Lawrence Donegan talks to Steve Otto about the challenge of technology

Many people have watched a golf ball leave Tiger Woods' driver and have thought it looked like a small but precise missile. But now there is a more reliable link between golf and military hardware in the shape of Dr Steve Otto, the R&A's very own rocket scientist.

Otto once worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) on a top-secret project involving space-age materials, advanced mathematics and mind-boggling sums of money.

These days he works for the R&A on a top-secret project involving space-age materials, advanced mathematics and mind-boggling sums of money.

From space suits to dark blue blazers, never have two worlds sounded so far apart.

"Actually they are not really that different," he says. "It used to be that metals like titanium were evolved for the aircraft industry. Nowadays the really new metals are being evolved for the golf equipment industry."

When he puts it like that it is hard to disagree, although one wonders what the ghost of Old Tom Morris might think as he wanders around the Old Course, a few yards down the street from Otto's St Andrews office. No doubt the old champion would agree with those who argue that his once simple ball-and-stick game has fallen dangerously in thrall to technology.

Otto, though, is not paid to fret about such trends. "My job, and the job of the people I work with, is to evaluate equipment and produce data," the man in charge of the R&A's research and testing says. "Larger philosophical questions about the impact that technology has on the game and what measures are required to keep everything in balance are taken at a much higher level than the one I operate at. I am merely a scientist."

After graduating with a maths degree from Exeter University, he spent three years with Nasa working on a high-speed plane which could fly around the world in a couple of hours.

He then took up a teaching post in Birmingham, where he was part of a team asked by the R&A to research the "spring-like effect" of driver faces. He was one of the co-inventors of a device now widely used to test the legality of club faces.

He took up a full-time position with the R&A last year and is heavily involved in the organisation's efforts to ensure that the new equipment that floods on to the market every year is within the rules. It is an immense task - there are 800 different types of ball on the R&A's approved list - but it will get slightly easier when the R&A opens its own research centre in St Andrews this year.

That centre will also be pivotal when it comes to tackling the most significant problem facing the game's administrators today: the possible introduction of a new ball, one that doesn't fly as far as those currently in use.

Like every other senior member of the R&A hierarchy, Otto is unconvinced by the arguments that the modern ball goes too far. "There are many factors involved here," he says. "If there has been any increase in distance - and I don't necessarily accept that there has been - then I would say it is down to the greater athleticism of the players, then there is the ball and then there are the clubs. There is also the question of more efficient matching of the player and their clubs."

Unlike other R&A blazers, however, he is not coy about discussing the work that both his organisation and the United States Golf Association, has put in on this issue of the ball. Last year the governing bodies admitted they had a "research project" into a ball that wouldn't go as far as those in use, although details were sketchy. No longer.

Otto says they looked at criteria such as size, weight, different rubbers and various dimple patterns.

The project ran into many difficulties, the most significant being that a ball that was 10 per cent shorter for one type of player might be 20 per cent shorter for another, and therefore intrinsically unfair.

"People thought there might be a solution that would keep the game the same but also address this question of distance," Otto says. "There wasn't. The problem is there is no single definition of a magic ball."

As for the current location of those intriguing, if less than magical, balls, Otto laughs. "They are in a cupboard somewhere, under lock and key."

Never to be seen again?

"Exactly."