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Behind Virgin Galactic’s First Spaceflight

In April, after the veteran NASA test pilot Mark Stucky completed a successful rocket-powered flight in SpaceShipTwo, the craft that Virgin Galactic hopes to use to pioneer commercial spaceflight, Jack Fischer, a NASA astronaut, tweeted that Stucky “was slipping the surly bonds like a boss!” This was a cheeky reference to “High Flight,” the 1941 poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (Ronald Reagan quoted solemnly from the same poem after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.) The poem begins, “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth.”

On Thursday, Stucky slipped them further. Along with his fellow-pilot C. J. Sturckow, Stucky took SpaceShipTwo up to a height of 51.4 miles—the edge of space, higher than the company has ever flown before, and a milestone in the commercial space race. “Not only is this the first human spaceflight to be launched from American soil since the final Space Shuttle mission in 2011, but the very first time that a crewed vehicle built for commercial, passenger service, has reached space,” Virgin Galactic said in a celebratory statement. The company posted images and videos from the flight on Twitter, of the haloed circumference of Earth as seen from the spacecraft.

Virgin Galactic and Stucky were the subjects of an article by Nicholas Schmidle that The New Yorker published in August. Schmidle wrote about the history and goals of the commercial space industry, the technical challenges and mortal risks that Virgin Galactic and its primary competitors—Blue Origin and SpaceX—are facing in their efforts, and the vast sums of money they are expending. Virgin Galactic’s reliance on test pilots set it apart. Schmidle wrote that despite “the futurism of its mission,” SpaceShipTwo was “a relatively simple aircraft. No autopilot. No automation. The other space companies would control the journey to space with computers: everyone on board was more or less along for the ride. Once a Virgin Galactic ship was airborne, the fate of the ship and its crew was in the pilot’s hands.”

Stucky, a former marine, has piloted SpaceShipTwo on several dozen test flights. “He is fifty-nine and has a loose-legged stroll, tousled salt-and-pepper hair, and sunken, suntanned cheeks,” Schmidle wrote. “In other settings, he could pass for a retired beachcomber. He wears the smirk of someone who feels certain that he’s having more fun than you are.” Stucky had dreamed of being an astronaut since childhood. In 1980, in an interview with his college alumni magazine, he confessed that he hated to “tell people that, because it seems like such a kiddie dream.” Almost forty years later, with the end of his career in sight, he went into space for the first time. “That was rather incredible,” he said after the flight. “Had plenty of time to look around.”

In August, Schmidle wrote that once SpaceShipTwo reached space, Virgin Galactic would send the craft back up several more times, “to assure the public that SpaceShipTwo was ready to begin commercial service.” Richard Branson, the British billionaire who has been funding Virgin Galactic for a decade and a half, told Schmidle that he felt redemption was close, and that he expected to make back the hundreds of millions of dollars he’d spent on the company. “There are, we believe, millions of people who would love to go to space, and we want to tap into those people,” he said. “If you can create the best—the best hotel chain, the best clubs, the best spaceship company—it’ll become very valuable.”