Between the Lines – Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle
On 31 October 2014, a manager at Virgin Galactic’s hangar in Mojave, California, picked up the phone and said the words; “Blue Zebra”. The phrase was meaningless to onlookers, but to the team, it had only one meaning – catastrophe.
In the company’s latest attempt to make commercial space travel possible, Michael T. Alsbury and Peter Siebold were piloting a test flight of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo. Reaching an airspeed of Mach 0.8, hitting the transonic zone, the spaceship’s flight was going exactly to plan. Suddenly, Alsbury did something that experts still struggle to explain; he reached for the lever that controlled the “feather”. This was an innovation by aerospace engineer Bert Rutan that allowed the ship’s tail booms to rotate vertically to allow for a smooth reentry. On this occasion, Alsbury unlocked too early, which led to the ship shredding apart in midair. Miraculously, Siebold survived with a broken back and dislocated shoulder, but tragically Alsbury lost his life in the accident.
Nicholas Schmidle read the news report and, drawn to the bizarreness of the story, emailed his editor at the New Yorker asking if he could investigate. “The notion that there was a company in the middle of the desert in California, that was test flying winged spaceships, not unmanned tubular rockets, felt retro, zany and harkened back to the days of The Right Stuff,” Schmidle says. Two weeks later, he arrived at the Mojave hangar. It quickly became apparent to Schmidle that the story would require more than an 8,000-word piece. After four years and 15 trips to Mojave, Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut is the end result of that investigation.
Schmidle was permitted to write about the company’s efforts for an extended period on the agreement that he would stay until Virgin Galactic flew the fifth powered flight (Siebold’s and Alsbury’s fatal crash was the fourth). He felt it was important to follow the ascending drama of Virgin Galactic, entering their journey at their lowest point, with the ambition to follow them through to their highest. “Richard Branson is a master marketer. I didn’t want the story to end, as it had many times previously for the company, with a Branson quote along the lines of ‘hopefully tomorrow’,” Schmidle says, “we wanted a sense of closure and finality.”
Test Gods was never going to be a book solely about space: “Space’s infinity makes it hard to write a tight narrative, so I needed to get it grounded as much as possible,” the author says. He achieved this by structuring the book into three personal sections entitled; Brothers, Fathers and Sons. The sections were apt as the book unwittingly became a way for Schmidle to write about his father.
Struggling to get comments from pilots one day, the “larger than life” test pilot and former marine, Mark Stucky, offered to meet him for a drink. Immediately, Stucky said that Schmidle reminded him of a rule-breaking fighter pilot who had instructed him 30 years ago – it was Schmidle’s father. “I had only known him for five minutes, and I instinctively understood him in a way that bridged a trust gap quickly,” says Schmidle. In writing about Stucky, he could weave the relationship with his father into the narrative in a way that “readers wouldn’t see coming”.
In crafting the book there was one more relationship Schmidle needed to concern himself with; the one between journalist and subject. The kind of embedment Schmidle was granted was “frankly unheard of”. He explains how Neil Armstrong was known to have warned his team to keep a particular journalist away from him before calling the man a “ghoul”. Needless to say, Schmidle was eager to avoid a similar nickname.
The book is full of poignant anecdotes, one of which played out at a more banal location. After Stucky and his co-pilot C.J Sturckow’s successful test flight of SpaceShipTwo and some celebratory whisky at the hangar, a member of the team suggested they head to the American diner Denny’s. Several hours previously, the two test pilots were 51 miles above the Earth, and now they had both feet firmly on the ground, ordering burgers. Meanwhile, in the corner, Dave Mackay, chief pilot and a Scot, and Michael Masucci, co-pilot and avid Trump supporter, were arguing about Brexit. Space travel, it seemed, put a lot of things into perspective, but not all.
“This ability that pilots have to compartmentalise, shut the world out and wall off a part of their brain” was something Schmidle was careful to introduce as a running theme throughout the book. He asked Stucky how he could do it; the test pilot shrugged and said, “there were no ‘compartmentalise days’ at work; we just did the job.”
Schmidle spent four years on the ground with the team, watching Virgin Galactic’s miraculous ascension into space end in victory and disaster alike. He learnt intimate details of test pilots’ lives, such as Stucky’s complicated relationship with his son, Dillion. He also learnt the one song that got Stucky in the correct headspace to soar into the Earth’s atmosphere (rather aptly, this was Elton John’s Rocketman).
In another lifetime, if Schmidle had chosen a path similar to that of his father and Stucky, he would listen to a band he enjoys to a “geekish and religious level” called the Disco Biscuits. Once up in space, playing classical music sounds like “the most transcendent experience,” he says.
To the great advantage of readers, Schmidle did not choose the life of test pilot, but one of a journalist, making Test Gods possible. It is a remarkable read about relationships; between father and son, journalist and subject and, most of all, man and space.