"The idea that any rich man could simply lay cash on the line and go [into space] was more than I could stand." --Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit -- Will Travel, 1958

Dennis Tito is 60 years old, slim, compact and gray-haired. He moves with the confidence and determination of a man who has discovered important rules about the way the world works, and applied them with great success. His intelligence and energy have made him rich -- worth, they say, $200 million dollars.

Now, rich men of 60 generally can choose to be anywhere in the world they desire. In Milan, ogling models. In Cabo, basking in the sun. Those craving adventure can dive to the Titanic or climb Everest. So, what is Dennis Tito doing in a birch forest northwest of Moscow, in October, trudging across the cold gray concrete at the heart of a Russian military village called Star City?

He is trying to become the worldıs first private space traveler, a "citizen-explorer" who hopes to experience the joys of microgravity and the view of Earth from orbit -- for a price. Dennis Tito has paid $20 million of his own money for the privilege of spending 10 days in space -- initially aboard the ancient, pungent, high-maintenance Russian space station Mir. Once it became clear that Mir's days were numbered, Tito switched gears and got Russian approval to ride on one of their spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS). More on that later.

Tito -- who says he never read science fiction -- has become that rich man the Heinlein character complained about, a man who is going to space not "because it is there," as the late George Mallory said about climbing Everest. Tito is going because he can.

Well, maybe. As October turned into November, and the Russian days grew shorter, Dennis Tito's chances of visiting Mir got smaller. On Nov. 16, Rosaviacosmos (the Russian Aviation and Space Agency) announced that Mir would be deorbited at the end of February 2001. After some delays, the actual deorbit day came on March 22 with Mir making a safe, fiery death fall into the Pacific Ocean.

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But instead of packing up and going back to his mansion in the hills above Los Angeles, Dennis Tito remains in his Star City apartment. Like a Space Age Don Quixote, he has a dream, and he's not giving it up. Tito was one of those teenagers who were inspired by the 1957 launch of Sputnik to think of spaceflight as real. He earned degrees in aeronautical and aerospace engineering, and then spent five years working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1960s, helping design trajectories for Mariner Mars and Venus probes. In 1972, however, Tito engineered a career change. Worn down by the mind-numbing nature of civil service employment and seeing the space program heading for funding cuts, he entered the world of finance.

He began using his mathematical and engineering knowledge to develop new approaches in the analysis of stock market risks. "You could throw darts and end up with a portfolio that might luck out and beat the market," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1999, "but you donıt get to Mars that way." The results were spectacular. By 1998, Titoıs Wilshire Associates was the third-largest investment management consulting firm in the U.S.; its 250 specialists advising clients who had as much as half a trillion dollars in assets. As the money accumulated, Tito grew bored with finance and looked for new challenges.

He did not immediately return to spaceflight, having been divorced from that world for over a decade. Though there was one passing flirtation: "I first thought about a guest cosmonaut flight to Mir in 1991, following on Akiyama," Tito said. Toyohiro Akiyama was a chain-smoking news producer for a Japanese television network who spent 10 fairly unhappy days in space in December 1990, filing news reports to the increasing disinterest of his audience.

But Tito's August 1991 visit to Moscow coincided with an attempted coup. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union left him unsure about who controlled Mir, so he tabled the idea and concentrated on philanthropic projects, such as building a medical research facility at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"I played with some ideas about investing in spaceflight, but not necessarily going myself," Tito said. In fact, there was no way to buy a ticket to ride a rocket.

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That is, until MirCorp came along. In February 2000, Gold & Appel, an investment concern whose principal force is Walt Anderson, a reclusive American telecom millionaire, teamed up with the Russia-based Rocket Space Corporation (RSC) Energia (builders of Mir). They formed a new company that would operate Mir as a commercial venture, leasing the station for advertising, scientific research, pharmaceutical processing, satellite repair, even as a future Internet portal (complete with 24-hour views of Earth from orbit). And, most remarkably, as a destination for wealthy space tourists.

Dennis Tito prepared for his anticipated launch into space by riding on a Russian MiG. (Credit: Space Adventures).

The very idea of an American millionaire making a deal with a private company that has leased a Russian space station is so audacious that it feels like a pitch for a cheap made-for-television movie. Consider: Mir was at one time at least partly dedicated to work on behalf of the U.S.S.R.ıs Ministry of Defense. Mir's operator, RSC Energia, was founded in 1946 by a decree from Josef Stalin. Energia's current director, Yuri Semenov, was actually appointed to the job by the Ministry of General Machine Building under Leonid Brezhnev. Mir was ticketed for destruction by the Russian government once the last resident crew came home in August 1999.

Nevertheless, MirCorp's infusion of cash gave the station a death-house reprieve, buying a pair of unmanned Progress supply missions and a 73-day maintenance flight by cosmonauts Sergei Zaletin and Alexander Kalery that began in April 2000.

At the same time -- following a Hollywood celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission -- MirCorp president Jeffrey Manber, board member Chirinjeev Kathuria and private space activist Rick Tumlinson visited Dennis Tito's home in Los Angeles. They addressed Tito's questions about the dangers and about Mir's habitability. And they closed the deal.

Dennis Anthony Tito would become the first "citizen explorer" (a term coined by Tumlinson). He would fly to Mir with cosmonauts Salizhan Sharipov and Pavel Vinogradov in spring 2001 on a two-week mission. For countless would-be space travelers who could only dream of such a chance, the announcement of Tito's planned spaceflight was electrifying. Of course, there are those whose envy spills over to resentment. But if the supporting letters and e-mail Tito has received are a sign, he's got more fans than critics.

And according to one of his former associates, Tito has a larger purpose in mind. Said JPL's Michael Eastwood, "Dennis hopes that his flight will not only be an adventure, but will allow him to serve as a catalyst. He feels he can bring the various worlds of spaceflight together -- the entrepreneurial and NASA and the Russians. Heıs got the technical training and the financial credibility to bridge the gap."

By last September, one bridge had already been built -- to the world of tabloid television -- when MirCorp announced its second citizen-explorer deal, with Mark Burnett, producer of the hit CBS program, Survivor. In fall 2001, 10 Americans would be enrolled in a Tito-style training course at Star City. Every week, one of the contestants would be sent home, until only two remained -- one of whom would win the prize of a trip to Mir in early 2002. All for the amusement of millions of TV viewers on NBC.

But only if Mir lasted long enough. Within 60 days of the announcement of the MirCorp-NBC deal, Rosaviacosmos set that February 2001 deorbit date, and Mir took a turn for the worse -- like a patient with a terminal illness who is told he wonıt be leaving the hospice.

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What happened? MirCorp had broken the first rule of spaceflight: "No bucks, no Buck Rogers." With all its efforts, the partnership could not come up with more than $30 million, far short of $125 million needed to support the station for a year; even an unoccupied Mir requires $80 million annually. Anderson, MirCorp's primary backer, reached his limits in late summer 2000, thanks to downturns in various telecom stocks. "The market wasnıt at all kind to us," Anderson told MSNBC.

Even the Sun itself was unkind to MirCorp's plans. The year 2000 happened to be a solar maximum year, with more than the usual number of sunspots and coronal mass ejections, all of which affect Earth's upper atmosphere, increasing drag on Mir and requiring extra frequent visits by expensive Progress supply ships to raise its orbit. Anderson's troubles and Mir's increasing rate of descent converged in mid October, when MirCorp was unable to make a $10 million payment for a Progress launch. Russian government spokesmen darkly threatened to "splash" Mir by February. Over the next two weeks, charges and counter-charges, promises and denials, flew back and forth between the Russian space agency, the Russian government, Energia and MirCorp like shuttlecocks in a four-way badminton match, culminating in the Nov. 16 "final" sentence.

At one point, a spokesman for Rosaviacosmos went out of his way to deny that Dennis Tito was a candidate for a flight to Mir at all! This was certainly news to reporters and visitors who had seen Tito at work in Star City. Not to mention Tito himself, who had abandoned his original plan to commute between Los Angeles and Russia every two weeks and was now in Star City "for the duration," adjusting to a new lifestyle in a relatively small town, where the weather can be grim and the natives insist on speaking Russian, making daily interaction difficult. (Tito had no time to learn much Russian, requiring him to have translators for all of his activities.) Travel to nearby Moscow is a nightmare, since you either board a commuter train that might have carried Dr. Zhivago, or drive in traffic so snarled it makes Los Angeles seem calm, on roads that are cratered, narrow and often unmarked. Even highly motivated NASA astronauts angling for tours on the International Space Station have been known to joke about being "sentenced to the Russian front." Some have flatly refused the assignment, a risky move in the intensely team-oriented astronaut office. One pulled out of an ISS assignment because the stress of life in Star City was wearing on his young family.

Within six days of the Rosaviacosmos denial, however, Colonel-General Pyotr Klimuk, director of the training center at Star City, confirmed that Dennis Tito was indeed preparing for a spaceflight there. He was filling his days, not with high-powered business deals, but with the cosmonaut version of basic training -- squeezing into a Sokol launch and reentry pressure suit to practice for his launch aboard a Soyuz ferry, pumping iron in the gym with hard-nosed physical trainers and taking nausea-inducing rides in an Ilyushin-76 zero-G aircraft.

He was also logging hours in mind-numbing classes, learning, for example, how to locate search-and-rescue gear in case of an emergency landing or operate the toilet in the Soyuz orbital module. The training regime, Tito said, is "a lot like going to college during one of those semesters where you have to buckle down and get good grades." The irony of his situation wasnıt lost on him. "I've been in charge of my own company," he said. "Here, I'm just a recruit."

A recruit who not only had to endure the public sneers of Rosaviacosmos, but also the typically Russian practice of being told only what he needs to know, and sometimes not even that. For example, in late September Tito was asked to provide a set of personal supplies -- shaving kit, toothbrush and the like -- to be carried to Mir by a pilotless Progress supply ship. On the day of the Progress launch, no one at Star City could tell Tito whether the supplies were aboard. (He used his laptop to log onto SPACE.com and found that, indeed, they were.)

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Still, Tito went into this knowing what he faced, not only at Star City but also with Mir. "I read Jerry Linengerıs book, Off the Planet," he said, referring to the memoir of the fourth NASA astronaut to live aboard the station. Linenger is frank about the rigors of training, not to mention the ordeals he faced in orbit, including an onboard fire.

Tito remains calm about the possibility of injury or death in space. "I have no safety concerns," he said, preferring to anticipate more mundane problems. "I would hate to reach the station and then have to wait days for the temperature to drop from the high 80s, for example. That would just be frustrating." With his engineering training and businessmanıs sense, Tito has already planned his activities in space. Knowing there is too little time to develop a program of experiments or arrange to bring sophisticated equipment through Russian customs, he has chosen not to focus on science. "I will probably do some medical tests, given my age," Tito said, "and concentrate on photography."

No orbiting Hilton, Mir offered few comforts. (U.S. astronaut Norm Thagard is shown in his bunk aboard the station in 1995.) But the view -- of Earth and the heavens -- was worth the price of the trip Tito sought and still seeks aboard the ISS.

So he presses on, refusing to admit that he might not fly in space. In fact, displaying his unique mixture of optimism and entrepreneurial drive, Tito describes the Nov. 16 Mir deorbit announcement as a "positive" sign. "At least it clarifies the future."

That future, Tito hopes, will see him flying to the International Space Station as early as April 30, 2001, as passenger on a Soyuz "taxi" mission, delivering a fresh return vehicle to the stationıs residents. "I donıt believe the Russians are eager to default on my contract. There is a considerable amount of money involved, and the Russians are much more savvy these days about world opinion."

There are some problems with that scenario. First, NASA, a considerable force in the 16-nation ISS partnership, is balking at the idea. It has thrown up a variety of arguments against Tito's flight and has gone so far as to complicate matters when Tito showed up to train with his cosmonaut crew at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Tito ended up walking away from the JSC gates. His crewmates protested JSC's treatment of Tito and initially refused their own training there but eventually followed orders from Russia and underwent training at JSC.

According to a NASA spokesman, all partners must approve commercial ISS projects that use common supplies and hardware. With ISS in its early assembly phase, supplies such as power, oxygen, water and other consumables are too limited to allow for visitors. "At this point in the assembly sequence, we have a tremendous job up there," Robert Cabana, NASA's manager for ISS operations told SPACE.com, "and we want to have astronauts doing it." NASA Administrator Dan Goldin is reported to be skeptical of the idea.

But Cabana refused to slam the ISS door in Tito's face. "Whether or not we'd object, I can't say at this time," he said. Even if Dennis Tito isn't successful and the ISS becomes chaotic without him, he and his determination and courage -- and money-- have given credibility to an unlikely idea. Every citizen-explorer who makes it into space will know that Dennis Tito pointed the way.

Michael Cassuttıs new novel, Red Moon, has just been published by Forge Books.