Spacemen
Two men behind the future of American space exploration and commerce compete to launch little white balls into the unknown

By Joe Bargmann
Sunday, September 28, 2008

Two of the most important men in the future of space exploration share an extreme passion for golf. Coincidence?

Maybe. But watch the trajectory of a white ball launched from the titanium face of a driver into an infinite sky. Consider the intricacies of remotely guiding a tiny vessel across complex surface topography to a target no more than inches in diameter. Imagine the ego, the competitive fire, that must be required to believe you can send humans into the frozen void of space and return them safely to Earth, or discover life on another planet. Or hit a ball 500 yards over lake and forest, hill and dale, and land it in a tiny cup.

Still think it's a coincidence?

When Popular Mechanics recognized Burt Rutan with a Breakthrough Award in 2006, lauding him as the "final frontiersman" for the design and development of the first suborbital spaceship for tourists, the magazine invited Rutan to be the keynote speaker at the awards ceremony in New York. He accepted, on one condition: He would need to get in a round of golf while he was in the Big Apple.

The magazine editors -- who knew I was a golf nut -- asked me if I could arrange for Rutan to play at New Jersey's famed Baltusrol Golf Club. The imposing 6-foot-3 Rutan showed up at the notoriously fusty club outfitted in tartan-plaid plus fours, a matching tam o'shanter, a long-sleeved golf shirt, knee socks and suspenders. My first glimpse of him on the practice putting green will be with me forever.

Early this year, I learned that Peter Smith, the principal investigator and driving force behind NASA's astoundingly successful Phoenix Mission to explore Mars via remote-controlled robots, was also a golf enthusiast. I did a quick calculation: Rutan, space flight pioneer + Smith, nation's leading Mars authority + golf, male-bonding session = irresistible story.

As it turned out, the two men had a passing knowledge of each other but had never met. Smith, 60, knew Rutan, 65, as the aviation pioneer who, as a former Air Force test-flight engineer, struck out on his own in 1974 to become the most famous American aircraft designer, period. Rutan had been fascinated by the possibility of manned flights to the Red Planet since he was a kid, and he knew of Smith's Phoenix project, but didn't know Smith by name. "I should have," Rutan says. "He's doing hero work."

When I e-mailed Rutan to ask him whether he'd like to play golf with Smith, he pronounced the idea "outstanding!" This is one of Rutan's favorite words. He uses it with a range of inflections, from a low, pensive whisper to a startling exclamation. From the tenor of his e-mail (wildly enthusiastic), this particular "outstanding" leaned toward startling exclamation.

Smith was exhausted after months of riding herd on the Phoenix project, but he wasn't about to pass up a chance to play golf with Rutan. "I'm up for that," Smith said, recalling the "absolute thrill" of watching on TV as Rutan's first suborbital craft shot into space. "There was a lot of showmanship and technical genius involved," says Smith. "I thought, 'Any guy who can make that happen, I've got to meet him.' "

In Tucson, two days before the combatants would take up their forged steel and titanium weapons 500 miles away in the high desert near Palm Springs, Calif., Smith is holding court in his house, a futuristic-looking corrugated metal structure he describes as "a spaceship that crashed in the middle of the desert." He is even more physically imposing than Rutan -- an inch taller at 6-foot-4 and not an ounce less than 250 pounds. Smith has worked since 1978 at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. An optical and imaging expert, Smith designed the cameras for the 1996 Mars Pathfinder Mission, among others -- both successful and disastrous. But his big personality, combined with his burrowing intellect, led him to increasingly broader, managerial roles, until his proposal for the $420 million Phoenix program got the green light in 2003.

He has just sucked down his third flute of Perrier-Jouet Champagne Grand Brut, two hours after announcing at a news conference that the Phoenix project had confirmed the existence of water ice on Mars. The implications are huge, the discovery a scientific first, and Smith is feeling flush with pride. "Confirming that water's there is nothing -- nothing," he says, leaning to pour more bubbly for his wife, Dana, a retired nurse and practicing painter and ceramics sculptor. "We're really just getting started." The next steps: proving that Mars has sustained life (and possibly still can), conducting more elaborate robotic missions, and then, perhaps, sending manned missions and colonizing the planet somewhere down the road.

Let's drink to our conquest of Mars!

The glasses clink, and conversation turns to the golf match. "Tell me," says Smith. "Do you think my opponent is ready?"

Rutan is nothing if not ready. He is arguably the greatest living aeronautical engineer, and even at 65, his most fertile period may well be ahead of him. In a dramatic news conference of his own just days earlier, Rutan unveiled WhiteKnightTwo, the gleaming aircraft that will launch a spaceship from between its double fuselage and enable Virgin Atlantic president Richard Branson -- Rutan's partner, along with billionaire Paul Allen -- to establish the world's first commercial space tourism business, Virgin Galactic.

The short-term goal, starting with flights next fall, is to carry Earthlings to the edge of space, where they will experience weightlessness for four minutes -- at a cost of $50,000 per minute, considering the "space fare" of $200,000 a pop. The 20-year plan is somewhat more ambitious: to put a "luxury resort," as Rutan calls it, into orbit around the Moon.

Rutan is quite confident this will happen. He has built his career on being confident. Confidence -- and a quirky genius that seemingly knows no bounds -- enabled Rutan to design an odd-looking plane that circumnavigated the globe in 1986 without refueling. That aircraft, the Voyager, hangs in the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall, and so does SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded craft to fly into space. SpaceShipOne and a later iteration of the Voyager, the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, have made Rutan the only repeat winner of the Collier Trophy, the coveted award issued annually by the U.S. National Aeronautics Association.

Rutan occupies a unique position in the aeronautics community, namely, at the top. He's the Tiger Woods of aviation, so talented and accomplished that, well, some people just can't help disliking him. Rutan himself remains refreshingly unaware of this. "I don't think I've ever had any genuine criticism," he told me recently, allowing that his calling the future passengers on Virgin Galactic "astronauts" drew fire from actual, NASA-approved astronauts.

At the WhiteKnightTwo unveiling, attended by Branson and moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, among other luminaries, one of Rutan's managers extolled the unusual harmony among employees of his spaceship manufacturing company, Scaled Composites. One reason for the esprit de corps, the manager theorized, is Scaled's method for handling on-the-job complaints, namely, making workers express their beef by writing it down as haiku and presenting it to their manager. The practice has a way of quickly putting petty concerns to rest.

Smith laughs when he hears this. He is also amused when he's told that Rutan is very competitive about golf. "He'll be very upset when I whup his ass," Smith says. "He'll be writing haiku like nobody's business: 'Haiku, and [expletive] you,' a very short one."

He sips his champagne and laughs a little more. "This will be an interesting match," he says.

Visiting Rutan at what he calls his "Golf Shack," in the exclusive, expansive PGA West golf community in La Quinta, Calif., is like going to see your eccentric, affable, golf-obsessed uncle -- if your uncle had a trophy case full of aviation awards. Rutan's wife, Tonya, is a diminutive, very fit woman with a preternaturally upbeat attitude. She's 15 years Rutan's junior and his fourth wife, and Rutan makes it clear, frequently and pointedly, that he appreciates her trim figure. Tonya doesn't mind that at all.

In fact, Tonya says that she and Burt, who's handsome and has an aging rock star quality about him, enjoyed a mutual "animal attraction" when they met on a blind date 16 years ago. They still seem to enjoy that attraction. Burt says the only things he really cares about in life are "golf, sex, and airplanes," and on the wall of his office at the Golf Shack hangs a large, soft-focus photo of Tonya, a former real estate agent and now a writer, wearing a cowgirl hat and a T-shirt cropped very, very short.

Tonya's energy and enthusiasm are not limited to posing for sexy photos. She frequently says, "Ooooh, that's great!" In fact, she says it now, as Smith -- who has just arrived -- unfurls two autographed posters, gifts for Rutan, showing crystal-clear images of the surface of Mars captured by cameras on the Phoenix lander. The posters lie on the kitchen counter in the Rutans' expansive three-bedroom home. The big rear windows, overlooking the backyard plunge pool and hot tub, display a panorama of the golf course and craggy desert mountains in the distance. Gazing down at one of the photographs, Rutan uses his hands to frame a portion of the surface of Mars. "Now, that's about the ugliest thing you'd want to look at, isn't it?" he asks, quickly looking up to gauge Smith's reaction.

Rutan, who clearly understands the value of exploring Mars, is just yanking his soon-to-be opponent's chain, but Smith seems taken aback.

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

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?"

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

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."

But because of the heat, the round of golf is a joke. The trash-talking that separated the spacemen and pointed to a showdown on the course dissipates like so much water in the scorching sun, which pushes the air temperature to more than 110 degrees.

They're fairly evenly matched, each a garden-variety amateur capable of scoring rounds in the mid-80s to mid-90s. They finish the first nine holes dead even, but their enthusiasm for the competition is withering in the furnace. Smith places a handful of ice in a towel, plops it on top of his head and secures his golf hat over the towel. Water drips down his face and neck, drenching his shirt. Rutan steers the golf cart down the fairway, wearing the arctic hat, doffing it only to get out of the cart, walk over to his ball and hit a shot. He then returns to the cart and straps on the hat again.

Oh, the spacemen attempt to stay on their game. But the day is wearing them down, especially Rutan. He's not only a few years older than Smith, but he's still recovering from major surgery. Last fall, Rutan had developed a heart problem, and as he underwent testing, doctors recommended he be put on a transplant list as a precaution. He was convinced he was going to die. At the time, he didn't attribute his illness to stress, a position he has since changed. A few months before his heart had gone on the fritz, Rutan experienced the greatest shock of his professional life when an engine test at his company's Mojave headquarters went terribly wrong. The explosion, on July 26, 2007, killed three employees of Scaled and seriously injured three others. The accident sent Rutan into a downward emotional spiral, the psychological trauma ultimately giving way to his failing health.

Doctors at L.A.'s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center finally diagnosed the problem in January: The sac around his heart, the pericardium, had thickened and hardened. It was restricting his heart from pumping normally, literally strangling the life out of him. After radical, emergency surgery, Rutan began a steady recovery. His major goal, after regaining his ability to walk, was to play golf. And today, he sees the operation -- and his recovery -- as a chance to improve his golf game. "I was lying in bed after surgery, thinking: 'This is my opportunity to start over. I can go see a really good teaching professional and build my swing from the ground up.' Before, I was loath to make radical changes to my swing. But now, I can. I stared death in the face, and today, less than a year later, I'm playing golf."

On the 17th green, Rutan two strokes up, Smith's iPhone rings. He plucks it off his belt, puts it to his ear and groans loudly. "But that's simply not true!" he protests, speaking to a member of his Mars mission team whom he doesn't identify. "I didn't speak to anyone at the White House, that's for sure ... Well, then, who did? Awww, Christ. Leave it to 'Aviation Leak' to make up a story like this. All right, all right. Let's not worry about it. Why should we? The story is wrong. Oh, it's possible someone talked to a member of the White House staff. That, we'll have to deal with; NASA will be kicking and screaming about protocol ... Okay, let's talk later ... Keep me informed."

He straps his phone to his belt. "Can you believe this?" he says to Rutan. "Aviation Leak [Smith's nickname for Aviation Week] has a story saying that a member of my team, or 'sources' on the Phoenix project, debriefed the White House, saying we'd discovered life on Mars. It's absurd! But, man, I've got a [expletive]-storm on my hands."

Rutan smiles wryly at this, saying, "Well, that's what you get for conducting a successful mission!"

It is 1:30 a.m. back at Rutan's Golf Shack. Tonya and Burt have retired, and Smith is soaking in the backyard pool. He has a glass of white wine in his hand. "Oh, man," he says, "does it get any better than this?

"I really enjoyed the golf today," he says. "I mean, really enjoyed it. Man, that course is tough. But I loved the whole scene. The fact that you can see the coral line in the cliffs around the course -- there was an ocean there thousands of years ago! It was like playing golf in a geological museum."

He crosses his arms over his chest and rubs his shoulders. It looks like he's giving himself a reassuring hug. "Yeah, the golf was hard, and the heat was oppressive. But I got to know Burt Rutan the man, not Burt Rutan, the legend. He's a fascinating guy with a big heart."

The word "heart" causes Smith to wince, no doubt bringing to mind Rutan's illness. Smith is earnest bordering on maudlin -- you can feel the revelation coming.

"You know how Burt talked about facing his mortality?" Smith asks. "I know exactly what he means."

In March 2007 -- with the Phoenix project in full swing and just a few months from launching the robot that would collect samples from the surface of Mars -- Smith was diagnosed with an illness he asks me not to specify. "I will say, though, that there were life-threatening issues; my recovery wasn't a certainty."

He had to undergo an operation that summer. "It was surreal for me," Smith says, gliding his arms back and forth across the surface of the water. "Saying good-bye to Dana as I went into the operating room was a poignant moment. After they gave me the drugs, of course, I didn't know from anything. But it was so odd. Here I was, being operated on robotically, and in just a few weeks, I would be [sending] a robot to scoop up samples on Mars. The doctor was doing to me what I was going to do to Mars."

He lowers his chin into the water until it rises up to a point just below his lips. He blows bubbles in the water.

"Anyway," he says, his voice trailing off, "a little more than two weeks after the operation, I was in Florida for the launch of the Phoenix. Obviously, I had to be there -- if something went wrong, it was on me. This is my mission."

He describes the beauty of the liftoff, the powerful thrust of the rocket, its arc into the sky. "We were ecstatic," he says. "And then the strangest thing happened. The craft disappeared ... and the vapor trails began swirling around and taking shape. I looked up and couldn't believe it. I said to Dana, 'Do you see that?' And she said, 'Yes, I do.' The clouds were exactly in the shape of a bird spreading its wings -- the phoenix."

Eighteen holes of golf were not enough for Rutan. At about 9:30 the next morning, we are back in the golf carts, the arctic hat is secured to Rutan's head, and we are hurtling toward the first tee of the famous Stadium Course at PGA West. The course design and topography are dramatic, sharply pitched and sculptural, appearing almost hallucinatory in the heat, a blast furnace just like the day before.

We race through nine holes, and then, surrendering to the rising temperature, we agree to head back to the Golf Shack. But wait! Rutan wants Smith to experience the sand bunker to the left of the 16th green. It's nearly 20 feet below the green's surface, as severe and inhospitable as a crater on Mars.

Smith's phone rings again. He puts it to his ear, his eyes narrow, and his expression grows serious.

"Oh, I see," he says. "They're going with the story?"

Rutan trudges toward the green, leaving Smith to deal with what appears to be another crisis. "C'mon, let's keep moving," Rutan says, a devilish grin curling the corner of his mouth. "Peter's dealing with a little matter regarding life on Mars."

Smith hangs up, straps his phone back on his belt, Rutan circles back in his golf cart. Smith is clearly distressed, deflated by the phone call, but Rutan insists that he play out of the cavernous bunker. "It's outstanding," Rutan declares.

"Uh-huh," Smith says weakly. "Outstanding."

Smith descends into the sandy bunker, closely followed by Rutan. They toss down a few balls, and Smith begins flailing away, swinging his sand wedge with maximum force but zero precision. Six horrible hacks later, he says, "I give up."

"Well, I'm glad you got to experience it," Rutan says. "It's a beast of a sand trap."

"You're right about that, Burt," says Smith.

Rutan begins his ascent from the hole, looking back to check on Smith, whose progress is glacial.

Reaching the top of the steep bank, Rutan turns and extends a golf club to Smith, who grabs the lifeline gratefully.

"Thanks, friend," Smith says. "I was beginning to think I'd never get out of there."

"We couldn't let that happen," says Rutan, flashing that wry smile once more. "You're way too important to our future understanding of space. There's no way we were going to leave you behind."

Joe Bargmann is a freelance journalist who livesin New York. He can be reached at jbargmann@gmail.com.