Back door astronaut

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, space flight, test pilots, commercial space flight, biographies

Let's cut to the chase. Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut, by Nicholas Schmidle, is deep and complex, though very readable, bringing to us the story of an extraordinary test pilot, warts and all, and some of the author's story, also warts and all, interwoven with the history of an extraordinary spaceship company.

Marines Pilot Mark Stucky found his way to becoming an astronaut at NASA blocked at every turn, and eventually found his way to the company Scaled Composites, where he test-flew the prototype of SpaceShip Two, an improved replacement for SpaceShip One, being built for Virgin Galactic.

SpaceShip Two crashed in 2014, which set back Virgin's plans by a couple of years. A second version of SpaceShip Two was built. The book opens with a test flight in in 2016 in which SS2 spun out at altitude. The episodes ends with Mark Stucky about to try something. We know it worked because he is still with us, but it isn't until a later chapter that we learn the trick Stucky used to bring the craft under control.

The narrative carries us through the test flight of Dec. 13, 2018, when Stucky and co-pilot Frederick Sturckow flew the craft to an altitude of 51.4 miles, above the 50-mile criterion used in the US for "the edge of space." At that point the two men joined the elect number of astronauts, and also became the first persons to reach this altitude in a piloted craft since the Space Shuttle program was shut down in 2011.

The author was "embedded" in Virgin Galactic from 2014-2018, and his unusual level of access allowed him to write such a book about Mark Stucky, Virgin Galactic, and provide close-up-and-personal insight into Richard Branson, the founder (and main funder) of Virgin Galactic, other company figures, and some of the test pilots. This photo shows Mark Stucky and David Mackay after they piloted SS2 on its first flight past Mach 1 (the December 2018 flight reached Mach 3, and it takes Mach 25 to achieve orbit).

When Stucky and the author met, as I understand from the text, they learned that Stucky had known, and been trained by, the author's father Robert Schmidle, a test pilot and fighter pilot for the Air Force. It turned out that the several of the test pilots at either Scaled or Virgin had known the elder Schmidle and some had been trained by him. Thus, the book is in part about the author himself, learning more of the test pilots' life that his father seldom spoke about.

Test pilots are a special breed. They think their way through crises that make most people freeze. My father knew a fighter pilot during WWII; they are of similar stock. This man in particular had a gunfighter's reflexes; Dad called him "twitchy". Such men do things so far beyond most of us, that the book's title Test Gods is warranted, at least on a secular level.

I really can't say more. It seems that authors like Nick Schmidle are also a special sort, able to take firm grip on our heart strings and make us see through their eyes and feel in our own guts, what they are feeling.

I understand from some searching around that the publication of Test Gods precipitated a falling out between Mark Stucky and Virgin Galactic. Perhaps the book exposed too much. But the cracks were beginning to show long before. When you corral too many alpha males together, fireworks are guaranteed. I credit Mark Stucky's unusual tact with holding things together as long as they held.

A little over a year ago the Virgin Galactic's craft, piloted by a new set of pilots, "reached space" for the fourth time, the first with a full crew of four, including Richard Branson, attaining an altitude of 53.5 miles. Perhaps Branson's dream of taking tourists to the edge of space is soon to be achieved, at a little less than half a million per ticket.

Technical note: SS2, officially named VSS Unity, is launched from a dual-fuselage "mother ship" called White Knight Two, now officially named VSS Eve. The launching craft brings the spaceship to an elevation of about 48,000 feet (nearly 24 miles, almost halfway to the 50-mile criterion), and then releases it to power its way upward to space.