The Makings of a Modern Astronaut: Virgin Galactic's Story

A split second into the mission, Mark Stucky knew something was horribly wrong. Pushing the stick forward, he had expected to enter an aggressive dive, like a kamikaze bomber racing at its target—in this case the bleak California desert. But now the tail of his spaceship was stalled and beginning to drift, contorting his carefully calibrated dive into an unintended back flop.

The computer on board the spaceship was going berserk—alerts beep- ing, yellow and red lights flashing. Grunting, Stucky pulled on the stick to try to level out. Nothing happened. He was now upside down and floating out of his seat, 40,000 feet in the air. The straps of his harness dug into his shoulders. The ship was falling fast.

Think.

An average human brain weighs about three pounds and contains nearly a hundred billion neurons; an almond-shaped cluster near the brain stem handles our response to fear. Most people panic when they’re afraid. Their palms sweat, their hearts pound, and their minds freeze—at the exact moment acuity is needed most.

Stucky was not most people.

He thumbed the pitch trim switch, hoping the pair of horizontal sta- bilizers on the tail booms would bite the air. No response. He reached up and switched to the emergency trim system. No response.

Already upside down, now the spaceship was beginning to spin. Stucky counted each rotation as the plunging craft spun past the sun.

One . . . two . . .

Stucky remained almost mysteriously calm. Clinical. He found an odd sort of comfort in such moments. His job was dangerous enough without letting panic get in the way. He was a test pilot, determined to navigate unexplored aerodynamic realms so that his engineering colleagues could define the spaceship’s capabilities and limits; as Arthur C. Clarke said, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

Each test flight offered some new adventure. But “expanding the enve- lope,” as test pilots described their work, was not adventurism for its own sake. It was a methodical process that drew as much on the discipline and rigor of the scientist as on the artful improvisation of the daredevil.

Fly, test, notate, adjust; fly, test, notate, adjust.

Stucky rummaged through a mental catalog of personal experiences and training manuals and anything he’d ever read or heard from any other pilot in search of something useful, some way to save his ship—and his life.

He deployed the speed brakes. Nothing. Stepped on the opposite rud- der pedal. Nothing. The spaceship continued to tumble and corkscrew at an alarming rate, losing 1,000 feet of altitude every two seconds. The sun kept flashing in the cockpit windows...

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