August 20, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man,” an extraordinary profile of an extraordinary man – Virgin Galactic’s ace pilot, Mark Stucky. Schmidle puts us squarely there, in the cockpit of SpaceShipTwo, with Stucky and his co-pilot, Dave Mackay, as they fly into space:

Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue.

He describes what Stucky sees:

The Earth’s bright-blue surface filled his porthole. It was a stupendous sight: the outer edge of the atmosphere was dancing with wispy tendrils. The spaceship was now at eighty-four thousand feet—higher than he’d ever been. He could now testify to the awesome power of the “overview effect.”

He shows us Stucky’s poised reaction to an in-flight emergency (Schmidle calls it “a vertiginous surprise”): 

Hurriedly, Stucky attempted to right the ship by blasting thrusters of high-pressure air, which was stored in the wings and was used to orient the vehicle in low-gravity environments. Then he instructed Mackay to unlock and raise the feather. As it went up, the spaceship righted itself, just as it had on Stucky’s harrowing glide flight seven years earlier. The same innovation that had contributed to the 2014 crash was, when properly deployed, a godsend.

That 2014 crash haunts Schmidle’s piece. He describes it magnificently:

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo zoomed off the runway. They flew about a hundred and fifty miles northeast, alongside a craggy mountain range streaked with purple and green mineral deposits. After reaching Death Valley, and still ascending, they looped back toward the release point. Stucky, in mission control, was watching the cockpit video and listening over the radio as Siebold and Alsbury ran through their checklists.

Alsbury: “Seat belts and shoulder harnesses?”

Siebold: “Snug.”

Alsbury: “Rocket burn timer?”

Siebold: “Set and verified.”

Alsbury: “Stick?”

Siebold: “Stick is forward.”

The pilots flooded their masks with oxygen, in case of an emergency. Neither was wearing a pressure suit.

Alsbury armed the release switch, and the spaceship dropped from WhiteKnightTwo. He fired the rocket. “Good light,” Siebold said, his voice reedy from the onset of g-forces. A moment later, following Stucky’s protocol, Alsbury announced their airspeed: Mach 0.8. They were in the transonic zone. Everything was going well.

“Yeehaw!” Siebold cried out.

Then Alsbury did something inexplicable. “Unlocking,” he said. He began reaching for a lever that controlled the locks on the feather.

Stucky hoped that he’d either misheard Alsbury or failed to notice that the spaceship had passed the transonic zone. He checked the Machmeter on the main display screen, and saw that the speed was still below Mach 1. His body seized: without the locks in place, aerodynamic forces would push the feather up, creating a tremendous amount of drag and shredding the spaceship in midair.

He lunged at the call button, intending to scream, “Don’t!”

Siebold grunted in agony. The audio feed stopped, and the video froze mid-frame. An engineer looked up from his console and gave Stucky a searching look.

Stucky said, “They’re gone.”

“Rocket Man” begins and ends with Stucky’s successful piloting of SpaceShipTwo into space. In between, it chronicles his personal history and how he became involved in Virgin Galactic’s amazing quest to make commercial space travel a reality. It brims with fascinating details – the way SpaceShipTwo is “attached like a marsupial to the belly of a mother ship, WhiteKnightTwo”; the labor-intensive construction of SpaceShipTwo’s frame (“you had to bind together sheets of honeycombed carbon by applying resin, cut the sheets into shapes with laser-guided precision, and bake each piece in a Celotex oven”); the technique suggested by Virgin Galactic’s flight doctor for avoiding passing out while experiencing extreme gravitational forces: “‘Pretend like you’re squeezing a walnut down there,’ she said, referring to my glutinal muscles.”

Schmidle's “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011) and “In the Crosshairs” (June 3, 2013) are New Yorker masterpieces. Now he's produced a third - “Rocket Man.” He's become one of the magazine's best writers.