Spacemen

Smith, matter-of-factly: "Because the moon has mountains higher than 100 feet."

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Rutan, gaining steam: "But imagine just scaring the [expletive] out of yourself, cruising over the mountains on the moon, real low. And then you spend a day or two, real slow, out at the apogee. Out there, you can see out of the same window, the Moon and the Earth, as separate bodies."

Smith: "Apparently, they liked the idea."

Rutan: "Well, Richard did, and he said so. But Paul was mute. He doesn't often tell you what he's thinking."

Rutan knows that Smith knows the outcome of the story: Branson and Allen funded the project, and Rutan flew SpaceShipOne into suborbital flight in June 2004 -- the first step toward realizing the space-tourism dream. Rutan and his famous backers did it again within a span of two weeks to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize, and then set about creating another ship, SpaceShipTwo, the first in a fleet that would fly people, six at a time, into weightlessness.

But that's only the beginning, and Rutan wants to make sure we all really grasp what he's shooting for. "You see, you have these bubbles where you can float in space, weightless, and see completely around you, without having the confines of a spacewalking suit. To float out there, with your girlfriend, and you're not constrained by anything; you have no noise, just deep silence; you close the door for privacy, and you're out in this bubble, and you're weightless, and you're seeing this view."

"Yes, it's like living a fantasy, isn't it?" Smith says.

"Well," Rutan says, "I'm sure you'd have to wash the windows quite often -- from slobber, right?"

By the time the spacemen make it to the first tee of the Jack Nicklaus Private Course at PGA West, the temperature is 100 degrees -- and climbing. But Rutan, always tinkering and inventing -- he plays with an extra-long-shafted putter he designed and built out of the same carbon-composite material he used in his spacecraft -- has a device to battle the heat. Smith is wearing it in the cart, and he looks, well, ridiculous. "People laugh at this thing," Rutan says, "until they try it on a hot day, then they say, 'Oh, this is kind of cool.' "

The "arctic hat," as Rutan calls it, is cool -- literally. It's a fur-lined hat with flaps that strap beneath the chin, which wouldn't be cool except for this: A labyrinth of plastic tubing crisscrosses the inside of the hat, and larger tubes, protruding from the hat like walrus tusks, run down into a five-gallon cooler filled with ice, in the front compartment of Rutan's golf cart. A pump hooked up to the golf-cart's battery circulates near-freezing water through the tubes, cooling your head, and . . .

Smith is smiling now, his face red and ringed with fur. "Amazing," he says. "I can feel the heat flushing out of me."

"See, I told you," says Rutan. "Now, let's be careful to ice down. This heat is no joke."