Wired contributing editor David Kushner describes the grueling training regimen that all cosmonauts (and millionaire clients of Space Adventures) must undergo.

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.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

A peek inside the Soyuz TDK 7.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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."

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

This building houses the TsF-18 centrifuge.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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.

photo: Photo: Benedict Redgrove

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.

Welcome to Star City, Russia, the tiny town where cosmonauts have trained since the 1960s. Today, clients of Space Adventures should expect to spend about eight months here (after forking over millions of dollars) to learn the ropes before blastoff.

Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera Operator (Moscow): Benedict Redgrove, Additional Footage: Space Adventures, NASA
For more, visit video.wired.com.

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.

Centrifuges, spinning chairs, and vomit comets: Wired contributing editor David Kushner describes the grueling training regimen that all cosmonauts (and millionaire clients of Space Adventures) must undergo.

Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera Operator (Moscow): Benedict Redgrove, Additional Footage: Space Adventures, NASA
For more, visit video.wired.com.

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.

With five months left before broadcast television goes digital, retailers are raking in the dough, thanks to a surge in converter-box sales.

That video may be funny to you, but advertisers don't get it. Sites such as CollegeHumor.com and FunnyOrDie.com are a mine field for marketers, who have proven reluctant to tarnish brand names by affiliating them with politically incorrect material.

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To drill or not to drill? That has been the question this summer as Congress, the president and both candidates debate where and whether we should be exploring for domestic oil. The implication is that this is an important step in reducing our dependence on imported oil.

It is not. Oil—wherever it is produced—is priced, sold and consumed in a global marketplace. Whatever the outcome of this existential debate, any incremental oil will be sold to the highest bidder, in the U.S.—or in other countries— most of which have an insatiable appetite for oil.

Such flaws of strategic logic seem to show up in most discussions on what to do. We must discipline ourselves to follow a more rigorous approach, which can be hard to do given the enormous importance energy has in our lives. The plans announced recently by T. Boone Pickens and former Vice President Al Gore provide a good opportunity to think through our strategic options, by means of a comparative look. (See the Portfolio.com Green Machine graphic to find out where investors are putting their cash in the clean-tech game.)

I include as a third option a plan to allow cars and trucks on U.S. roads to run primarily on electricity drawn from the regular electric grid.

Pickens proposes to build massive wind farms in the nation's center to generate a large part of America's electricity, which would then liberate the natural gas that is currently used to generate electricity. If the cars on the road were to be retrofitted to run on natural gas, Pickens argues, the need to import the corresponding amount of petroleum would disappear. Setting aside the task of retrofitting over 200 million vehicles, this plan raises a fundamental question. Natural gas, like oil, is a global commodity that can be shipped anywhere. Even if it is produced in the United States, what makes it stay here? It does so if, and only if, the United States pays the prevailing market price for it, just as we are paying market price for the petroleum fueling our cars today. So very little would change.

Vice President Gore's focus is on carbon reduction. He proposes that by 2018, 100 percent of America's electricity be generated from sources such as wind, solar and geothermal. Doing so would free a lot of oil, imported and domestic alike, as well as coal and natural gas. The oil, coal and natural gas that the U.S. does not use would become available for others through the world market. Correspondingly, carbon emissions would be shifted to other countries, but the world's total would not be reduced. And, in spite of this effort, cars on the road would still be fueled by petroleum.

I have been arguing that the first task—Job 1—is the electrification of the transportation sector. The fuel needs of transportation account for a very large part of the nation's petroleum consumption. Even more important is that today only petroleum and agri-fuels can be used as sources of energy for the overwhelming majority of the nation's vehicles, even though the residential, industrial, and commercial needs for fuel can be satisfied using the full range of energy sources.

Put another way, the various sources of energy are fungible for residential, industrial, and commercial uses, but not for transportation.

If we are to undertake the equivalent of open-heart surgery on our economy, we must insist that after the trauma, the fuel for all segments of the economy should be capable of coming from multiple sources of energy. This will allow us to cope with the unexpected, and will prepare us for future transition to renewable sources of energy like wind and solar. This is why fungibility in transportation is important.

This approach has its problems too. As with Pickens' plan, cars and trucks, old and new, must be converted. They need to be able to run on electric power, even if only partially. As we make progress, we will become increasingly dependent on battery technology and manufacturing, most of which currently takes place outside the U.S. If investments in battery manufacturing abroad outstrip domestic investments, this situation is reinforced. In addition, improved battery technologies may end up using exotic metals. As we scour the periodic table of elements, our hunt may lead us to yet another set of dependencies.

The key features of the three approaches, in a comparative fashion, are shown in this table.

Complicated picture? Yes, it is.

Let's face it, we are dealing with the adaptation of the world's largest industry, under the pull and push of different problems. To have even a small chance to improve matters and end our dependence on imported oil, we need to ask basic questions: What problems do we intend to solve? And in what order? Environmental? Economic? National security? They are all important, but our answers lead to different approaches and to different outcomes.

Personally, my bias is that national security has to be our first priority. We can't lead the world if we're on our knees begging often-hostile nations for oil. Wars have been fought over natural resources, and this could happen again. But whatever the answer, objectivity and clarity are essential for us to make progress on the issue that informs the life of our generation.

Out-of sync development timelines between TV and cell phones over the past decade or so had a lot to do with the fact that free broadcasts are virtually unavailable on mobile handsets in the U.S. But the conversion to digital next February will shut down any possibility for at least some time to come.

Fewer Americans are reading newspapers and are instead getting their news online, but television remains the leading source of news in the country, according to the Pew Research Center's biannual survey on news consumption habits.

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Apple is worth more than Google. Huh? This doesn't make sense to me.

Let's start with the obvious: Google makes more money than Apple does. It had earnings of $10 billion over the past 12 months, compared to $8 billion for Apple. And while both companies' earnings are growing fast, Google's are growing faster.

But here's the clincher: Google's earnings were on less than $20 billion of revenue -- that's what I call a profit margin. Apple, by contrast, needed more than $30 billion of revenue to get its $8 billion of gross profit.

Of course, when it comes to stock valuations, the present doesn't matter nearly as much as the future. So what does the future hold for these two franchises?

They're both strong technology giants with very large "moats." But Google is stronger, and its moat is bigger. It owns search, certainly in Europe and the Americas, and it's making strong inroads into display advertising as well. Sam Gustin might be kvetching about "the toll being inflicted on Web advertising by the slowing economy," but the growth rates are still pretty torrid for what is now a reasonably mature industry: Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC, told Bloomberg that online ad spending grew 18.9 percent in the second quarter, a growth rate 7 percentage points lower than a year ago. Were it not for the slumping economy, web ad spending would have grown by more than 20 percent, she said.

19% market growth? I think Apple would be very happy with that. And remember that Google is increasing, not decreasing, its share of total online ad spending. Over at Apple, by contrast, the iPod/iTunes duopoly can't help but see its market share eroded going forwards, as DRM-free online music stores start competing on price, the record labels try to cut Apple down to size, and the marginal utility from buying your fourth or fifth iPod starts to decline.

Apple's phone business looks great right now, but the industry is notoriously cutthroat, Apple doesn't have the degree of control it's used to elsewhere, and in any case handset margins are never going to be as big as margins on iPods or MacBooks. Yes, the iPhone app store is a very promising business model -- but it's going to be quite some time, if ever, before it makes a significant contribution to Apple's bottom line.

And then there's the computer business. Macs are selling well, at very high margins. But Google's muscling in on the computing business too: over the long term, it makes sense to do all your computing in an ever-improving cloud than it does on specific, individually-owned pieces of hardware which always, eventually, break. The more important the cloud, the less important the computer, and the less important the computer's operating system, too.

Howard Lindzon, by contrast, thinks the stock market is right, and that Apple should be worth more than Google. Two of his arguments are weak: that "social search" will make Google obsolete (I'll believe it when I see it), and that "MacBooks are getting cheaper" (no they're not: Apple's entry-level laptop has been priced between $1,000 and $1,100 for years, and it's going to stay there).

Howards best argument is that a falling Google share price could become self-fulfilling: "if the stock lingers between $500 or worse yet, drifts lower, you will see a brain drain of epic proportions," he says. Google's competitive advantage has long been that it was smarter and richer and one or two steps ahead of the competition. As it matures, it might not have the same ability to attract the very best and the brightest.

But if Google has job risks, Apple has Jobs risk -- which is much bigger and probably just as imminent. No one at Google is even as important to the company as Jonathan Ive is to Apple, let alone Steve Jobs. If I'm holding a stock as a long-term investment (which is the only sensible way to hold a stock) then I don't want to run the risk that the company will founder the minute the CEO exits.

And talking of the long term, the option value of all those crazy Google projects which never make any money is huge. There's a good chance that, eventually, one of them will take off in a big way, and if it's energy-related, it could make Google's present business look positively puny.

Google stock is volatile, just as the founders said it would be in their prospectus. But if I was going to sleep today to wake up in ten years' time, I'd be much happier with Google stock under my mattress than Apple.

NBC may be taking lumps in the blogosphere for its decision to provide so much of its Olympics coverage exclusively through traditional channels, but they have provided advertisers with an increasingly elusive commodity — a large, captivated -- and captive -- audience.

The proposal for a so-called "iTunes tax" in California was widely criticized and promptly shot down this spring. So why is it back on the table? One state assemblyman reintroduced a bill that would levy an additional tax on digital download purchases, potentially driving more paying customers to use file-sharing sites.

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Get on an elevator in any Manhattan office building, and there's a good chance you'll find yourself surrounded by them: the tattersalls, the windowpanes, the mini-checks of Brooks Brothers' fleet of Non-Iron Dress Shirts.

Inoffensive? Yes, as are the often-accompanying oxfords with Nike Air technology in the soles. But as the patterns blend together, they start to form a vaguely disturbing picture.

Gone is the time when the Patrick Batemans of the world could hold pissing contests over the microscopic differences in their business card stocks, dismissing peons for the inferior weaves of their suits. These days, there are fewer distinctions between industries and power levels. Pretty much everyone looks more like they belong in tech support than in a partners' meeting. (View our slideshow to see how the captains of industry dress.)

That's because somewhere between His Girl Friday and casual Friday, between black-tie and BlackBerrys, our workforce morphed from Mad Men into marathon men—and the race is not to the sartorial top, but to the bottom of the laundry pile.

When the dot-com bubble burst, many predicted an end to Teva-wearing C.E.O.'s and even the curtailment of casual Fridays. Clearly the second tsunami of tech money, which brought twentysomethings in hoodies to the head of the conference table, has helped keep that from happening. But tech chic only has so much to do with the dressing down of the workforce. As Bill Clinton might say, "It's the economy, stupid."

Before sitting down to write this, I e-mailed a bunch of friends in various professions and asked them about their work wear. The men overwhelmingly responded with an affinity for the aforementioned stiff shirts from Brooks Brothers, as well as half-brags about their disheveled appearances at the office. "I wind up wearing my lunch more often than not" one wrote [subtext: because I eat at my desk every day]. "I wear pleated-front pants because they're more comfortable," another admitted [subtext: I eat at my desk every day—and every night].

If you look good, you're obviously not working hard enough. Outdoing the next guy in terms of looking put-upon is the new pissing contest.

In a world where profits are down, bankruptcies are rampant, and the most entrenched I-bankers are getting the heave-ho, you can't afford to look as though you spared an extra second thinking about the cut of your Charvet shirt. Did you go shopping for a Breguet instead of billing that extra hour? Are you interviewing? Because seriously, who wears a suit these days? Who has time for that?

With subprime losses piling up, it's not just cubicle-bound young analysts who are being subjected to this sort of scrutiny. After all, Angelo Mozilo always looks like he put a lot of thought into his clothes. Company shareholders are more concerned with what the stewards of their wealth actually do. "Hey, nice suit, asshole. How much did it cost me?"

In fact, it's not uncommon for the messiest guy in the office to also be the most heralded, a phenomenon that has made its way into popular culture. In Dana Vachon's recent novel, Mergers & Acquisitions, the only clear hero is the poor overweight slob to whom all J.S. Spenser's dirty work has been outsourced. The other guys—the ones who can tell the difference between a Turnbull & Asser and a Thomas Pink shirt "blindfolded"—are not so laudable.

Women can take even more criticism if they seem overly concerned with their dress—often at the hands of female superiors. "I'm more 'fashiony,' which is definitely misunderstood and under-appreciated in my line of work," wrote a V.P. at one of New York's better banks. Sport more tailored and modern clothing and you get hit with a double-whammy—not only are you not working hard enough, you're trying to distract everyone else from their business.

If you think that's all hooey, I'd ask you to recall the time Hillary Clinton showed up on the Senate floor revealing a centimeter of cleavage under her rose-colored blazer. No one went so far as to accuse her of trolling for a date, but no one exactly congratulated her on the outfit either. (Or glance at the wardrobes of such titans as Meg Whitman, who just stepped down from her post as eBay's C.E.O., and Irene Rosenfeld, head of Kraft Foods. For them, the way to success was brains, hard work, and separates from Talbots.)

There are, of course, the rare exceptions to the rule. Julie Macklowe, portfolio manager for Sigma Capital Management, was recently recognized as an "It" girl by Vogue. And, speaking of that venerable title, fashion is perhaps the one industry where showing up looking like a slob or like a buttoned-up matron can get you into hot water. Don something less-than and you could face the same question: "Who has time for…that?"

#bio_sb {float:right;clear:top;width:250px;border:2px solid #ccc;margin:10px;padding:10px;} #bio_sb_title {text-align:center;padding:4px;background-color:#69A0F3;color:#fff;} .bio_sb_elem1{font-weight:bold;} h3 {width:300px;border-bottom:1px solid #AAAAAA;margin-bottom:12px;}

Scott Brown

This article is about the renowned humorologist. For the sports figure, see Scott Brown (Scottish footballer).

Scott Brown
Born March 2, 1976 (age 23)
Opelika, Alabama (Europe)

Pen name Jonathan Safran Foer

Occupation Writer, author, writer-author, songstress, avid composter

Genres Fiction, nonfiction, fan-fiction, email, checks (no less than $50)
 
Influences Julius Caesar, Raphael (disambiguation: ninja turtle), Black Jesus, the Bangles: Greatest Hits  
Web site
www.people.com (updated infrequently)

Scott McClure Brown
(born March 2, 1976) is an American writer, journalist, and underwear model. [citation needed]

Early life and career

Brown was born in Alabama in 1976. He grew up white and male — which, he assures you, is harder than it looks. He learned sharecropping from his father and wine-pairing from his mother, but his greatest teacher was the streets: They taught him everything he knows about paving and resurfacing. HA! Yes, Brown is also a humorist, and thank you, America, for the laughter.

In 1998, Brown began writing for magazines and awaiting the creation of a free, crowdsourced online encyclopedia that would deliver the recognition denied him by his peers, his parents, and Who's Who Among American High School Students 1993/1994.

Controversy

Famously, no one has ever created a Wikipedia page for Brown, an omission some attribute to a lack of Web savvy on the part of Brown's mother. Across Brown's apartment, the debate rages: How is it that a man can write stuff, put his name on it, and get published over and over again and not warrant a few lines in the world's de facto most-authoritative public record? Seriously, would it kill the world's de facto most-authoritative public record? You don't even have to upload a picture. (But if you do, please use one of the pre-bald ones.)

Some say Brown was simply too humble to promote himself properly. Others maintain Brown's ideas were too radical for the system, and the system retaliated by not noticing. Still others claim that "some," "others," and "still others" were all Brown, using various high-pitched voices.

Resurgence and triumph

Brown was often advised to secretly author his own Wiki entry, despite how this would violate the rules and juke the whole noble Wiki experiment. "Everyone does it!" Brown was told. What's the use of a free-market popularity contest if it's rigged and padded, he reasoned. Then it's just LinkedIn! For years, he maintained a serene faith in the wisdom of crowds, checking Wikipedia two or three times a day to discover that a) he wasn't there and b) crowds are stupid. And then one day, after a night of heavy drinking, an entry finally appeared.

"I didn't write this"

Late in his Wikipedia entry, Brown was quoted as saying, "I didn't write this Wikipedia entry. It may look like I did, but I didn't. I'm a published writer, so it's not inconceivable that one of my many hot young fans [citation needed] wrote this. I'll look it over, though, just to make sure everything's accurate ... Yup, looks good!"

Death and sainthood

Toward the end of his life, Brown died. He died a hero, blowing up a Nazi asteroid that was either headed for Ohio or was the size of Ohio. (And he doesn't even have any friends in Ohio!) Anyway, the people have spoken. With a single voice. Which is not his. Make changes, but know this: The people check this page a lot, and they like it how it is.

- - - -

Scott Brown's Wikipedia page may (or may not) be here .

The broadband market is full of disappointments: Service speeds are improving at a spectacularly slow pace, while sign-ups have stalled amid a weakening economy.

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From wind turbines to water purification systems, from solar panels to CO2 capture, suddenly, if you're an investor with money to burn, environmental technology has become the biggest game in town.

The problem: Venture capital firms and private equity shops are discovering that while dot-com startups are easily fashioned by mavericks and whiz kids, there are few rogue entrepreneurs with the chops to handle the complexities of environmental technology, much less to invent it.

The finance guys' big problem, however, is a potential gold mine for academia.

Take Potentia, a green tech startup conceived by University of Michigan PhD students Tzeno Galchev ad Ruba Borno in conjunction with MBA student Rishiraj Das, and facilitated by Michigan's Zell-Lurie Institute of Entrepreneurial Studies.

The Institute was founded to introduce engineering students to new venture opportunities and help them bring their inventions to market. In addition to offering a business curriculum, it serves as an umbrella organization for grants and competitions for the benefit of new startups -- such as last September's Clean Tech Forum for venture capitalists.

Potentia, which manufactures an environmental energy powered battery, was the runner-up in the center's 2008 Michigan Business Challenge. While still in the R&D phase, Potentia has already been in talks with potential investors.

"I would say that without getting the business background, it would have been fairly impossible to take an invention anywhere," Galchev said.

Michigan's not alone. Top engineering programs such as those at Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, and U.C. Berkeley are designing business-oriented programs, institutes, and curricula to turn bookish engineers into savvy entrepreneurs.

According to Bill Aulet, who created and teaches MIT's Energy Ventures class, the nature of alternative energy research poses unique challenges: Green tech innovations require extensive resources, a long time horizon, and a formidable education in engineering, as well as business skills.

"There aren't nearly enough energy entrepreneurs out there," says Aulet, who has seen interest from VCs skyrocket in the last few years. "So what we had to do is start teaching entrepreneurship to engineers."

The shortage of mature green tech startups can be attributed to the suddenness of widespread interest. Investments in companies working on green technology in North America totaled almost $4 billion in 2007, according to the CleanTech Group. And 2008 is on track to yield five times what was invested in 2004.

Of course, universities' eagerness to lend a hand is not free from self-interest. Typically, an invention by a university-employed inventor (e.g. faculty, staff, paid PhD students) with substantial use of university facilities is the property of the university, with the inventor getting exclusive licensing rights to the patent. If a licensed technology forms the basis of a successful venture, that could mean big money for the school.

But Peter Adriaens, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, says that the influx of interest is so new that until recently, the university didn't even have a comprehensive database of its clean tech-related inventions.

"Not so long ago, if an engineer had a small invention he would just hope that there would be someone on business side that would recognize brilliance and see the application," says Tim Falley, a colleague of Adriaens' and the managing director of Michigan's Zell-Lurie Institute. "Most of the time, it would have died right there."

Last year, MIT's Entrepreneurship Center launched a class called Energy Ventures, geared towards graduate students in engineering working on research applicable to the alternative energy market. It also now awards a Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize: $200,000 for first place, "to help develop and motivate the next generation of energy entrepreneurs."

Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program also provides resources for linking inventions to investments through the two-year old Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency. Its Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship serves as a boot camp for graduate students looking to commercialize their inventions.

"What we try to do in terms of the course is to give them the sense that there is a structure in place for how to present your ideas," says Margaret Neale, a professor in Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and SIE instructor. "We give them a framework for how to approach business situations."

An early business education give engineering types the “ability to analyze problems in a different way, by focusing on a need in the market and working backwards to an invention," says Susan Broderick, the program manager of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology.

With the proper training, engineers can avoid embarking down research paths that will be ultimate dead ends, from a commercial standpoint.

"Engineers need to understand that the best technology does not win – the best application wins," says MIT’s Aulet. "They need to think very early on about whether something will create value in the real world."

Can you do better than "Bam!" Careful, Emiril Lagasse has ridden that syllable to fame and fortune. But advertising is a fickle business and now Proctor and Gamble is replacing its pitchman's signature slogon with, well, maybe yours: The old school company is going right past its creatives and crowdsourcing their next campaign.

A Citigroup analyst has given a big boost to Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, calling it to "the iPod of the book world." Sales of the gadget are healthy, but we've been here before. For whatever reasons, eBook readers have traditionally had no traction among consumers. Is the Kindle the game changer?

Wired Heroes * authorName= Steven Leckart -->

Years after they first appeared in Wired, these three VIPs remain in the spotlight.

J. J. Abrams
Since upgrading TV with that confounding isle, he's taken on 2009's Star Trek prequel.

Why he does it
"It's cool to bring something to life, whether it's a song or a video. But to do it and have it embraced by millions ... like Lost, that's insane."

Hilary Rosen
Once a foe (she helped shut down Napster), the ex-RIAA chief made a heroic comeback by penning a love letter to Creative Commons in Wired. She now heads lesbian social network OurChart.

Why she does it
"I worked hardest to bring the tech and content communities together. It is happening."

Joe Trippi
Howard Dean's campaign manager pioneered the Web-centric bottom-up politics that has propelled Obama's run.

Why he does it
"I got the chance to put Washington and Silicon Valley together. We are seeing an Apollo project of a new kind of politics being built right now."

* Dead to us: Sonic the Hedgehog, Terry Semel, the Wachowski Siblings, Hans Reiser

Q&A with Hilary Rosen

Wired: With OurChart you used one platform (the television show The L Word) to launch another (a social network). How did you hook up with Ilene Chaiken, and when/how did the "aha" moment happen? Were you convinced from the outset that OurChart would be a success, and why?

Rosen: OurChart was Ilene's idea. We are old friends. She and Kara Swisher (AllthingsD.com) came to me and said that they thought "TheChart" from the show, which was literally a chart on the wall of one of the main character's living room that connected who slept with whom, should go online as a social network — broadening, of course, the purpose beyond sex! The L Word has long served as kind of an analog social networking vehicle for the lesbian community. People watch it at bars and at parties. We created a business plan that would incorporate what people liked about the show, which meant providing original lesbian and fan-centered entertainment content and combined that with traditional SN features. Showtime and CBS were very supportive.

Wired: Only a few other social networks have launched via television shows, but none has replicated the success of OurChart. Why do you think the L Word's audience took so well to a new online community?

Rosen: Lesbians are a hugely underserved market. This is a community with some $300 billion in annual consumer spending. Marketers and advertisers have started paying attention to the gay market over the last few years, but mostly that has been to target gay men. Surveys show that lesbian households have as much disposable income as gay male households. We knew if we built it they would come — both users and advertisers.

Wired: What other projects are on the horizon for you?

Rosen: I am now concentrating on some projects in Washington. I work for a few great companies like XM Radio and Viacom. The brilliant Jay Berman and I have a partnership that helps companies like Facebook navigate the IP world. Politics has always been my hobby, and this year it is also my business. It is as important an election as we have ever had. I am on-air on MSNBC as one more talking head discussing the same things as everyone else, but I hope sometimes with a different angle. And I am excited about a new role I have taken with The HuffingtonPost.com as a political director and an at-large editor. The site's traffic is through the roof, and as the largest site for progressive voices, we are going to have a great impact on this election. Given my experience, I am also helping the team develop the business side as well. It is a great group of people, and Arianna [Huffington] is, as everyone knows, a fantastic force of nature.

Politics has always been my hobby, and this year it is also my business. It is as important an election as we have ever had. I am on-air on MSNBC as one more talking head discussing the same things as everyone else, but I hope sometimes with a different angle. And I am excited about a new role I have taken with The HuffingtonPost.com as a political director and an at-large editor. The site's traffic is through the roof, and as the largest site for progressive voices, we are going to have a great impact on this election. Given my experience, I am also helping the team develop the business side as well. It is a great group of people, and Arianna is, as everyone knows, a fantastic force of nature.

Wired: You've noted the "chilling effect" the RIAA's actions had on legitimate uses/users. Knowing what you know now, would you still file the same suit against Napster?

Rosen: We had no choice but to sue Napster. I tried to avoid it because I thought the service was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. But they weren't knowledgeable enough to be interested in talking at the beginning. It was the first big program, and the precedent needed to be set.

Wired: Do you think the Big Five should have accepted the licensing agreement that was on the table during the Napster 1.0 days? (i.e., $1 billion over five years). Had they accepted the offer, how might the landscape of online music and the industry itself be entirely different from where we are today?

Rosen: I don't know if that particular deal is the one that should have been done, but I do firmly believe that the record companies should have made a deal. At the time, no amount of money that Napster put on the table seemed large enough because it was virtually impossible to compare the then current revenues from sales to the proposed digital revenues. The record companies weren't willing to jump off the cliff and take a chance. That was a mistake which can never be undone. P2P took over, and we had no technology or consumer allies, which we might have had if we had a deal. Having said that, the Napster management was difficult to deal with because the players kept changing.

I understand the interest that people have in wanting to know how this fantastic industry with so much potential for growth has now shrunk so dramatically. The fact is that there are so many reasons. And I can only scratch the surface here. Maybe someday I'll write a book. In the record industry there were problems with the retail distribution, with advertising and marketing strategies, with demographics focusing too much on the young hit maker and not serving the older buyer, with artist relations, with international piracy, and so many other areas. Technology and the piracy it facilitated (and continues to facilitate) was a major reason as well, of course. And this is the issue that got the most play. Senior executives at the record industry were often trapped in the same short-term thinking that a lot of business executives get trapped into — which is making the current quarter revenues as high as possible and hoping that the next quarter works out. It is also fair to say that the most influential record executives were more music men and not businessmen (yes, all men), and therefore there was no problem that a great "hit" wouldn't fix.

But it is so wrong to blame the record companies alone. The music publishers wouldn't license, the retailers threatened the labels with retaliation if they distributed online at a cheaper rate than they sold physical products, and the artists wouldn't reduce advance requests to try and experiment more online. In short, it required the entire music community to see the future in the same way and commit to working together — a very difficult scenario to pull off.

And exacerbating the problems within the music business was a very real arrogance in the technology community that valued technological innovation above all. Their disdain for the music community was palpable and irritating to many of my colleagues. After all, artists worked as hard to create their music as software developers worked to create their technology. ISPs were making more money when piracy was a driver to upgrade to high-speed; hardware makers were incorporating CD-Rs and increasing prices. Once MP3 distribution was rampant, the tech industry didn't think it needed the legitimate music industry because their consumers were being served with the unauthorized music. Most of the best innovators in the field didn't want the music industry to succeed because too many of them believed that it was a zero-sum game.

Well, that needed to change. I wasn't going to be able to undo 30 years of mistrust within the music community since that was in others' control. So I worked hardest to try to bring the technology and content communities together to see their common interests in upgrading the consumer experience with legitimate higher-quality music and artist participation in the extra content that fans wanted. Much of my time in my last few years at RIAA was in that behind-the-scenes shuttle diplomacy, urging the experimentation with business models and facilitating licensing systems. While the language and orientations are still different between content and technology, there is at least some great understanding now. And though there is still a great amount of unauthorized stuff online now, consumers have some great choices and lots of companies are working hand in glove with the music industry to make the offerings even better. It has taken so much longer than any of us would have liked or even predicted, but it is happening.

Wired: Since stepping down from the RIAA, you've consulted for companies like XM Radio. Some would say you've switched teams. Is that a fair assessment?

Rosen: No, I haven't switched teams. I am inherently a proponent of intellectual property protection and its critical role in the creation of art and the commercial support of artists. But I do call them as I see them. And sometimes that means that I disagree with some of my former employers. Not that anyone cares, including me, but I've turned down fortunes to go against them because I just couldn't reconcile the work with either my beliefs or my loyalty.

Wired: You helped found Rock the Vote and work with a number of nonprofits. Do you ever worry people will instead remember you more for the turbulent times you spent at the RIAA?

Rosen: Geez, I haven't turned 50 yet! I hope the epitaph isn't written. Having said that, I do think I have had a great and varied career as a business executive, a television commentator, a lobbyist, and an activist, and all the time working on issues that I really like. Hopefully that will continue. I definitely have another act or two in me.

Wired: Did that period sour you to music, music fans, the music business at all?

Rosen: No, RIAA didn't sour me on music at all. I originally took the job because I was such a music fan, I loved almost every minute of it, and I am still a music fan. But it is nice now to listen to an artist or a new song and not worry about whether they get along with their record company, who's getting paid on what, whether the release was leaked online before its release, and whether it is meeting its sales targets!

Wired: And if you had your way, what would you most want to be remembered for above all else?

Rosen: Who knows?! Who cares?! I guess I just want my kids to be happy and do good in the world.

Q&A with Joe Trippi

Wired: In 2004 you pointed to the fences and declared that the 2008 race would be the "first national contest waged and won primarily online." The first point is irrefutable. Based on what we've seen thus far in 2008, why is the battle being waged online really more vital than, say, 30-second TV spots or door-to-door stumping?

Trippi: The important differences can be seen between the Clinton old "top-down" campaign and the Obama "bottom-up" Internet-savvy campaign. Hillary Clinton was dependent on $2,300 checks — and could not replicate them — having to loan herself millions just to keep up with Obama's online small donors who were able to contribute repeatedly. Obama's volunteers who signed up online organized his caucus victories for free while contributing to pay for the professional, paid Obama organizers they worked with. Clinton did not have enough of these online activists to keep up with Obama in the caucus states — so she lost almost all of them. TV took people out of the process — the Internet and technology are putting people back into the process. Politicians, government officials, CEOs, and others who fail to understand that this changes everything are going to be shocked at what happens to them as their competitors "get it."

Wired: During the ‘04 election, at one point, John Kerry had raised roughly 37 percent of his campaign funds from his Web site. Today, $45 of the $55 million Barack Obama raised in February alone streamed in from the Web. Did you expect the shift toward Web-based fund-raising to accelerate this much in only four years time? Will we see even more impressive numbers before November?

Trippi: In my book, [The Revolution Will Not Be Televised], I said that the $100 revolution was just around the corner — that a candidate in the 2008 cycle would be able to mobilize millions to contribute small contributions of $100 or less. Before this campaign started, I believed and still believe that a candidate (probably Barack Obama) will raise a half-billion dollars just in the general election. The math is simple: 5 million Americans giving $100 each. We are still scratching the surface of what's possible as more Americans get involved in their democracy. Fifty-seven million voted for John Kerry, 60 million or so voted for George Bush — you cannot tell me that 10 percent of the Kerry voters would not have given him $100. The real trigger will be a candidate who limits General Election contributions to a small amount like $250 or less, and millions of Americans realize they can block the special interests and change our politics with a small contribution or helping in some other way. This is going to happen this year. I am sure of it. And BTW, in 2012 or 2016 it will be even bigger. It's the network, stupid. And the network is growing.

Wired: If 2004 is remembered as the year of micro-targeting and online campaigning, what will the legacy of 2008? Also, Obama's campaign has sparked a wave of Web-based creativity — from T-shirts to viral sites like barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com. Had John Edwards stayed in the race, what might your strategy have been to compete, diffuse, or work around all the buzz?

Trippi: I think that the creativity unleashed by sites like YouTube.com will be the hallmark of this cycle. In 2004 we created DeanTV, a 24/7 broadband channel where anyone could upload a video, a mashup of a Dean speech, or anything they wanted — about 200,000 people used it. Turns out we had created our own YouTube before YouTube created YouTube.

The important thing to understand is that TV and Internet campaigning are still intertwined. Elizabeth Edwards called into Hardball on MSNBC to confront Anne Coulter and created an online firestorm. The problem for the Edwards campaign was that no matter what we did, the media focused on Clinton vs. Obama. And the more coverage Obama got, the more his online buzz grew. This wasn't new to me — we benefited from this same kind of media focus in the Dean campaign. Our strategy in the Edwards campaign was to build a strong online presence and then beat both Obama and Clinton in Iowa. We felt if we could do that the media would focus on us and that our Internet presence would combine to dramatically shoot us into contention. We took second — and close never matters in politics.

Wired: I understand you kept a 90-day calendar, color-coded to track traffic to JohnEdwards.com. What was the most common cause for the larger spikes?

Trippi: The larger spikes were almost always caused by something related to Elizabeth Edwards, she gets bottom up politics and the Internet better than anyone – candidate or spouse I have ever worked with. She connects with people and she is authentic and those two things created a lot of the spikes in sign-ups or contributions to our campaign.

Wired: Keeping tabs on what's happening online is beyond a full-time job. What's your best advice for, say, a small-town politician running on a lean budget and staff?

Trippi: This isn't hard or expensive. Start a blog, a Twitter account