Spacemen

"Well, I don't know about that," Smith says.

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Game on.

Smith, a lifelong Tucson resident, started playing golf as a teenager with his father, a medical researcher who helped develop the vaccine for yellow fever. In fact, Smith says, his father was perhaps the first human to try the vaccine. "After he took the shot," Smith recalls, "he'd be walking around the house and we'd say, 'Well, Dad, how are you feeling today?'" A voracious reader to this day, Smith devoured science fiction as a boy, including Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Thuvia, Maid of Mars."

Smith's robotic probe of the Red Planet's surface has provided more verifiable scientific information -- about the soil composition, atmosphere, weather patterns and more -- than the previous Mars missions combined. He's cagey about revealing the full Phoenix mission findings -- partly because the extent to which they support the possibility of Martian life, past or present, is red-hot controversial, and partly because the results will soon be published in the journal Science. "We found a very interesting salt called perchlorate, which is an energy source for microbes on Earth," Smith says. "We've also seen ice clouds, ground frost and diamond dust -- little ice crystals raining down out of the sky. I think that's a first." Like Rutan's venture with Branson, all of Smith's work could ultimately pave the way for more manned forays into space. In one sense, their goals are disparate -- Rutan toils in the name of commerce, Smith for the sake of pure science. But they're fundamentally driven by the same desire: to exponentially expand our understanding of space and, ultimately, to put humans there on a regular basis.

"What Burt is doing is off the charts," Smith says. "People think, 'Well, you just find someone to give you a bunch of money and then you build a rocket and fly it into space.' But it's just not that easy, not by a long shot. If it were, there'd be more people doing it, but there's really just one, and that's Burt."

Rutan will talk your ear off about this. He's talking now, over breakfast of ham and eggs, in a clubhouse restaurant at PGA West. Smith sips black coffee and works on his own cholesterol-laden meal -- sausage and eggs -- listening to Rutan go on a tear. Rutan talks so much, without pause, that you think maybe he'll get a little tired -- all the better for Smith to take advantage of him when they tee off in about an hour. During that hour, Smith will get a few words in edgewise, but mostly he listens. And what he finds out is that Rutan is a dreamer, albeit one who has had the brains and conviction to turn his dreams into reality.

Take the whole manned space mission thing. Back when he was puzzling over how to pull it off in 2004, Rutan was stumped about how to present the idea to the two men with the financial wherewithal to make it happen, namely Branson and Microsoft co-founder Allen. Rutan's breakthrough came when he was in a pose not unlike that of Auguste Rodin's The Thinker.

"Paul and Richard were on their way to my house," Rutan recalls, using his fork to cut off another bit of ham. "I was sitting back, on the toilet, thinking about it. 'What am I going to tell Paul and Richard?' And it came to me that these guys are 10 years younger than me -- but they are old enough for me to make a point. They sat down in my living room, and I looked them straight in the face, and said, 'What do you guys want to see happen before you die?'" Branson and Allen weren't seeing exactly what Rutan was driving at, so he laid it on the line. "I said, 'I want to be able to see the public be able to afford, at least, to go into orbit.' "

Now, over breakfast, Rutan elaborates on his vision, which is part Jules Verne, part "Love Boat." He says he wants to put a resort hotel into orbit around the moon, and to create two-person modules where couples could take excursions and experience weightlessness together and get a good, close look at the moon's surface, before returning to the main "resort."

"Put you in a real simple spacecraft with enough propellant to go out and swing around the moon and then to decelerate back to the mothership. Now, the thing that you can do with that, is kind of fun. You give the couple a three-day trip to the moon -- they could orbit at 100 feet!"

Smith interrupts: "I wouldn't recommend that."

Rutan: "Why not?"