Mr. Schmidle writes for The New Yorker and is the author of “Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut,” from which this ess

For Richard Branson, the Romance of Space Tourism Meets Reality

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2021-07-11 19:30:05

Mr. Schmidle writes for The New Yorker and is the author of “Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut,” from which this essay is adapted.

On the morning of Feb. 22, 2019, my two sons and I fixed our gazes on the horizon of the Mojave Desert, waiting for a flame to appear in the distant sky: Virgin Galactic’s spaceship was about to launch.

Rockets traditionally launch vertically, from the ground. Virgin Galactic does it differently; it employs an air-launch system, using a broad-winged mothership to carry its spaceship aloft, a retro configuration inspired by the experimental rocket planes of the mid-20th-century.

An hour earlier on that cold morning, Virgin Galactic’s mated mothership-spaceship duo had taken off from the Mojave Air and Space Port, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles. The pair climbed to a desired altitude of around 45,000 feet. If all went according to plan, the mothership would soon drop the spaceship, whereupon two test pilots inside the spaceship would light the rocket, pull into a near-vertical ascent so their ship’s trajectory approximated the shape of a hockey stick, and zoom into space.

I pointed at the contrails suddenly visible in the sky. Then, we saw the spaceship, called SpaceShipTwo, separate and a burst of fire shoot out from the rocket nozzle at the rear of the ship.