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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A peek inside the Soyuz TDK 7.

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

This building houses the TsF-18 centrifuge.

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?"