air balloon, found funding from an Internet casino known for sponsoring promotional streakers at sporting events. Brian Feeney, da Vinci's founder, has agreed in return to play online casino games on a laptop computer in space.

While a dozen or so teams have devised potentially plausible technological plans, far fewer have had the funds to follow up on them. The level of these financial difficulties is suggested by a recent press release from the young team of Space Transport Corporation, in Forks, Washington: "The latest proud S.T.C. sponsor is the Forks Coffee Shop in downtown Forks."

Interorbital Systems, run by Rod and Randa Milliron out of an unmarked building at the Mojave airport, is also severely underfinanced. Rod is a rocket engineer who once worked for Grumman Aerospace, on Long Island. The Millirons dress in black, and they maintain a long-standing interest in electronic music. They spend part of their time in Hollywood, appearing as extras in movies and on television: Rod has a recurring nonspeaking role as a counter-terrorism agent on "24." When they're in Mojave, they work on designs for space-faring vehicles. In a conservative town--a sign outside the local liquor store reads "Ice and Ammo"--the Millirons are unsettling neighbors. "If aliens came down to Earth and were looking for company, I think they'd like to meet Rod and Randa," Dick Rutan told me.

"We like to say we're the most hated X Prize team," Randa Milliron said.

Interorbital plans to build a hundred-and-fifteen-foot rocket, which would be launched from a site that the Millirons have examined on Tonga, in the South Pacific. The rocket's capsule would return to Earth by parachute. The Millirons are impatient with the idea of putting wings on a spaceship: a wing serves no purpose in a place without air, and it is bound to add weight. In the opinion of the Millirons, Burt Rutan's winged design is undermined by the fact that it does not point the way to orbital flight: they say it could never be sufficiently modified and powered to take part in the next stage of the private space race (a claim that Rutan disputes). "Orbital is where the money is going to be made," Randa Milliron told me when we met. In fact, this summer, Interorbital was no longer actively planning for an X Prize attempt--although a Rutan setback, and the sudden appearance of a wealthy investor, could bring the Millirons back in. Rather, they were concentrating on their interest in sending tourists into orbit, and, in time, building a private space station. A full program would require an investment of thirty-five million dollars. Randa said that when she and her husband meet other X Prize competitors they are struck by the fact that "they seem to be more into winning a prize than travelling in space. I haven't met too many competitors who are interested in setting up a colony on the moon."

The Millirons consider Rutan to be a man for whom a short journey matters more than any dream of arrival. They are also highly suspicious of Rutan's X Prize progress. "It could all be preprogrammed to be a success, whatever happened," they told me, suggesting that one test flight by Rutan's team might not have achieved the height claimed for it. Rutan says of some of his competitors, whom he never refers to by name, "They start with a little bit of money hoping they'll make progress, and then they find themselves doing stunts instead of research flight tests. They beg for more money instead of putting their nose to the grindstone."

To speak with apparent certainty, as the Millirons do, of vacationing in a space hotel is to show extreme optimism in one of two areas: either in the speed at which the private space industry will mature or in the chances that one will live a very, very long time. The Millirons do have some more modest technological plans: they have built and test-fired engines for rockets intended to launch small satellites, for example. But they also claim to follow a regimen of diet and exercise dictated by their desire to undertake future space travel (a regimen that, unconventionally, includes milkshakes), and they allow themselves to be drawn into conversations about space etiquette: the wisdom of keeping goats in orbit, say, or making Venus habitable by forcing a greenhouse effect upon it. At such times, they risk sounding like a fringe Presidential candidate musing on possible curtain colors for the Lincoln Bedroom.

Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, leases buildings a hundred yards from Interorbital. A drab, light-industrial corridor leads past a number of glossy paintings that portray all of Rutan's aircraft flying in formation over lush landscapes. Beyond the coffee station and the cut-out "Dilbert" cartoons, a door opens onto a twenty-two-foot-high hangar where, on a recent visit, Rutan showed me SpaceShipOne, his X Prize competitor. It looked as playful as a Philippe Starck hair dryer, and as flimsy as a fibreglass canoe. One would feel nervous driving it around the corner to the airport restaurant, for fear of running into a jackrabbit. About thirty feet long, it looked like the scale model for something much larger, sturdier, and more intergalactic. SpaceShipOne was recognizably a plane--a white tapered tube with wings, and an undercarriage, parked parallel to the ground--but the wings were hinged, and the small cabin space, where the tube narrowed, then came to a point, had a dozen portholes at different heights in the place of a windshield. The flight deck featured a single computer screen. The pilot's controls were a stick and two foot pedals. The interior had an unpolished, home-built feel, and smelled of carbon.

Rutan showed me a Ping-Pong ball decorated with hand-drawn happy faces which hung from above the pilot's head; when the string is no longer taut, the pilot is weightless. "You don't fly the Space Shuttle to orbit," he said. "The pilot sits there and the computer flies it. They don't trust the pilot to fly it. If space is going to be cheap, it has to be stick-and-rudder."

On the morning of June 21, 2004, a year behind schedule, and after fourteen test flights that had stayed mostly below twenty miles, Mike Melvill, sixty-three, an old friend of Rutan's, and "the best stick-and-rudder guy" he knows (a "steely-eyed, hairy-chested test pilot," in the words of Tonya Rutan), strapped himself into the pilot's seat in SpaceShipOne, with a parachute on his back. Melvill had flown SpaceShipOne nearly a dozen times, but this would be the first flight to aim for space, and the last test before a formal attempt at the X Prize. At 6:47 a.m., White Knight, another Rutan design, with long skinny wings, lifted SpaceShipOne from the runway. An hour later, the twinned planes were at forty-seven thousand feet. White Knight's flight-test engineer pulled the handle that released SpaceShipOne, and Melvill glided for a few seconds, alone. He then ignited the rocket engine--burning a mixture of liquid nitrous oxide and rubber--and within ten seconds SpaceShipOne was moving upward faster than the speed of sound.

Rutan later acknowledged that he had considered the risks of producing a "smoking hole" on the desert floor. "I'd have lost a friend. You could say, 'I should pick a pilot who I'm less friendly with, a guy who's a stranger to me and just working for me, so if he gets killed . . . ' " He smiled. "You could say, 'Let's have a lawyer fly it' "--a pause--" 'or a liberal.' Mike's a conservative and a good friend, so that's the highest risk I can take." Dick Rutan, who would gladly train to pilot SpaceShipOne, said, "It worries me, what Burt would go through, if something terrible happened. I worry that he's too confident. It might totally destroy him."

Alan Bond, a leading British rocket engineer and the head of Reaction Engines, recently told me that it would take a shotgun to get him to ride on SpaceShipOne. He fears that the X Prize will discredit the entrepreneurial space race if contestants die on CNN, live. "When these people do kill themselves, which they surely will, in large numbers, then companies like mine, which look to governments to support them, we'll suffer," he said. Bond has calculated that an amateur spaceflight costing ten million dollars--the kind of money an X Prize competitor might hope to have--would carry a high risk of disaster. He made the calculation by determining the current cost of designing, building, and exhaustively testing a vehicle like the X-15: $1.3 billion. "So what can you do with only ten million? You can work out what the failure probability is, and it comes out at thirty to forty per cent."

After firing the engine, Melvill intended to fly SpaceShipOne directly upward. But the plane was caught by a violent wind shear; he overcompensated, and, after zigzagging, ended up several degrees away from vertical. "A lot of pitching," he told the test's mission control, in Mojave, by radio. The deviation cost him height, but, according to Rutan, it was not especially dangerous. After seventy-six seconds, a timer shut down the engine. Melvill had reached a height of thirty-four miles. SpaceShipOne had such momentum in the thinning air that it continued to move at twenty-three hundred miles an hour, now in silence. Melvill arranged SpaceShipOne into its folded, "feathered" position, with the wings tilted upward, in readiness for reentry. The horizon was nine hundred miles away; the sky was black and empty. "Holy mackerel," Melvill said. Three minutes after leaving White Knight, as SpaceShipOne was reaching the apogee of its flight, there was a moment of alarm: when Melvill pushed the switch to set the trim of the stabilizers, which keep the spacecraft from pitching, only one moved. Within two seconds, he had resorted to a backup control, and the trim was set. Now he had a minute and a half before the Earth's air would disturb his peace. He put his hand into his flight-suit pocket and--fumbling, because time was short--took out a dozen M&M's and opened his hand. On Rutan's video footage of the cockpit, the candies float around Melvill's head. It's so quiet, you can hear them hitting the windows.

Melvill later compared the noise of reentry to "somebody talking to you very, very sharply." In another momentary drama, the fairing around the engine's nozzle, softened by the heat of the motor, buckled. (According to Rutan, this presented no danger to the flight.) Rutan later said, "You know that if you jump off your roof and fall a couple of stories you're going to break your leg, but imagine falling ten, fifteen, twenty miles." In the most unnerving moment of the flight, Melvill was accelerating so fast that his body was experiencing pressure at five times the level of everyday gravity. "It's like a very exciting roller coaster," Rutan said. "It's ferocious for a moment during reentry, just enough to be a lot of fun." At sixty thousand feet, Melvill straightened out the wings, and SpaceShipOne became a glider, returning to the Mojave airport eighty minutes after taking off. Melvill climbed onto the roof of SpaceShipOne, and straddled it like Major Kong in "Dr. Strangelove." His wife, who had not wanted him to make the flight, was waiting on the tarmac. Rutan's data showed that Melvill had reached a hundred kilometres by only four hundred feet. "If Mike had eaten a big breakfast, he wouldn't be an astronaut," he said.

Rutan, whose wife said that he had barely slept in the two weeks before the test flight (he remembers no such difficulties), drove out from mission control with Paul Allen to meet Melvill on the runway, taking a printed sign from someone in the crowd. It read "SpaceShipOne, Government Zero," and had been printed by Ernest Hancock, a libertarian talk-radio producer from Arizona. (The anti-government rhetoric associated with SpaceShipOne disregards, among other things, the fact that the Mojave airport's taxiways were improved this year with a $3.9-million grant from the F.A.A.)

"I was ecstatic," Rutan told me. "We have a few little things to clean up, like the X Prize." Three weeks later, Rutan announced that he would make a formal claim on the prize, whose rules demand notice of sixty days. The first flight would take place on September 29th, and the second sometime in the following two weeks.

Several weeks after Melvill's flight, John Carmack launched his Black Armadillo on a short, unmanned test flight. The craft was expected to rise to two hundred feet before slowly returning; instead, it reached six hundred feet, ran out of propellant, and crashed to the ground. The same weekend, Space Transport Corporation's Rubicon 1 rocket exploded over the Pacific. The head of one of the three dummies on board was washed ashore; the company later offered it for sale on eBay.

"It showed the world that the little guy can do it," Rutan told me when we had dinner recently. "Years of manned spaceflight and there was less activity this year than there was in 1961! That's ridiculous. Why is nasa running an airline? They should be doing basic research and making it available to American industry."

We were at the house in Mojave where he has lived since 1989. A few years earlier, during his third marriage, Rutan had been persuaded to move to Palmdale, which is half an hour south of Mojave and is more worldly. There he kept a poodle and shaved off the long, full sideburns that he regards as his trademark. When he met Tonya--his fourth wife, and "the best one he's ever had," in the affectionate view of a longtime neighbor--he regrew his sideburns, moved back to Mojave, and helped design a new house just outside town, situated on a spectacular spot in the desert, in the midst of Joshua trees.

He met me at the door of a white concrete hexagonal pyramid. At the dirt roadside, Rutan's street number was written on the tail end of a cargo plane; it pointed up at an angle, as if it had crashed into the sand. Inside, the house had the air of the hideaway of a young Medellin kingpin. It was a single open space reaching to a skylight at the pyramid's point. On one wall, where you might hope to see a view of the surrounding desert, a mural showed three stone pyramids by a lake, and, in the foreground, four figures standing on a promenade: a human couple, the Egyptian god Horus, and an alien with large eyes. Aspects of the mural's design correspond to ideas that Rutan has about the origin of the Egyptian pyramids, some of which he believes may have been built by a civilization earlier than ancient Egypt. The sound of the wind did not carry through the walls.

We ate sitting on a sofa beside a red trapezoid pool table, among stuffed toy animals that included a four-foot bear, a gift from Burt to Tonya. Rutan spoke in long, stump-speech paragraphs. When he wanted to emphasize a point, he leaned forward with the unsettling smile of a department-store Santa asking a child if he has been good. "No one went to jail!" he said of nasa's troubles with the Space Shuttle. "You go down to Kmart with a ski mask on for thirty-five dollars, and they send you to jail. But can you imagine spending hundreds of billions of dollars after making a promise to Congress that this will save money? No one went to jail!"

As we spoke, a bird screeched at increasing volume in a side room. Eventually, Tonya fetched Winglet, an African gray parrot that Burt had reared from its birth, twenty-five years ago. His tone softened.

"Can you do a duck?" Rutan asked the parrot. The parrot quacked.

"Can you do a cat?"

The parrot barked like a dog.

"A cat!"

It meowed.

Rutan picked up the bird and put its head into his mouth, as if to bite it off, and made a roaring sound. The bird clucked. "She likes the echo," Rutan said.

Rutan's desert house has no windows on the ground floor. It is a dark, silent capsule, designed for energy efficiency. Windows would compromise the home's protection from heat. Earlier, Tonya had described how her husband lived primarily in the company of his own thoughts, and the house seemed to be a symbol of this temperament, as well as a product of it. Like SpaceShipOne--a solution to an engineering problem solved forty years ago; a design to inspire the awe of Earthlings while moving at high speed away from them; a smallish step for mankind, a giant leap for Burt Rutan--the house's design reflects a mind that seems to be happiest when it ignores the world beyond it. "I see enough of the ugly desert when I drive to work," Rutan said, laughing.

A few years ago, Rutan developed heart trouble, and he was fitted with a defibrillator. His brother refers to him as Robo-Burt. He is now prohibited from flying a plane except with another pilot on board, and, according to Tonya, there is doubt whether he would risk riding as a passenger on a future flight of SpaceShipOne--not for fear of his own safety but out of worry that his flailing death by heart attack would distract the pilot and endanger the flight.

Yet whenever Rutan talks of space tourism he still includes himself in the adventure. He figures that he has forty or fifty more years to live. During dinner, he said, "I really think I can go to the moon now. There's a whole bunch of people with new dreams. And I think they're valid now." He takes calls every day from people wanting to buy tickets to space from him; he explains several times a day that he has built a prototype, and has not launched an airline. Yet he thinks that space tourism will soon be economically viable."You could charge someone a hundred thousand dollars, maybe more. To get rid of the rich guys, service the rich guys. Theoretically, I could do it next year. But I don't call that space tourism. Space tourism is when you get more seats, and you can do it at thirty or fifty thousand dollars. And then the next generation would be ten or twelve thousand. Nobody's space airline will be as safe as an airplane. But it's going to be as safe as skydiving." He looked at the giant Teddy bear, which he has half-seriously considered as a SpaceShipOne passenger on September 29th, and added, "Well, certainly safer than climbing Everest."