I met Daisuke "Dice-K" Enomoto in Star City, Russia, in August 2006. Enomoto, 37, is slight with tired eyes and a shock of bleach-blond dyed hair. His idea of space travel comes from comic books and Star Wars. He grew up as a self-described otaku, coding his own computer games and dreaming of space—or, at least, space as it was portrayed in Star Wars and manga. His favorite anime show, Gundam, chronicles a future full of giant robots in which humans are abandoning this planet for the stars. "People who live on Earth, their souls is tied up by gravity, you understand?" Enomoto says. "I sympathize with this idea. Maybe in the future people should live in the space."

Enomoto applied his programming skills to building Internet companies, making millions. He bought a swanky wraparound penthouse loft overlooking Tokyo's famous electronics district, Akihabara. He tooled around in Porsches and Segways, and threw raves. He redecorated the moon-age pad himself, tricking it out with sinuous white walls modeled after the International Space Station. But life was bearing down on him. He married and divorced, had a couple of kids. One of his former companies, Livedoor, was embroiled in criminal lawsuits over stock and accounting issues. He needed to get away from the money, the demands, the scandal. And what better place to go than space? "I just want to go up there," he says, "and chill."

This giddy club kid paid $20 million (the price of a trip to the International Space Station at the time) to Space Adventures. He left behind his sci-fi penthouse and moved into a tiny two-room apartment in Star City to train for his 10-day space trip. He bunked with a Russian translator named Sergei, who stayed up every night shoving wads of newspaper into the window cracks to keep out the freezing winds.

Daisuke "Dice-K" Enomoto shows off his official cosmonaut jumpsuit in Star City, Russia, in August 2006.
Photo: David Kushner

The months of intensive cosmonaut training was hard on the keyboard jockey, especially the fitness regimen. When he arrived, he could do only two chin-ups. Swimming 800 meters took him 26 minutes. He was also unprepared for the antinausea conditioning in the whirling vestibular chair. Enomoto had his own technique for trying to deal with the looping around. "I imagined that I was driving in the PlayStation game Ridge Racer," he says. It didn't work. Within minutes, he was spewing borscht all over his blue spacesuit.

The longer Enomoto stayed at Star City, however, the more he came to enjoy the simple life there. Gone were the pressures of life in Japan. "I realize life is more than just money," he says. The broadband access in his cramped Star City apartment and several seasons of 24 on DVD didn't hurt.

Enomoto had big plans for his ride into space—and not just the ultimate iPod playlist he put together for the trip, a meticulously arranged mix of techno and trance. He also intended to take cosplay to a whole new level. He would dress like his favorite anime character—the mighty Char Aznable from Gundam. He had his assistant make a custom space suit, an orange and black number complete with a homemade Dice-K patch stitched on the front.

Every Space Adventures client can do experiments during his or her trip to space—most have chosen to conduct scientific research. Enomoto decided to see if he could assemble Gundam toys in weightlessness. Enomoto explains, "I make robots in these bags!" as he reaches his hands inside what looks like an elaborate Ziploc filled with robot parts, "just because it's fun!"

Enomoto displays a couple of toy Gundam robots, an example of the sort of toys he wanted to see if he could assemble in the weightlessness of space.
Photo: David Kushner

Enomoto's space dreams came crashing down one August morning shortly after my arrival in Star City. The discovery of a kidney stone means he can't fly. Enomoto's backup, Anousheh Ansari, a 41-year-old Iranian woman living in the US, will be taking his seat in the next Soyuz launch. After a visit to the hospital, he's sitting in his apartment with a steaming cup of tea. Enomoto's phone rings off the hook from friends just getting the news. But Enomoto is all smiles.

"My flight isn't canceled," he tells his friend on the phone, "it's just postponed." With his training complete and his condition treatable by a blast of ultrasound, Enomoto is in even better shape. He'll be up in space in no time. Best of all, he says, now he can work out some final details like getting the space station manuals translated into Japanese. And, he says, maybe he'll use the extra time to negotiate a spacewalk outside the ISS.

In the meantime, he's happy Anousheh is getting her crack at the flight.

Any chance he'll let her assemble one of his robot toys in space when she goes? "I don't think so!" he says, with a nerdy laugh and a snort. He spent $20 million, and the robots are coming with him.

As of August 2008, Enomoto hadn't returned calls, and Space Adventures wouldn't comment on his future flight status.

In the woods an hour outside Moscow, a sign on the road reads zvyozdny or "star." You are now approaching Star City, home of the Russian space program where cosmonauts have trained since the time of Yuri Gagarin. Clients of Space Adventures who shell out tens of millions of dollars for a trip to the International Space Station can expect to spend up to eight months training here before blastoff.

Star City cosmonauts and workers, and their families, reside in these apartment buildings. Some 8,000 people live in Star City year round.

Buses wait outside the entrance to Star City. There is a security booth, and nearby is a kiosk selling cigarettes, snacks, and souvenirs.

The Cosmonaut House is the main community center in Star City. It has a theater for events, a indoor flea market, and a museum that includes Yuri Gagarin's office and artifacts.

A sculpture outside the Cosmonaut House represents Gagarin flying effortlessly through a ring that symbolizes earthly limitations.

This photo collage at the entrance to the Cosmonaut House is just one of many memorials to Yuri Gagarin around Star City.

This is a replica of the MIR mock-up/trainer inside the Star City space museum.

Inside the Star City museum is a simulation of the Soyuz vehicle. The two holes lined with bright aluminum are parachute containers that pop open at lower altitudes for a soft landing.

A MiG monument stands at the air base entrance of Star City.

Artwork celebrating flight shows the MIR at the center, surrounded by images of planes.

Richard Garriott, dressed in his flight suit, stands in the stairwell near his one-bedroom apartment in Star City.

Rostislav Bogdashevsky, the renown Star City psychologist who has been training cosmonauts for more than 45 years, instructs Richard Garriott and Nik Halik with the aid of a translator.

Rostislav Bogdashevsky conducts psychological training of the cosmonauts inside this room. Note the picture overhead of a smiling Gagarin, one of his former pupils.

The bare-bones gymnasium in Star City houses exercise equipment, a pool, and a locker room. Space Adventures clients may spend several hours a day in here.

Gagarin's locker, preserved behind glass in the Star City gym, holds his tennis racket, shoes, and towels.

The Soyuz TDK 7 showing the habitation chamber atop, and descent module below.

A peek inside the Soyuz TDK 7.

Richard Garriott, bottom, and Nik Halik, top, train in the Soyuz TDK 3. Richard Garriott points out: "Note the very close quarters that in real life are even tighter. If you see the green at the bottom of the screen, that is where a door has been cut into the side for easy access. In reality, that is where the parachute compartment sticks into the passenger area. Nik and I are going line by line in the Flight Data Files as the sim progresses. Each line has a time and action to perform and the result we expect. Note that I have a stick in my right hand. When strapped in, especially when in a space suit, it is hard to reach some buttons, so that device is for reaching and pressing buttons that might be hard to reach. Near the right of the screen, you can see the small periscope viewport. At this moment in the sim, our attitude is aligned with Earth. This is likely just after insertion, or just before reentry."

This building houses the TsF-18 centrifuge.

The TsF-18 centrifuge is one of the largest and most advanced in the world. It can simulate the gravitational forces that cosmonauts experience during liftoff and landing—up to nine times as much as Earth's gravity. Space Adventure clients don't endure the full level of the machine's torture—30 gs for unmanned runs—but they are warned to keep their mouths shut at all times, as the extra gs can break their jaws.

The Hydrolab is an underwater training facility used to simulate a spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The mockup section of the ISS shown here can be lowered by the crane into the tank. Cosmonauts wear Orlan spacesuits as they perform spacewalk maneuvers.

The Soyuz Café is a private gathering place for cosmonauts and others celebrating special events in Star City. The blue chamber to the side of the lodge is modeled after the Soyuz, except it contains a wine cellar and comfy sofas.

Richard Garriott holds the old Star City planetarium, a handheld device. A sheet of black paper with holes would be slipped into the viewer and held up to the light.

Do you want to be the commander or the engineer?

It's exactly the kind of question you'd expect to hear from Richard Garriott, the 47-year-old father of massively multiplayer online gaming. His titles, which have sold more than 100 million copies, let gamers assume the role of magician, warrior, or sci-fi super-soldier. In real life, Garriott goes by the nickname Lord British and dresses up in Elizabethan garb.

But on this May afternoon in a cramped classroom northeast of Moscow, Garriott is not playing a game. He's fiddling with a joystick, but he's training for a real-life mission as a cosmonaut. In front of him is a simulation of the control panel of the Soyuz spaceship. "I know you are great computer gamer, so here you go," his instructor jokes in a thick Russian accent as he fires up the videoscreen so Garriott can practice a descent.

When the Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft blasts off from Kazakhstan on October 12 and travels to the International Space Station, Garriott will be on board. The Soyuz can accommodate three people. US astronaut Mike Fincke will sit in the left seat, and mission commander Yuri Lonchakov will occupy the center seat. Garriott didn't have the right stuff, but he did buy the right seat.

Garriott will become the sixth private citizen to join the most exclusive, most high-octane clique on the planet: Call it the 240-mile-high club. Membership includes Greg Olsen, who made his fortune developing infrared cameras; Mark Shuttleworth, the software engineer who spearheaded Ubuntu; and Charles Simonyi, former chief architect of Microsoft. What they have in common, other than tremendous success in the tech industry, is a willingness to pay tens of millions of dollars for a week and a half in space.

But here's the fine print: That ticket to the ISS comes with a stopover. Before they blast off, the wealthy adventurers must spend as many as eight months at Russia's cosmonaut training ground, Zvyozdny Gorodok, aka Star City. They live in cramped dormitories in the Prophylactory Building, or Prophy, which looks more YMCA than Star Trek. They slip and slide down frozen walkways past dilapidated Soviet structures. They subsist on cafeteria food slathered in mayo. They bury themselves in textbooks or ride "vomit comets" and centrifuges.

"Everybody knows you can go to space if you are a perfect physical specimen and incredibly smart," Simonyi says. "But what if you are kind of normal?"

Then you have to fork over $30 million to Space Adventures, a company that serves as go-between with the Russian space program. Just don't call its clients space tourists. "That term implies you are there to take photos and hang out," Garriott says. "I'm trying to prove you can actually be a valuable contributor to the activities on board the space station." He notes that he'll be conducting research on protein crystal growth on behalf of a biotech firm. But he doesn't deny that he's really going up because it will be a friggin' blast. "I'd be misleading you if I didn't admit that it's a very selfish activity," he says.

Selfish, and potentially risky for the rest of the crew. "There are a million ways I can screw up and kill everyone," Garriott says. That's why he's getting remedial cosmonaut training. Today's descent simulation is uneventful at first. But then the instructor ups the ante with a malfunction, and Garriott's capsule veers off target. "I don't want to kill us!" Garriott yelps, flicking his mouse. "No way, dude!"

Too late. The descent simulation ends. The instructor checks the results. "Your landing is very bad," he says gravely. Luckily, here in Star City they can restart and try again.

Zvyozdny Gorodok is the birthplace of spaceflight. Ever since the Soviets built the cosmonaut training center in 1960, this city of 8,000 has been shrouded in mystery, even left off maps. After Yuri Gagarin trained here and became the first person to travel into space, Star City became a sort of Bolshevik Oz in the minds of the Russian people, with highly evolved star men living in gleaming silver towers.

The reality, Garriott discovers as he checks in at the security booth on his first day of training in January, is a bit different. Nearby, an old woman sells chocolate and cigarettes from a tiny kiosk. Garriott makes his way past the solemn armed guards at the gate and follows a trail through the towering pines. Grim cement buildings covered in peeling paint rise from the cracked pavement. An enormous babushka trudges past, lugging a grocery sack.

A statue of Gagarin flying through a ring that represents earthly limitations.
Photo: Benedict Redgrove

Tributes to Gagarin are everywhere. There are paintings of him, like religious icons, in all the buildings. There are statues and busts of him outside the Yuri A. Gagarin Russian State Science Research Cosmonaut Training Center. There's a bizarre futurist sculpture of him flying through a symbolic ring in front of the so-called Cosmonaut's House. The building houses a museum, but it's also the site of a flea market, where locals haggle over G-strings and furry hats.

Garriott arrives at his new quarters, a drafty little apartment on the third floor of the Prophy. He tacks up inspirational pictures of Gagarin, as well as posters of some of his videogames. On the door, he has put up a picture of himself and penciled Richard Garriott lives here underneath it.

"It's like going to a monastery," says Simonyi, who stayed here from September 2006 to March 2007. "You have a small bag and a toilet kit and move into a dorm. You have to live very simply."

"The whole lifestyle of Star City was very different from what I was used to," says Space Adventures' fourth orbital client, Anousheh Ansari, a 42-year-old US-based Iranian woman and a sponsor of the Ansari X Prize (a $10 million competition to develop a reusable manned spaceship). "You can't count on hot water. A lot of time, the water that comes out is dark brown and starts lightening up only after 20 minutes. I'm lactose intolerant and need a special diet. But over there, I had to learn to live with what was available."

Garriott thought ahead and packed a stockpile of gamer meals: candy bars and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. He lined up his rations on a shelf when he arrived, then sat on the edge of his bed. Gone were his personal assistant, his 6,000-square-foot mansion, his sprawling 13-acre lawn, and his private observatory. But he was as giddy as a kid on his first day of college.

"I grew up in a place like this, where everyone I knew went to space," Garriott tells me over a lunch of veal and cabbage at a dreary Star City cafeteria. The place he's talking about is Nassau Bay, a Houston suburb favored by NASA employees because of its proximity to the Johnson Space Center. His father, Owen Garriott, rocketed to Skylab in 1973 and to Spacelab-1 in 1983. "I always assumed that my future would include going into space," he says.

But there was a problem: His vision sucked. When Garriott was a preteen, his family doctor at NASA showed him the results of his eye test. "I'm so sorry, Richard," he said. "You'll never be accepted as an astronaut."

"It was just kind of a shock," Garriott says, sawing away at his glistening pile of meat. "But I went from shock to dismay to 'Who is he to tell me what I can't do?'"

Young Garriott spent his days monkeying around with electronics and his nights playing Dungeons & Dragons. He turned his love of role-playing games into a career, coding the Ultima franchise and cofounding the development studio Origin Systems. In 1992, Electronic Arts bought Origin for $35 million in stock, making Garriott a very wealthy geek. He spent some of that on a mansion he dubbed Britannia Manor, outfitted with secret passageways.

Garriott may have made his riches designing adventures for others, but he has also orchestrated plenty of adventure for himself. A symbol representing his motto, "Ethical hedonism," is tattooed on one of his ankles along with a ring of additional tattoos, each marking a memorable experience—like diving to the Titanic or hunting for meteorites in Antarctica. But those terrestrial exploits weren't enough for Lord British.

So in the late '90s, Garriott became a donor to and board member of the X Prize Foundation, the organization created by Peter Diamandis to foster private space initiatives. He also invested in Diamandis' parabolic flight company, Zero-G, and became an investor and board member of Space Adventures, a company that had just been founded as a kind of space travel agency.

In 1998, Eric Anderson, president and cofounder of Space Adventures, pitched NASA and the Russians on the idea of selling a seat aboard a spacecraft. NASA balked, but the cash-starved Russians were game. Though Star City had been top secret until the end of the Cold War, it was now opening up in a bid for tourism money. The Russians told Anderson they needed funding for a study on the feasibility of selling a ride on the Soyuz.

Richard Garriott, who bought a trip tto the ISS.
Photo: Benedict Redgrove

Garriott, flush with wealth from the sale of Origin, says he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance the research. Around the year 2000, the Russians came back with an answer: Space Adventures could purchase a seat in the capsule ... for $20 million.

Garriott didn't flinch. He signed up, figuring he was first in line. His trip was set for April 2001.

Then the dotcom bubble burst, taking most of Garriott's cash with it. In his place went US investor Dennis Tito, who would go down in history as the first citizen space explorer. "It was devastating," Garriott says. Four more multimillionaire cosmonauts and six years later, Garriott finally scraped together the dough for the trip, which now costs $30 million. "I'm spending the majority of my money to do this," he says.

When he arrived at Star City on January 20, 2008, Garriott found a comrade: Aussie-born playboy Nik Halik, a 39-year-old fellow millionaire who made his money in real estate and stocks. Halik now travels the world as a motivational speaker and self-described "thrillionaire."

Halik told Garriott of his childhood spent indoors with chronic asthma. While other kids played outside, he would sit in bed thumbing through Encyclopaedia Britannica and compiling a list of the 10 things he wanted to do before he died. By the time he got to Star City, he had crossed off the bulk of his list: mansions in Mykonos and Morocco—check. Chasing tornadoes—check. Lunch in a submersible on the Titanic—check. A night in the sarcophagus of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza—not on his list, but bloody wicked. "I've got three more to go: the space station, Everest, and the lunar surface," he says. "After that, I'm done."

Technically, Halik isn't signed up to fly until at least April 2009, but he coughed up an extra $3 million to come here early ... just in case. Garriott points at Halik and jokes, "I'm the one going to space, unless this guy breaks my legs." Halik grins broadly.

Though Space Adventure clients pay a fortune for their trip, there's no guarantee they'll actually make it. The slightest ailment could scuttle their plans. In 2004, an x-ray turned up a spot on Olsen's lung, and the infrared-camera developer had to wait a year for clearance to fly. The 37-year-old Japanese dotcom millionaire Daisuke Enomoto suffered a worse fate. Just a month before his 2006 liftoff, he was diagnosed with a kidney stone. Ansari took his place. Enomoto has yet to make his flight.

Garriott had a close call of his own. Just before departing for Russia, doctors found a hemangioma on his liver. Though the small, benign lesion could have been with him his whole life and never caused a problem, there was a slim chance it could rupture and bleed in space. Garriott underwent surgery to have it removed. He shows me the 6-inch scar on his belly.

All winter, the two wealthy adventurers carefully navigate the icy sidewalks, knowing that a minor injury could ground them. In the cafeteria, they usually eat alone. When they pass cosmonauts, all they get is a grunt and nod of acknowledgment.

It's not hard to imagine why they're having trouble fitting in: Though the months of preparation seem daunting to Garriott and Halik, a cosmonaut spends several years training for a flight. And the outsiders' eccentricities haven't exactly endeared them to the locals. Garriott wears two rattails, which he's been cultivating for more than 20 years. He has them rebraided occasionally and is working up the nerve to ask someone at the Star City barbershop for help. But that's nothing: Before Enomoto was grounded, he talked about dressing up as an anime character during his flight and trying to assemble a toy robot in space.

The chores assigned to the travelers are rather unglamorous. During his 2002 space trip, Shuttleworth drained the sewage. Garriott will be tasked with similar grunt work, like pumping out condensation. And while he is trained to perform all roles in case of an emergency, he will have no mission-critical responsibilities. "There is nothing the right-seat person is doing that couldn't be done by one of the other crew members," he says. "Even if the person in the right seat faints, the crew is perfectly capable of flying the vehicle. The minimum training for us is 'Don't mess with things.'"

Marina Driga, a military captain and press liaison, confides what some around Star City think of its high-profile trainees: "People say it is better to send monkey."

Garriott and fellow trainee Nik Halik (right and center) are running simulations on the Soyuz control panels — even though they won't have any mission-critical responsibilities.
Photo: Benedict Redgrove

"Ya doomayoo, ya mogoo,ya boodoo," says a hulking old Russian with a blue V-neck sweater, a gray comb-over, and two gold teeth.

"Now you repeat," his translator tells Garriott and Halik: "I think! I can! I vill!"

"I think, I can, I will," the two trainees respond lifelessly.

It's early afternoon in a Khrushchev-era building in Star City. We're gathered in a wood-paneled classroom. Nearby, there's an anatomical model with an exposed brain. A chart hanging from a cabinet shows a man in what looks at first glance like an electrode-studded diaper.

Halik and Garriott sit opposite their instructor, Rostislav Bogdashevsky, a psychologist who has been training cosmonauts for more than 45 years. Behind him, there's a large black-and-white photo of his star pupil, Gagarin, smiling down. The mere mention of that Soviet hero elicits a hearty grin from Bogdashevsky. "There vas no one like him," the psychologist says through the heavily accented translator. "He vas good at adapting to everything. He vas himself all the time."

And now, Bogdashevsky is training the psyches of a couple of wealthy foreigners. Problem is, his nuggets of wisdom don't always survive the journey into English. As the translator says things like "Stress is yourself," an assistant cycles through a slide show that rarely syncs with the lecture.

"Can you tell me how many psychic states we can have?" Bogdashevsky asks.

Garriott shrugs. "Seven?"

Bogdashevsky smiles and shakes his head. "You make mistake. There are 63."

It's one thing to adjust to life in Star City—but quite another to endure the confounding, confining, and sometimes just plain goofy training regimen. The first challenge is the language. Garriott is an autodidact wunderkind who persuaded his high school teachers that learning Basic code counted as fulfilling his foreign-language requirement. He won't be as fortunate at Star City. All of the instructions, instrumentation, and communications in space will be in Russian. So, for four hours a day, Garriott and Halik slave over fat, dusty language books in class, then tote them back to the Prophy to study more at night.

The grueling physical training is a relief from all the Cyrillic lettering. Some of it is standard conditioning in the drab smelly gym. No Tae Bo or aerobics—just medicine balls, a pool, and weight machines. (The most interesting thing in the gym is Gagarin's old locker, the contents sealed behind glass.)

Other training sessions involve what's called a vestibular chair. All trainees routinely get strapped into this torture device. The black chair sits on a round wooden platform in a small, dank room. Once someone is buckled in, the chair spins like a midway ride, clockwise and counterclockwise for as long as 10 minutes at a stretch. As Garriott gyrates, he's instructed to tilt his head forward and back—the better to create disorientation. "You can feel this kind of ... sloshing in your inner ear," he says. "NASA stopped using it, but the Russians still believe it helps desensitize you so you don't get motion sickness." Sometimes the lab coats pepper the cosmonauts with math questions while they're strapped in, just to see how their brains are functioning.

Nausea is also a problem during the dozens of trips they take on the vomit comet, a plane that follows a parabolic trajectory, letting you experience weightlessness in 10-second increments during the drop. Trainees are advised to pack several plastic bags for the trip, since they're likely to fill more than one with the contents of their stomach. As a veteran of 150 parabolas on Diamandis' Zero-G flights, Garriott passed without losing a beet.

All this is nothing compared with the TsF-18 centrifuge. Weighing 300 tons and measuring 59 feet long, it looks like a giant blue phallus. It spins at 170 miles per hour, and riders are instructed not to open their mouth while in motion because the pressure will break their jaw, according to Driga. "It is like nightmare," she adds. "Imagine being buried deep in sand and wanting to move but cannot."

This ordeal is preparation for the inevitable physical challenges of the mission. During launch of the Soyuz craft, cosmonauts experience four times the force of gravity. As if that weren't harrowing enough, the past two reentries were "ballistic," meaning that instead of controlled descent, the capsules were essentially in free fall—hitting up to 9 gs. (NASA shuttle descents typically hit only 3 gs.) "I'm not a worrier," Garriott says. But the fact that no one is sure what caused those ballistic descents can't be a comfort.

When he's enduring 9 gs in the centrifuge, he can at least clutch the "dead man's stick," a controller with a button he can release if the savage gravitational force becomes unbearable (or if he passes out).

There are no dead man's sticks in space. And no matter how stressed anyone gets, they can't even enjoy a little release by manipulating their own joystick: One of the effects of weightlessness is reduced blood flow to the lower half of your body. The rumor in Star City is that many have tried in vain to get it up out there. "There vas top-secret program of this," Driga says. "But the man could not perform. Viagra vill not help."

Going to the bathroom in space may be the trickiest docking maneuver of all. In a Star City museum that includes replicas of the MIR space station and Gagarin's capsule, the first thing everyone wants to see is the space toilet. It's a small plastic bucket with a crotch cup and a vacuum. To use it, Garriott will have to position himself over the bucket, and a suction tube will Hoover up his crap. During tours, the guide paints a pristine picture of the process, involving a seamless deposit of waste into a bag that's sealed for storage until landing. "This vay," he says, "everything is clean and nice in space!"

Not quite. After Olsen took his spaceflight, he phoned Enomoto with urgent advice. "Always have napkins with you," Olsen said. "There's an old saying that no matter how you shake and dance, the last few drops go down your pants. That happens in space, too." One space tourist (whose identity is closely guarded) forgot to switch on the vacuum in the ISS toilet before off-loading. The results were disastrous, and the chamber was splattered with feces. Even worse, the unlucky traveler had to float over and tell the other cosmonauts in halting Russian about the urgent—and potentially life-threatening—spill.

As the psychology training winds down for the day, the good Bogdashevsky leans over the table and passionately gestures at his two students. For the past two hours, they've discussed how to resolve any negative emotion in space. The lecture closes with a series of physical exercises they can do while strapped into their space chair. "Throw away negative emotion," the translator says as Bogdashevsky rubs his ears. "Warm up your ears!" the translator says as Bogdashevsky rubs his stomach. "Massage your internal organs! Three or four times a day for five minutes!"

Garriott and Halik nod dutifully. "Now you not have problems," Bogdashevsky concludes. "You understand positive thinking. He who manages to do this is immortal soul."

By April 12, after four months of isolation, stress, and discomfort, our civilian spaceniks are finally starting to settle in. It's Cosmonauts Day, a holiday honoring Gagarin's first flight into space, and in Star City the celebration lasts late into the night. The thrillionaire wannabe-cosmonauts haven't been invited. But they show up anyway.

It's held in a giant yurt covered with camel hair; inside are famous cosmonauts and their families. Many of the men are wearing traditional Uzbek robes and are seated around an enormous table overflowing with food. But everyone is staring at Garriott and Halik as they walk in, and the two feel like they've been caught trespassing.

After an awkward pause, they are welcomed in broken English, and a long, alcohol-filled night ensues. "That was when we first got to know all these cosmonauts really well," Garriott says. He and Halik may have been perceived as effete space tourists (or monkeys) at first, but they learned enough Russian to make themselves understood, and they stuck it out long enough to prove their commitment. Garriott and Halik can now joke around with the residents of Star City. Halik chums it up with the bosomy, middle-aged woman who runs the cantina. Garriott later finds the unlikely pair in the kitchen, where they're seeing who can down more vodka shots.

After that night, the American and the Aussie increasingly felt accepted as members of the Star City family. Before one cosmonaut came back from space, Garriott and Halik talked the Prophy housemothers into giving them the key to her room so they could wrap every bit of her place in toilet paper, all the way down to the grapes in her fridge. The older Russian cosmonauts even showed the pair a secret way into the building in order to dodge the standard postflight quarantine.

But no amount of camaraderie and training can prepare Halik and Garriott for the worst part of the journey, worse than the grueling training, worse than the punishing gs of takeoff, worse than the indignities of space bathrooms. "The hardest part of the trip was coming back," Ansari says. "You realize that you may never experience this again." It's difficult to readjust to life on Earth, to go from being a temporary cosmonaut to being a normal civilian. Olsen is known to wear his old Star City jumpsuit to schools and youth groups, happy for the opportunity to recount the story of the greatest moments of his life.

Garriott has a simple solution for post-orbital ennui: another ticket to space, which could now be as much as $45 million. "I'm already strategizing how I can earn the required funds," he says.

This full-size training version of the Soyuz capsule is used to practice launches and descents.
Photo: Benedict Redgrove

There's a full-scale Soyuz replica in a Star City facility known as Building 1. Garriott and Halik squeeze into the fake spacecraft and slip on their headsets. It's time to run through another descent exercise, an instructor tells them over an intercom. And this time, no one is nearby to help them.

The capsule is so cramped that Garriott and Halik can't lean forward in their seats to reach certain buttons; they have to jab at them with 18-inch metal wands. The exercise today involves separating the Soyuz from the ISS and returning to Earth. They go through the motions of releasing the latch from the space station.

Garriott begins the countdown in preparation for firing the thrusters. "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six ...," he says. His finger is poised over the Manual Fire button in case the thrusters don't kick in at the right instant, which could cause the Soyuz to skip off the edge of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond.

But the thrusters work fine. One minute later, Garriott begins a second countdown, this time to signal the end of the thruster burn. "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six ..." The thrusters click off. Just before entering the atmosphere, the Soyuz separates from the habitation and instrumentation chambers, and, as Garriott puts it, "we wait to fall out of the sky."

This simulated landing is a success. No ballistic reentry. Touchdown complete.

Aside from surviving the trip, Garriott has one more wish—to earn the title of astronaut. As a gamer, he cares deeply about the difference between character classes—whether a ninja, merchant, or citizen spaceman. But the moniker he has dreamed of all his life is not coming easily. NASA has strict rules about how it titles its explorers, and Garriott cannot qualify, no matter what he does, because he's a private citizen. Instead of an astronaut, they'll call him a space flight participant.

Garriott thinks that's ridiculous. "Every dictionary says that astronaut and cosmonaut are synonyms," he says. "It means anyone who trains for or participates in space flight, period. And once you start training at Star City, they call you cosmonaut."

But they sometimes call him something else, too. As Garriott steps out of the Soyuz, a Russian guard in green fatigues is there to meet him. Garriott has never seen him before, but the dude—clearly a diehard Ultima fan—knows him. "Hail Lord British!" he says, in his thick Russian accent. Velcome home.

Contributing editor David Kushner (david@davidkushner.com) wrote about AI researchers in issue 16.02.

1960: Belka and Strelka, a couple of stray mutts impressed into the Soviet space program, become the first living creatures to return alive from an orbital flight.

The Russians had been using dogs for experimental high-altitude flights long before Belka (Russian for "squirrel") and Strelka ("Little Arrow") lifted off from Baikonur on what would be a 16-orbit flight. Their safe return was by no means a certainty: Less than a month earlier, two other dogs were lost when the booster rocket meant to carry their Vostok spacecraft into orbit exploded on launch.

Then there was Laika, of course, the first living being to orbit the Earth. But Laika was sent into space on a one-way ticket; the Russians knew beforehand that she wasn't coming back.

It was the Americans, not the Russians, who put the first animals into rocket-powered missiles to test the effects of rapid acceleration and weightlessness on a living organism. Albert, a rhesus monkey, was the first to go, launched into suborbital space on June 11, 1948, aboard a V-2 Blossom rocket. He did not survive.

The Russians began experimenting with rabbits, mice and rats before switching to dogs in the early 1950s. In general, the Russians were successful at bringing their dogs home safely, and several of them made multiple flights. One plucky pooch, Snowflake, made at total of six flights during 1959 and 1960.

In selecting their animals, the Russians preferred females (owing to their temperaments and the ease of waste elimination) and strays (which were considered hardier and more adaptable than pampered house pets).

The dogs went through rigorous training to get them ready to fly. Because the dog would be immobile throughout the flight -- in a specially constructed safety module inside the capsule -- she was confined in gradually smaller boxes for days on end, and trained to sit still for long periods of time. The animal grew accustomed to wearing a space suit and was placed in flight simulators and centrifuges that prepared her for space flight.

Belka and Strelka did not go into space unaccompanied. With them onboard Sputnik 5 were 40 mice, a couple of rats and some plants. All were unharmed by their one-day voyage.

Strelka, in fact, went on to become a mother. One of her puppies was presented to President Kennedy's daughter, Caroline, as a gift from the Soviet Union. When Caroline's dog produced her own litter, JFK got a few laughs by referring to them as "pupniks."

Eight months after Belka and Strelka returned to Earth, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first biped to orbit the Earth and return safely.

Source: Various

World of Warcraft has announced a new "Recruit-a-Friend" initiative, designed to rope in those few people who still talk to their spouses and significant others after 8 p.m. instead of beating pretend demons with sparkly weapons. The deal is this: If a current player can convince someone to sign on for a two-month tour of fantasy duty, they get a free zhevra mount.

I should explain a couple of those words for the sweet innocents who have managed to avoid the tawdry, painted World of Warcraft.

Alt Text Podcast

Download audio files and subscribe to the Alt Text podcast.

First: zhevra. A zhevra is a zebra with a horn. Like a unicorn, but a zebra. That's kind of a theme with Warcraft: Take a normal animal, paste on an extra body part or two, and give it a fantasy name. A zebra with a horn is a zhevra, a crocodile with six legs is a crocolisk, a two-headed buzzard is a bonestripper. There's some fantasy precedent for this, but I'm going to be disappointed if the upcoming Warcraft expansion has me fighting three-eyed yaks (yakaboos) and nine-armed octopi (nonopi, or possibly octoplarghs).

As for the mount part, characters in Warcraft can learn to ride an animal, but not until level 30. Starting characters might be able to conjure fireballs or summon a demon, but put them in front of a horse and it's like integral calculus to a sleepy stoat. "Horse, huh. How does this work? You ... I go on top of it? Like above it? And it moves? I'm not ... screw it, I'll walk."

Once characters reach level 30, though, they're not limited to horses. Depending on your character's race and reputation, you might end up riding a wolf, a ram, a dorky-looking bird, a dorky-looking mechanical bird, an elephant (sorry, elekk) or something even stranger. Get enough Warcraft characters together on their mounts and it's like I Ran the Circus without the Three-Snarper-Harp.

So, to sum up: If you get one of your friends to shell out for two months of Warcraft, your character will get to ride a completely cosmetic zebra with a horn instead of whatever it's riding now. It's a sign of Warcraft's unrelenting brain-grip that this is incredibly compelling.

World of Warcraft's developers have mastered the unholy art of in-game bribery. They have discovered that players will do any number of stupid, tedious things in order to earn perks that have no effect on the game.

Just this week I've been fighting in battlegrounds -- special areas where armies clash and 12-year-olds question each other's sexuality -- over and over just for a chance to win a tiny little flying dragon. This dragon doesn't fight on my behalf or give me powers or anything. He just follows me around. In real life I try to avoid being tailed by parasitic flying creatures, but in the game I seek it out, even though I hate battlegrounds.

And really, what does my little dragon tell the other people in the game? The same thing it tells you -- I spent too much time playing Warcraft.

This isn't so bad, mostly because the other players spend too much time playing Warcraft as well. The zhevra mount, however, tells people: "Not only do I spend too much time playing Warcraft, I hassle those with enough wisdom to avoid it." It's sort of like helping out a drug baron, except at least drug mules generally get some cash out of the deal. This is as if someone said: "Hey, if you board a plane with this condom full of cocaine stashed someplace unmentionable, I'll give you a stylish cravat."

I can only hope that this will serve as a cautionary tale to those who, unlike me, have managed to resist the massively multiplayer siren song that Warcraft continues to sing. But if it doesn't, and you decide to sign up for the game anyway, let me know. Those zhevra mounts are pretty boss.

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to be thankful that at least they didn't call it a zebracorn.

Cross one off the list of Google's friends.

Wireless audio-equipment manufacturers and producers of live events are up in arms against Google's efforts to open up a little-used patch of radio spectrum.

What's being contested is the so-called "white space" spectrum, the vacant bands between ultra-high frequency television channels. As U.S. broadcasters transition from analog to digital transmission in time to meet the February 2009 deadline imposed by the Federal Communications Commission, the unused spectrum has become a battleground, pitting not just audio professionals but organizations such as the National Football League, movie studios and Broadway producers against Google.

Google turned up the heat Monday by launching a "Free the Airwaves" campaign with a website and a petition lobbying the FCC to open up the spectrum.

"Remember that fuzzy static between channels on the old TVs?" says the site. "Today more than three-quarters of those radio airwaves, or 'white space' spectrum, are completely unused. This vast public resource could offer a revolution in wireless services of all kinds, including universal wireless Internet."

But for audio-equipment manufacturers and live sound producers, the fuzzy static is their meal ticket.

"We are worried the FCC will buckle and allow white space to be used by personal portable devices seeking wireless services," says Karl Winkler, director of business development for Lectrosonics, a manufacturer of wireless professional audio systems.

The result, say audio industry professionals, could be disastrous. Wireless audio equipment could face significant interference from personal devices searching for wireless connectivity on the spectrum already being used by high-end audio equipment.

"The radio frequency environment is going to become more crowded and more difficult to use," says Mike Torlone, director of marketing services at AKG Acoustics, a division of audio-equipment manufacturer Harman International.

That could potentially lead to loss of signal and interruptions in transmissions, and could force audio producers and production managers to change the way they do business, say experts.

"In that case the number of wireless microphones used will be reduced significantly and it cost big productions millions of dollars to redesign what they do," says Winkler.

The kinds of performances affected aren't limited to the next Justin Timberlake concert or a video shoot for American Idol. While Broadway productions and live shows at Las Vegas are expected to bear the brunt of the decision to open up white space, even local bands, fast-food restaurants, political rallies and church pastors delivering their Sunday sermons could find themselves facing more than a few glitches.

The efforts to unlock the white space has been one of the biggest issues facing the audio-equipment industry and the professionals involved in it, says Bill Evans, editor of trade publication Front of House.

"Everybody is not only angry and upset, they are very, very worried," he says. "We are talking about the livelihood of people here."

The move from analog to digital TV transmission allowed the Federal Communications Commission to reclaim a part of the spectrum, between 698 MHz to 806 MHz. Recently the FCC successfully auctioned the 700 MHz spectrum, a large chunk of which was won by Verizon Wireless.

While a portion of the remaining spectrum has been reserved for future public-safety networks, white space between TV channels remains, and that has caught the attention of companies such as Google, Motorola, Microsoft and Philips.

The tech giants are lobbying to use the white space to deploy new wireless technologies to deliver broadband internet services to portable devices.

That's where the hitch lies, says Chris Lyons, manager of technical and educational communications at Shure, a professional audio-equipment manufacturer.

Lyons says it's not the broadband access per se that will cause problems, but the way devices would have to search through the spectrum for free bands.

Audio professionals claim that prototypes of devices capable of spectrum-sensing have failed some key tests. The FCC is expected to release a final report about the results next month.

For its part, Google says it doesn't want devices that could interfere with wireless audio equipment in the market either.

"From the beginning we have said that no white space device should come to market unless the FCC signs off on it," says Dan Martin, a Google spokesman.

Industry professionals hope there will be a technological fix for the problem soon, one that could allow wireless audio equipment to co-exist with devices using wireless broadband on the same spectrum.

But till then, the FCC needs to stay strong, says FOH magazine's Evans. "We are not ready yet," he says. "We need more time."

Google says it has suggested the use of a geolocation database that would ensure no white space device could transmit without first getting the all-clear from the database. That would allow manufacturers to prevent the use of white space bands in the vicinity of a Vegas show, for instance.

Meanwhile, companies are preparing for the worst. For instance, Lectrosonics is now offering a wider range of frequencies for its wireless microphones.

Until last year, the company's wireless microphones spanned a range of 537 MHz to 768 MHz. Now that a part of that band has been auctioned off, the company has reworked its devices to operate in the 470 MHz to 691 MHz spectrum. It has also added another band, the 944 MHz to 952 MHz spectrum, to the mix.

Those changes haven’t been easy. Over the course of a year, Lectrosonics reallocated engineering resources and spent "several thousand dollars" getting each new product certified by the FCC.

"We have a limited amount of engineering resources and there are hard costs such as FCC licenses that we have had to get," says Winkler.

Smaller wireless audio-equipment manufacturers may not have a choice, says Winkler. "We think a number of manufacturers will be shaken out. Lower quality, lower power systems will have a difficult time."

When skin cells from a dead pit bull named Booger gave rise to five healthy-looking puppies with a $50,000 price tag, it marked the formal beginning of a commercial dog-cloning industry.

But for all the attention given to these and other clones, little was paid to the behind-the-scenes science. For every successfully cloned animal thrust into the spotlight, how many failures were quietly ushered out of sight?

"What we're seeing with the clones they present are the ones that look good," said Jaydee Hanson, an animal-cloning analyst at the Center for Food Safety, a Washington, D.C.-based liberal nonprofit.

In March, the U.S. Humane Society and American Anti-Vivisection Society released a report castigating pet cloning for "serious animal suffering and disreputable activities." Critics point to the general tendency of animal embryos to fail before they're born, and for survivors to develop debilitating diseases. And dogs, it's widely agreed, are among the hardest of all animals to clone.

These are serious charges for a nascent industry comprising, for now, just two startup companies: the South Korea-based RNL Bio -- Booger's cloners -- and California-based BioArts International, who in July promised clones to four high bidders and a contest winner.

RNL Bio's charge of $50,000 for Booger's clones was heavily discounted, and BioArts' bidders paid $150,000 apiece, but prices could drop if the procedure becomes popular. That could make cloning an option for many of the United States' 50 million dog owners, but disfigured and diseased outtakes would turn the joy derived from copying their canine into horror.

Yet defenders of the industry say that it's wrong to apply analogies taken from other species' clones: Despite the difficulties, they insist, cloned dogs tend to be healthy, not least because scientists have spent the last decade figuring out how to do it.

"Clone enough dogs, and occasionally you have offspring that aren't perfect," said Lou Hawthorne, CEO of both BioArts and the late Genetic Savings and Clone. "But it's comparable to what you have through conventional breeding."

At cloning's root is a procedure called somatic cell nuclear transfer: Scientists scoop the nucleus out of a fertilized egg, then replace it with the nucleus of a cell taken from a pet. It's the same process used to generate genetically matched human embryonic stem cells for therapeutic purposes. But unlike those embryos, which are destroyed after a few days, the canine embryos are implanted in the hope of eventually becoming adults.

The developmental process magnifies any flaws, the most fundamental of which involve epigenetic programming -- patterns of genetic activation and inactivation that are acquired rather than inherited. A sperm cell involved in traditional reproduction undergoes extensive changes during development, but the donor cells used in cloning come from so-called adult sources, such as skin. They underwent completely different programming.

Though cloners try to reverse-engineer the original process, it often proves difficult, if not impossible. There's also a mismatch between the DNA of a cloned embryo's new nucleus and the DNA of its energy-regulating mitochondria, which come directly from the mother and are already present in the egg.

For these reasons, getting a cloned embryo to survive to birth is tricky and often results in failure. Among livestock, where animal-cloning efforts have been concentrated, many surviving clones die shortly after birth; if they live to adulthood, they often suffer from organ malfunction, metabolic disorders and cancer.

"Most of the animals die in utero," Hanson said. "Then another group dies within a few days right after birth. And of the ones that live 150 days, about half of those die."

"The biological abnormalities inherent to the cloning procedure will always make cloning inferior to natural breeding," said Konrad Hochedlinger, a Harvard Medical School cloning expert. "I don't think we will ever be able to fix the biological problems. The process of fertilization is fundamentally different from sticking DNA into an egg and generating clones."

Adding to the challenges, dogs are notoriously hard to clone. Females ovulate rarely and randomly, and their eggs are fully mature for just a couple hours out of a six- to 12-month cycle, making them difficult to collect. The eggs are also coated in opaque fats that make them tough to work with.

The first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy, was the end result of 1,095 implanted embryos, of which just three developed into pregnancies. One of these resulted in a miscarriage, and Snuppy's only brother died of pneumonia after three weeks.

But according to Hawthorne, there's a silver lining to the complications of canine cloning: Flawed embryos are miscarried or fail to develop altogether.

"The extreme sensitivity of the canine reproductive system means you have to have an absolutely perfect pregnancy," he said. "In other systems, you can just put a flawed embryo in, and get offspring out."

Hawthorne also headed Genetic Savings and Clone, a pioneering company whose six-year run ended in 2006 after producing just three cats and no dogs.

Researchers at that company -- who'd already started canine-cloning work three years before the company's founding -- produced just a single canine pregnancy, and it ended in a naturally caused stillbirth.

"The idea that there's a holocaust of malformed offspring and all these miscarriages is false," said Hawthorne, who insisted that his researchers have learned from a decade of painstaking, often frustrated efforts.

Overseeing BioArts' cloning efforts is Woo Suk Hwang, the former leader of a South Korean research team disgraced for its fraudulent human stem cell findings, but only after cloning Snuppy. Another member of that team was Lee Byeong-chun, who now directs science at RNL Bio.

Hawthorne cited unpublished data showing that 90 percent of his company's cloned dogs are born healthy, a figure comparable to traditional dog breeders. The dogs are given full veterinary exams after birth and again at eight to 12 weeks of age; if they're free of defects that long, said Hawthorne, they should stay healthy.

Carol Keefer, a University of Maryland animal-cloning expert, said that safe dog cloning should be scientifically possible, though she cautioned that conclusive studies haven't yet been conducted.

"There are cases where something appears to go wrong later," she said. "You get that with natural breeding, too. The question is, what's the rate, the big picture? There haven't been that many clones made to get a true feel."

Indeed, cloners have only produced about 40 dogs to date, and all since 2005.

"It is still unknown how the surviving animals will do later in life," reads the Humane Society's report, "as no cloned cat or dog has lived long enough to assess."

If you plan to not only survive but thrive in the harsh environment of Burning Man, you'd be well-advised to rise above your REI tent.

Luxury living on the playa requires relaxing in the heat of the day and staying warm on cold nights. You've got to be able to transport the structure in and out of Black Rock City, Nevada -- the temporary city that rises out of the desert each year during the mammoth art festival -- and assemble it in unpredictable conditions. It must be able to survive brutal dust storms that can arrive without warning and last for hours.

Last year, I discovered some clever options for living large on the playa without leaving a big footprint. Though all three solutions were rather low-tech, none would be accessible to Burners without the internet or open source.

Hexayurt

Originally designed as refugee housing, a Hexayurt can be built for $200 from fire-safe insulation boards and industrial tape. The Hexayurt Project follows a free and open source model; plans can be downloaded at the project's website.

I visited two of these innovative shelters last year at Burning Man. One belonged to Lindsey Darby, a 21-year-old college student and co-designer on the Hexayurt Project. The other belonged to Kevin Price, a 47-year-old computer technician from Mesa, Arizona, who said he discovered Hexayurts two weeks before Burning Man. "I was thinking of all the ways the tent would be awful. I went right to it: no prototype." He bought all the parts, cut them in his driveway and assembled them on the playa.

Inside, both Darby's and Price's Hexayurts were spacious, quiet and cooler than expected in the hot afternoon sun. According to Darby, her fold-up Hexayurt took only 30 minutes to assemble on the playa, and its impressive R-value allowed her to sleep later than her neighbors.

"I've always stayed in a Hexayurt on the playa, never in a tent, so I've always been able to stay in bed until 10 or 11 [a.m.]," she said. "But I did notice that I was always the last one up!"

Vinay Gupta, the Hexayurt's inventor, said: "It's like having an entire extra day at Burning Man. You can go to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning, get up at noon, and you're still human at the end of the week."

Indian Desert Tent

After a decade of camping in tents and borrowed camper trailers, San Francisco burner John "Jocko" Magadini decided to treat himself to a little bit of luxury in Black Rock City. Though the camper -- with its stove, running water and cushy seating -- was comfortable, Magadini said it left him feeling "not as one with the playa."

"I felt a bit removed and also maybe a little bit common because so many people do that," he said.

Following an extensive online search for tents of all sorts, he stumbled across an Indian Desert Tent. It cost just under $1,000 for the tent, and another $500 for shipping, which took six weeks.

"They told me it would take a little over an hour [to set up], and one person could do it," said Magadini. "It took two people and three hours. But once I got it up, I couldn't believe it. It was so absolutely bomber."

Made of heavy-duty cotton canvas and lined with printed sheeting, the yurt-shaped tent repels water and wind and has plenty of room inside for guest seating, Magadini's queen-size inflatable bed and a full rack of costumes. Plus, it stood up to Burning Man's rugged environment. "After a week and a half and many dust storms, there was close to no dust inside," he said.

Playatech Furniture

Arthur "Sunshine Dreamer" Zwern, a 48-year-old entrepreneur and inventor from San Jose, California, got tired of seeing so many sofas going into the landfill after Burning Man, yet his wife, "Glimmer," said she wanted extra seating on the playa. So he designed a line of DIY "period furniture" made from 4-foot-by-8-foot sheets of plywood. Plans for cutting the plywood to build a Precarichair, a Ploset, a Plantry, Plykea Shelves and many more Black Rock essentials are available at Playatech for a small donation, which benefits Black Rock Arts Foundation.

Once cut, Playatech furniture requires no tools or hardware for assembly and can be stacked flat for transport before and after use. "If you have to rebuild everything again each year, it gets a little tedious," said Zwern.

"We burn a little bit of our furniture each year, as it wears out," he admitted.

Describing both the Hexayurt and Playatech, he said: "We wanted to develop the technology to build a city in a week, with no infrastructure, and with two to three natural disasters a week." He insists his furniture is sturdy enough to dance on and to have sex on -- perhaps the next most important qualities in Black Rock City.

Bonus: Five Items a Burner Can't Live Without

Many believe that humanity's destiny lies with the stars. Sadly for us, rocket propulsion experts now say we may never even get out of the Solar System.

At a recent conference, rocket scientists from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and academia doused humanity's interstellar dreams in cold reality. The scientists, presenting at the Joint Propulsion Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, analyzed many of the designs for advanced propulsion that others have proposed for interstellar travel. The calculations show that, even using the most theoretical of technologies, reaching the nearest star in a human lifetime is nearly impossible.

"In those cases, you are talking about a scale of engineering that you can't even imagine," Paulo Lozano, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a conference attendee, said in a recent interview.

The major problem is that propulsion -- shooting mass backwards to go forwards -- requires large amounts of both time and fuel. For instance, using the best rocket engines Earth currently has to offer, it would take 50,000 years to travel the 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri, our solar system's nearest neighbor. Even the most theoretically efficient type of propulsion, an imaginary engine powered by antimatter, would still require decades to reach Alpha Centauri, according to Robert Frisbee, group leader in the Advanced Propulsion Technology Group within NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

And then there's the issue of fuel. It would take at least the current energy output of the entire world to send a probe to the nearest star, according to Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That's a generous figure: More likely, Cassenti says, it would be as much as 100 times that.

"We just can't extract the resources from the Earth," Cassenti said during his presentation. "They just don't exist. We would need to mine the outer planets."

A 160-Million-Ton Needle

Interstellar propulsion systems are not a new idea. Rocket scientists, aeronautical engineers and science-fiction enthusiasts have proposed such designs for several decades.

In 1958, U.S. scientists explored the possibility of a spaceship propelled by dropping nuclear bombs out the back, a so-called nuclear-pulsed rocket. The research, called Project Orion, was killed by the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the budgetary requirements of the Apollo Project.

In 1978, the British Interplanetary Society designed a mission to Barnard's Star, almost 6 light years away, using a pulsed fusion rocket fueled by deuterium. Building such a spaceship would require mining the outer planets for fuel for at least two decades, scientists said at the Joint Propulsion Conference this year.

But the thought experiments continue. At the conference, Frisbee presented a theoretical design for a ship using antimatter to propel its way to nearby stars.

Frisbee's design calls for a long, needle-like spaceship with each component stacked in line to keep radiation from the engines from harming sensitive equipment or people.

At the rocket end, a large superconducting magnet would direct the stream of particles created by annihilating hydrogen and antihydrogen. A regular nozzle could not be used, even if made of exotic materials, because it could not withstand exposure to the high-energy particles, Frisbee said. A heavy shield would protect the rest of the ship from the radiation produced by the reaction.

A large radiator would be placed next in line to dissipate all the heat produced by the engine, followed by the storage compartments for the hydrogen and antihydrogen. Because antihydrogen would be annihilated if it touched the walls of any vessel, Frisbee's design stores the two components as ice at one degree above absolute zero.

The systems needed to run the spacecraft come after the propellant tanks, followed by the payload. In its entirety, the spaceship would resemble a large needle massing 80 million metric tons with another 40 million metric tons each of hydrogen and antihydrogen. In contrast, the Space Shuttle weighs in at a mere 2,000 metric tons.

"Interstellar missions are big," Frisbee said, in part because of the massive amounts of energy (and hence fuel) required to get moving fast enough to make the trip in anything like a reasonable amount of time. "Any time you try to get something up to the speed of light, Newton is still God."

With that fuel, it would still take nearly 40 years to travel the 4.3 light years to Earth's nearest neighbor, Alpha Centuri, he said.

Down and Out On Earth

Even improving humans' access to near space is not easy.

Scientists have all but discarded ideas for rockets that can reach orbit using a single stage. Instead, private space ventures have focused on lightening the payload and rocket and on increasing reliability. If space tourism comes into vogue, then launch providers could benefit from economies of scale.

But alternative-propulsion systems? They are not in short supply in people's imaginations, but most fail the test of reality, Marcus Young, a researcher at the U.S. Air Force Research Lab's Advanced Project Group, told conference attendees. Young and his team surveyed ideas for launch vehicles that could be accomplished in the next 15 to 50 years and found most to be unworkable.

Space elevator? Even if the engineering made sense, the design requires a breakthrough in materials science to create cables long and strong enough. Rail guns? A vehicle would have to shoot down a 100-kilometer track at 50 times the force of gravity to achieve orbit. Nuclear power? Radioactivity would limit its use to outside Earth's atmosphere, and the politics are positively toxic.

"There are a lot of ideas that initially you say, 'Hey, that might work,'" Young said. "But after a little research, you quickly find that it won't."

Yet, just because science fiction is not yet a reality is not a reason to make science suffer, said MIT's Lozano.

"There is a lot of interesting stuff that you cannot do even in the solar system," he said. "We have the technical means to do it. But some of the most sophisticated technologies ... we have not developed. Not because we can't, but because we have not made it a priority."

As for interstellar travel, even the realists are far from giving up. All it takes is one breakthrough to make the calculations work, Frisbee said.

"It's always science fiction until someone goes out and does it," he said.