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May 24, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
48:48
Edition 548 - Nicholas Schmidle
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope you're keeping well.
Spring is delivering us still, even though it's late May, a lot of rain here in London.
But I am hoping that June is better.
Because, you know, June is the time of the Gemini people.
And we like the weather to be good for it.
Otherwise, you know, we're not nice people to know.
But I think there is sunshine forecast for the United Kingdom at least during June.
But we will see.
Okay, thank you for all of your emails.
Please keep them coming.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam.
And you can send me an email with your thoughts and suggestions on the show through the website.
Now, this is going to be a big addition.
This is all about Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson's effort to get travelers, tourists into space, the frontiers of it.
This was the news over the last weekend as I record this.
CNN said this Virgin Galactic's rocket-powered plane carrying two pilots soared into the upper atmosphere on its third mission to reach space Saturday morning.
This success queues up Virgin Galactic to begin launching paying customers within the next year as the company works to finish its testing campaign at its headquarters in New Mexico.
After this successful flight, Sir Richard Branson spoke to CNN, and this is what he said to them.
Everything just worked like a dream.
They're analyzing the data, but the initial feedback from our chief engineer has been incredibly positive.
Sir Richard Branson speaking over the weekend to CNN, which makes the conversation that we're about to bring to you very, very important indeed.
Nicholas Schmidtel spent a lot of time living with, embedded with, the people at Virgin Galactic.
He has written a unique book and account of their development.
The characters, the people, the human stories behind Virgin Galactic.
The book is called Test Gods.
We'll talk more about it in the conversation, but it is a remarkable conversation.
Nicholas Schmidtel is based in London, writes for The New Yorker, and he got unique access to Sir Richard Branson and his people at Virgin Galactic, which is why the account that you're about to hear, I think, is pretty amazing.
So, this is my conversation with Nicholas Schmidtel, and we're talking all about Virgin Galactic.
Nicholas Schmidtel, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
This is fun.
What gave you the idea of doing it in the way that you have done it?
Not only have you told, you know, a chronological story of Sir Richard Branson and what he wanted to do and how he's done it, but you've also brought the people, the characters into it.
Yeah.
So, you know, I came to this story at a critical turning point for the company particularly, which is in late 2014, very shortly after they crashed, after their spaceship crashed in the California desert, and one test pilot was killed and the spaceship was left in ruins.
And I'm a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and went to my editor and said that, you know, we should do a big magazine piece about this company.
And the question was, well, could we get real access?
That was, that was the, that, that was the, that was the, that was the, my editor threw down the gauntlets.
Can we get in and get anything that feels real?
We didn't want sort of a dog and pony show.
And so I went to the company and I proposed a long-term embed.
And what I told him I wanted to do was something similar to what Buzz Bissinger had done for his incredible book about an American high school football team, which was he spent a season with the team.
And I went to the company and I said, I want to spend a season with your team.
I want to spend this set duration.
And we determined that the duration of what I, I wanted to sort of follow them as they rebuilt another spaceship and returned to rocket power test flight number five, which the fourth one is the one that crashed in October of 2014.
And so those were the parameters.
And when I got inside the company, I had this incredible, unprecedented, very intimate access to all of the people.
I was sitting in on the meetings.
And I just, you know, the more I sat there and the more I observed, I began trying to, I began sort of, you know, people were coming out in relief.
And I was beginning to get a better picture of who was who and who was who was going to be the ones to sort of hold this big, broad, sprawling story together.
And working for the New Yorker, I guess, Nicholas, it will have quickly become apparent to you that this was a people story, not a technology story, more than anything else.
Exactly.
I mean, and the thing is, the two go hand in hand.
And the technology is very important because, I mean, the technology is important for a number of reasons.
It's critical to understanding what happened on the day of the accident.
And I thought that it was also really important to be able to, you know, I wanted to sort of have a little bit of something for everyone, if you will.
I wanted the engineering types to, you know, I wanted the engineering types to appreciate the fact that I am not a technical person.
I, much to my chagrin, when I was applying to grad schools, I notoriously went, was inquiring to grad schools.
And when they told me, and my first question would be, do you have an economics requirement?
And those who said yes, I'd say, yeah, next.
And so, you know, I'm a humanities guy through and through.
And so it was a bit of a challenge to try and become fluent in the technology.
And I really kind of nerded out on it at times.
And I needed to know much more than I put in the book in order to be able to explain the technology through character and through people.
So it was finding that balance to be able to explain the aerodynamic challenges and the propulsion challenges.
But like you said, doing that through character rather than through sort of a technical treatise, if you will.
You will know this, and I'm here to tell you that Virgin Galactic get a lot of media requests, including regular ones from me.
And usually the answer is no.
What do you think it was about your bid that got you that exclusive access?
It's a great question.
And it's one that, you know, it's one that I've asked myself since.
And it's one that I don't think, you know, I just, I found them at the right time.
And I found them at the right time.
And I had an entree into the company that made a huge difference.
And the entree was that at that point in 2014, there were five test pilots that made up Virgin Galactic's Test Pilot Corps.
And one of them was a former Marine fighter pilot who left the Marines in the 90s and went and flew for NASA and flew four shuttle missions and was a big, became a really well-known astronaut.
But before that, he was our neighbor.
And my dad was a fighter pilot.
And he was my dad's wingman on the first night of the Gulf War in 1991.
And he, a couple of years before that, had led a search and rescue mission for my dad when my dad, flying a single-seater F-18, had ejected into as his airplane, had lost control of his airplane and his airplane sort of was barreling into a mountainside in Japan and had to eject.
And this pilot, C.J. Sterkow, led the search and rescue mission.
So I hadn't spoken to C.J. Sterkow in 25 years, maybe, if not longer.
And so what happened is after the crash, I reached out to him and I said, you know, it's been a long time.
His wife used to babysit for my brother and I. So, you know, we were close, but like, again, a lot of time had passed.
And so I went to Mojave, California, and I met him at the place where people in Mojave, California meet, which is the Denny's there at the intersection.
And at the sort of the one and only intersection.
And I just explained to him what I wanted to do.
And he said, look, you know, we're written about all the time by people who don't know what they're talking about.
And, you know, I think that there's a sentiment inside the company that it'd be good to let someone in who is eager and passionate about the subject.
And I explained to him the way that the New Yorker fact-checking works and the way that my sort of journalistic standards.
And I explained that to him and I explained it to the president and everyone else who I met.
And so that sort of that got me in the door.
But as I told the company in the beginning, I said, look, I don't need a guarantee.
You don't need, I don't, I don't, I don't think it's fair to ask you to guarantee my access.
If you don't feel comfortable with me and you think that I'm a creep and you don't want to let me into the meetings, then that's your prerogative, you know?
But hopefully, I said, I just want you to know sort of what I would hope.
And what I would hope is that at some point, especially as we're moving towards the real flights and we're getting, you're getting back into the air, that I'm a fly on the wall and that you just let me sit in the back of the room.
And, you know, eventually that is where we got.
And so that's the story of how I got in and stayed in.
You talked to me at the beginning of this about how you're a generalist, not a scientist.
And that's me too.
That's a lot of us who do media, I think.
And I think that might have fitted Sir Richard Branson's view of everything, because I'm quoting you here from a New York Times article about the book here that I read today.
Quotes, he regarded space travel as a humanistic rather than an escapist venture.
It seems to fit you down to the ground.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, totally.
And I too, when I told people that I was working on this story, people would look at me a bit quizzically and say, you know, I didn't know that you were interested in space.
And I said, honestly, I'm not really.
And I continue not to be very interested in space.
Yeah, it's interesting.
But for me, the whole book and the whole project was space was always a metaphor.
It was always the, you know, it was the great white whale.
And it was what all of these real and true and genuine efforts here on Earth were being oriented towards.
But that wasn't, I mean, it was much more about the journey than the destination.
So in many ways, yes, I think that Richard and I, I think that I shared that sentiment and I think that he shared that sentiment as well.
And look, I know that he, after the magazine piece came out, so I spent, so after I negotiated that access in late 2014, the endpoint, that fifth powered supersonic rocket test was the company had said initially, it would probably be about two years and it ended up being four.
And to their credit, they let me continue to keep coming.
And to the New Yorkers' credit, they continued to pay for me to go.
So I made, all told, 15 trips to Mojave, California.
I was living on the East Coast and flying to the West Coast and spending a few days there, you know, sometimes a week at a time.
And so, you know, I know after the magazine piece came out, which was based on these four years of, you know, very intimate and unusual access, Richard wrote to me and said, you know, he waited about a month after the piece came out.
He said, look, I've been sort of sitting on my hands because I don't want to interfere with your independence.
But, you know, I thought it was tremendous and that, you know, a lot of journalists don't have the time to be able to spend this much on a, this, aren't afforded the time to be able to spend this much energy on a particular project.
And so, you know, I thought you did a great job.
So, you know, that I think that he appreciated and that we do kind of share that similar approach.
I think it's really creditable that he personally got what you were trying to do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm, I'm terribly curious to know what he thinks about the book because the book is, you know, so the access, the company is, is really, it's important to understand, I think, that the company is, there are two sort of centers of activity, two hubs of the company.
There is the operations, particularly when I was there.
There's now a third, which is in Spaceport America, New Mexico, where the operations are based.
But for the vast majority of the time that I was there, the test flights and the construction of the spaceship and the wrench turning and the guys with the greasy hands that are doing the work are all in Mojave, California.
And the folks who are selling the concept and marketing the concept and all of that were in London.
And they were always competing opinions about whether I should be allowed and about sort of the direction of the company, whether this was a, you know, this is Virgin companies have always been marketing companies.
They have never or very, very rarely built stuff.
And now here, suddenly, because of this accident, you know, Virgin Galactic had a subcontractor who was doing all the work and Virgin was going to then sort of, you know, put its decal on the outside once all the work was done.
And then after the crash, that relationship ended and Virgin Galactic was suddenly thrown into the business of building spaceships.
And so the story is really kind of capturing those competing interests between, like I said, between the marketing interest and the operationally focused ones.
And after the magazine piece came out, the folks in London really didn't like the way that I, they didn't like the story that I was telling.
They are used to sort of having a monopoly.
As you mentioned, there's a very robust PR apparatus and they're used to telling the story a particular way, a story of incremental progress.
And yes, we've had some slip-ups, but we don't want to talk about those.
We want to talk about what's ahead of us.
And that just, that doesn't do justice.
There are three dead engineers as a result of a 2007 rocket accident, a ground accident.
And there's one dead test pilot as a result of an airborne accident.
So, you know, I wanted to make sure that I captured all that grit.
And you helped them to understand that, you know, it's enormously sad when people die and you don't want anyone to die along the way.
But if we look at the history of space exploration, if we look at every company and every organization and every government involved in it, inevitably and sadly, just as if you were building some great public works project, some people who start on the project are not going to finish it.
Exactly.
And yeah, so that was, that's what I, you know, what I kept coming back to whenever I would, oftentimes when I would witness, I'd be in a meeting and things.
There was this one particular meeting that always comes to mind.
In 2016, they were preparing to fly what they call a captive carry flight.
So, you know, Virgin Galactic, unlike SpaceX and Blue Origin and frankly, most traditional rocket outfits, which employ a vertical launch and in the case of SpaceX and Blue Origin, a vertical landing system, Virgin Galactic uses an air launch system.
So they have a mothership that tows the spaceship up to an altitude of about 45,000 feet and then drops the spaceship.
And the test pilots on board the spaceship light the rocket motor and fly horizontally for a few seconds and then pull into this very steep near vertical ascent to the heavens.
And that's the flight profile.
And then they glide down.
They make this sort of corkscrewing descent and they glide down and they land on the runway.
And when they're first testing the aerodynamic profile of the spaceship, they do what's called a captive carry flight, where they just fly around as a sort of this mated pair for a while.
And in 2016, they were preparing their first captive carry flight.
And, you know, they were, there was like, it was nothing, it was nothing overly critical, but there was missing, the paperwork was slow to come in.
And they were 24 hours before flying, ready, being ready to fly, but they didn't have the right paperwork.
And it caused a tremendous amount of consternation, particularly for the former military guys who comprise the test pilot corps, who were like, look, this is not how you run a flight test organization.
We're doing some seriously dangerous stuff.
And we can't do this sort of fly-by-the-seater pants operation.
And so I sat against the wall during this meeting, and they were being very frank.
There was this one, the vice president of safety at the time who was saying, look, we're a failure as a flight test organization to be having this conversation right now.
And one of the senior executives turned around and said, I don't feel comfortable having this conversation with Nick in the room.
And it was an invitation to leave, certainly.
And I said, yeah.
And I said, you know, I said, look, this is why I came.
And this is what, you know, in the end, when you hopefully triumph, it will be these moments of adversity that will make the triumph all that much sweeter.
And without those moments of adversity, then it feels contrived.
And so that was always sort of my, that was always what I told, as I was asking them questions about what I knew were uncomfortable moments for the program, difficulties with the rocket motor program, et cetera.
You know, they would always kind of get skittish and be like, why are you asking all these questions about bad stuff that's happened?
And I said, well, I have to be able to understand the whole, the whole operation, the whole enterprise to be able, like I said, hopefully when you reach that goal, it will make it all that much sweeter.
And so, yeah, that was ideal.
You were a tremendous ambassador for yourself.
I want to unpick the stories of some of the people involved in this, the principles, particularly as told in your book, Coming Next.
And we're talking with Nicholas Schmidtel in London, who spent time, a lot of time, with the Virgin Galactic people with the blessing of Sir Richard Branson and tells an amazing story in Test God's Tragedy and Triumph in the New Space Race.
We're talking about Virgin Galactic and its space program and how it differs from the others, because Nicholas, it does, doesn't it?
If you were to compare it with the technocrats at, you know, SpaceX or NASA or, you know, another foreign power, this is, as we said at the beginning of this, this is very much a human story.
They do everything differently, including the way that they launch the flights.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, if you, you know, we'll use SpaceX for a second as a point of comparison.
SpaceX, if you look at the cockpit or the drag, the capsule in which SpaceX is now launching with some regularity at this point, NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, which is a huge, incredible achievement for a private company to be doing that.
I mean, you divorce yourself from what now seems normal and think that 30 years ago, if you told someone that NASA would be depending on an upstart private rocket company to fly them to space, I mean, people would think you're crazy.
But if you look at the design of that capsule, I mean, those astronauts are sitting there.
There's not a whole lot for them to do.
And they're looking at what appear to be iPads and it's all touchscreen.
But most of the work has been done by the engineers and the programmers and these sort of algorithmic geniuses that are down on the ground building these rockets to be able to fly more or less on their own.
I mean, the automation inside them is incredible.
Virgin Galactic's cockpit, if you look at a photograph, there's a picture in the book.
But if you look at the cockpit, I mean, this thing, it's old school, right?
Yeah, I mean, as I said to some, you know, it's a Piper Cub with a rocket motor shoved in the back.
I mean, it's really, it's all switches and there's very little automation.
Increasingly, they are introducing a little bit more, particularly as they progress towards commercial operations.
And, you know, there is a need for things like autopilot.
People liked, autopilot puts people at ease, that there's, you know, that you're not dependent on a pilot who maybe had something to drink the night before or whatever.
But if you look inside of that cockpit, it's, yeah, it's a very austere machine.
And so there are all sorts of questions about what that means for the viability of the business.
But what that meant for me in terms of its storytelling potential and its dramatic potential was just incredible because this, as we've said, this was inherently a very sort of dramatic and human story.
This was about people, elite test pilots, making the right decision every time.
So to me, it sounds like it harks back.
If you look at, you know, I wasn't alive then, neither were you, but if you look back at the 50s, late 50s, and the very early days of space exploration or trying to get as high as you need to go to consider going beyond that point, this Branson operation is very much allied to that in a way that today's space exploration by SpaceX and NASA isn't.
You know, they're still, these people are still raw pilots at their heart and soul.
Very much so.
And I think there are two pieces of that, two things that are relevant there.
One of which is that it's important to know that Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's people, they didn't sort of blue sky design Spaceship 2.
Spaceship 2 was designed by a boutique aviation firm in Mojave, California called Scaled Composites, which was headed up by this legendary aerospace designer named Burt Burtan.
And Burt Burtan, just as an establishment of his bona fides, Burt Burtan has more vehicles on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. than any other aerospace designer.
I think he has six vehicles, six airplanes that are there on display.
Am I right in saying that he was involved with the famous Lockheed Skunk Works?
He, it's a good question.
I don't know that he actually was ever at Skunk Works, but that's his generation.
Like that's his, that's his, that's his DNA.
That's the sort of fabric of the company.
And he talked, I mean, he built scaled composites around the idea, modeled it around Skunk Works.
It was going to be light and fast, and they were going to build prototypes.
They were going to prove the concept, and then they were going to move on to the next design.
They weren't interested.
He wasn't interested in certification.
He wasn't interested in manufacturing.
He wanted to build one.
He wanted to prove the concept and move on.
And he has a reputation.
He has a record.
He built a prototype and proved a prototype every year for the duration of his company, a new prototype.
I mean, the guy is a genius.
So Berber Tan, though, comes from the generation just after those that you mentioned in the 50s and 60s flying the experimental rocket planes, the X1, the X-15, et cetera.
He's learning lessons when he's in the Air Force as an engineer in the early 70s.
He's learning lessons from those pilots and from their experiences.
So when it comes time for him to build his rocket plane to compete in this competition called the X Prize that was established in 1996 and was going to end in 2004, and it was going to be $10 million to the first private company to put a vehicle into space, Burt Tan built a thing that kind of looked like the X-15.
And this was Spaceship One and the White Knight.
And this was the air launch system.
And this was very much that sort of retro approach.
So they won the X Prize.
And Richard Branson said, can you build one of those for me a little bit bigger so I can put tourists on it?
And that's the genesis of, that's the sort of origin story of Spaceship Two.
So yes, so it does very much harken back.
And that's the kind of engineering legacy.
Mark Stuckey, who is the lead character in this book and is the, you know, the US subtitle is Virgin Galactic in the Making of a Modern Astronaut.
And the reason is that Mark Stuckey is this phenomenally talented test pilot who let me into his life in a way that I could have never imagined or expected.
Or even, I mean, it was beyond my belief that I was in his email, you know, kind of let him let me go through his emails and, you know, him being willing to sort of put himself out there in terms of details about his divorce and his relationship with his children and which were which is very strained at times.
You paint a very deep and detailed portrait of him, I have to say, Nicholas.
I mean, you know, I will, I saw, as I read your book today, I saw a picture of three-year-old Mark Stuckey glued to the television in the den at his parents' home, watching age three transfixed by John Glenn orbiting the Earth.
I mean, this guy was into it from the, almost from the womb.
Totally, totally, totally.
And had this light and had and had been nursing this lifelong dream.
And, you know, his father told him when he was three that, you know, his father came home that day and said, you know, what'd you do?
And Mark, you know, three-year-old Mark Stuckey said, you know, watch John Glenn.
And that's what I want to do.
I want to become an astronaut.
And, you know, most parents would pat their three-year-olds on the head and say, you know, sure, son, whatever you want to do.
And, you know, kind of humor them.
And Mark Stuckey's father, though, who was a Mennonite and a conscientious objector, told Mark, no way, impossible, that no son of his was ever going to become an astronaut because no son of his was going to serve in the military and all the astronauts came from the military.
Yeah, so his father told him that this was an impossible dream and that no son of his was ever going to become an astronaut because no son of his was ever going to serve in the military and all astronauts came from the military.
So he spent the next 50 years of his life trying to defy his father and prove his father wrong.
So that was also a central thread.
Going back to this, just coming back for a second to this earlier generation of test pilots, this title comes from, there was this dinner that I attended in 2019, early 2019, with a bunch of test pilots at a Mexican restaurant outside of Edwards Air Force Base.
And the dinner was the result of a decade-long bet between Mark Stuckey and one of his very good friends, a NASA astronaut named Jack Fisher.
In 2009, these two guys, Mark, who was with Scaled Composites and Jack Fisher, who was with NASA, both were trying to get to space and they made a bet to see who'd be the first one to get there.
It was a sort of public versus private spaceship bet.
And the loser had to buy the other one dinner at Domingo's, this restaurant.
And so Stuckey lost and there was this dinner that was supposed to be, you know, Stuckey and Fisher and a few others.
And it turned into this huge dinner.
There were like 40 people packed into this restaurant.
And as Mark Stuckey stood up to kind of thank everybody for coming, a guy in the back of the room said something, Mark Stuckey stood up and he said, you know, that guy right there is the Chuck Yeager of our generation.
And I thought, all right, you know, I'm sitting there taking notes.
That's a pretty cool quote coming from someone.
You know, these guys are all extremely experienced, you know, kind of legends in their field.
And then Jack Fisher stood up and Stuckey and Fisher had their arms around one another.
And this test pilot in the back of the room said, those guys are test gods.
And, you know, and that was like, you know, that was the reflection of this undefinable concept that certain guys had the right stuff, you know, and certain guys were just a cut above even the best.
And so, yeah, so that very much that thread, that sort of retro mentality is certainly a theme that threads through the book.
Well, Mark Stuckey, absolutely a maverick.
I mean, you tell a story about his college days, something to do with a forgery episode.
That's right.
His call sign was forger.
And I remember getting to the company and, you know, when I was sort of trying to figure out and learning about Mark and piecing it all together, and he told me what the origin story was of his call sign.
And it's amazing how, you know, these guys, you know, my dad is, Mark is 61 years old, 62 years old.
You know, my dad is 66.
And, you know, these are guys still go by their call signs.
My dad goes by rooster.
Mark Stuckey goes by forger.
And people don't, people, you know, I guess sometimes they ask what the, what the backstory is, but I said to Stuckey, I was like, so where did it come from?
And so exactly, he had been running this sophisticated forging operation out of his dorm room closet, which came to light when he first showed up at one of his very, very early jobs as a Marine Corps pilot.
He was one of the commanders in the squadron made some, essentially said, we need to update the badges to get on base for visitors.
And Mark was like, all right, I'll take him home.
And, you know, I think everybody was expecting him to come back with like, you know, cardboard with masking tape.
You kind of, you know, double working his lamination.
And he came back with these like really high quality credit card, like, you know, you know, credit card solid IDs.
And everybody kind of looked at him quizzically.
And he's like, all right, well, yeah, I was running this door.
You know, I had this forging operation I was running out of my dorm room closet.
So that's where it came from.
I mean, you don't, those are the stories that you do not get to.
I'm sure they exist, but you don't get to hear about other people in the so-called space race.
That's amazing.
And you also tell the story just as we conclude this section, because I loved this bit.
And it really gives us a picture of Mark Stuckey and what he's All about his first experience of skydiving.
Yeah.
So when he told me this story, I thought, I mean, it was just bananas, right?
I mean, so his first experience of skydiving is that he's in college, he wants to experience free fall.
He is a paraglider.
So he has a paragliding sort of backup parachute.
And he has a friend who has a pilot's license.
And he convinces this friend to fly him up one cold winter morning in Kansas.
They get up in the air and Mark Stucky climbs out of the Cessna down onto the wheel struts and jumps.
And, you know, and he was telling me this story.
In fact, we were going paragliding once and we were in the van with some other paragliders winding up this mountain in California.
And apparently Stucky had told this story once before to one of the other paragliders.
And the guy said, hey, you know, they're like something like, does Nick know this story?
And as he's telling me, I thought, oh my God, you got to be kidding.
I mean, it comes back to what you said.
I mean, this very sort of Maverick-y mentality.
And so that was, yeah, when he told me how, you know, he borrows a pair of goggles from the chemistry lab and he's, you know, he's in his bell bottoms and his dad is going to pick him up.
You know, they had called his dad and said, hey, we're going to fly over from Kansas State University.
Can you pick us up at the airport and we'll have lunch at the house?
And the airplane lands and Mark Stuckey's dad is there at the airport and he says, where's Mark?
Where's Mark?
And the pilot says, well, he jumped.
And so his dad said, you know, his dad apparently, you know, his dad, I think at a relatively, could be humorless.
And his dad said, get in the car.
So they get in the car and they all, they drive to the destination point.
And as the pilot said to me, he said, you know, and so all of a sudden he said, we pull up and we come over, you know, we come around this bend and there up ahead of us, Mark is coming towards us in the street.
And he's got this big orange, you know, parachute sort of billowing behind him.
He said, you know, you'd have thought it was D.B. Cooper or something.
So, hi, guys.
I've just jumped off the plane.
What's for lunch?
Exactly.
I think it's a fabulous story.
Let's park it there for now, and we'll come back to Mark Stuckey, who I think should be in there with the pantheon of space explorers, along with the NASA names that you do know.
I think he should be up there with them.
We've got Nicola Schmidtel here.
I think we need to make this three-dimensional now.
So here we have Mark Stuckey, who's very much after service with an airline, then service like your dad in the military.
And we'll come back to the similarities, the points of reference between your dad and Mark Stuckey in a moment.
So he does military service, and then he ends up working with Richard Branson, which is a massive compression of the story, but that's basically it, isn't it?
Yeah, exactly.
And yeah, he goes to the Air Force for a few years, and he's doing some extraordinarily top secret stuff in the Air Force that for all of his candor and openness, man, I spent the past seven years trying to pry secrets out of him about what he was doing for the Air Force.
And all I could do was sort of capture snippets of intriguing anecdotes and some rudimentary stuff.
But these bases, the Air Force bases, these are places where guys, visitors who aren't cleared for what they're seeing or what's around them have to wear these things called foggles that are essentially classes that cloud your vision.
So you're just walking around blind in there until you get to your sort of place that you're allowed to then take the foggles off and have your meeting.
So, I mean, that was, so he goes, he goes to the military, and then he goes to Scaled Composites, and he's there flying this, testing the spaceship.
And, you know, he truly, him and Richard Branson are in some ways sort of their destinies are intertwined.
His hope for becoming an astronaut depends on Richard Branson continuing to support the project.
And Richard Branson's hope of success depends on Mark Stuckey at times being able to fly that spaceship through really difficult moments and to be able to sort of prevail and punch through the atmosphere.
Just to explain to my listener, your sound has gone slightly muffled.
I think it's just something to do with the Wi-Fi connection, but I can hear every word.
So Mark Stuckey, absolutely central to this operation.
Correct, correct, correct.
Yeah, I mean, exactly.
He and Richard Branson are joined at the hip.
Exactly.
Their fates are very much intertwined.
Right.
And very similar people, because you tell, and we don't have time to tell it here, but a lot of British people know this story anyway.
Richard Branson kind of made his name or was on the way to making his name when that notorious incident on Thames television happened.
His band, The Sex Pistols, meet a television presenter called Bill Grundy.
Four-letter words are aired live on a TV program.
Bill Grundy's career is never the same after that.
And Richard Branson's band suddenly goes right to the front pages of every newspaper and then ultimately to the top of the charts, not doing Richard Branson any harm.
So there's another Maverick.
Meet Mark Stuckey, a Maverick.
So this is an outfit.
And I love this because I'm one myself, full of mavericks.
Very much.
I mean, these guys, and this is the setting of where all this is taking place, too, is very much, I mean, Mojave, California, though it is only an hour and a half from Los Angeles, could not be any different.
It is colorless.
It is in some ways cultureless.
It's a bunch of people in the middle of nowhere trying to do something that no one thinks they should be able to do.
And, you know, and I'll just share this, this, this, the drive, you know, you leave Los Angeles, you sort of drive through the glitz and the glamour of Los Angeles, you know, you pass all these, you know, extraordinarily overpriced juice bars, and then you get on the highway and you drive for an hour, hour and 15, 20 minutes, and then you pull into Mojave.
And the first time that I was taken through the hangar and into, and it's sort of into the hangar.
You know that feeling you get when you walk into a football pitch for a night match and you sort of come through the tunnel and the grass is so much greener than it looks on television and the lights are so much brighter than it looks on television.
And you're just, you know, I feel like every time I, you can't, that moment is so unique and so, so fresh and so kind of crystal clear in my mind of every stadium that I've ever walked into.
And it was, it was like that when I walked into the Virgin Galactic Hangar.
And there, though, under those bright lights was this half-constructed spaceship up on scaffolding that has now flown to space twice.
And, you know, but I saw it when it was just this husk of a ship.
And so that was an extraordinarily cool thing to see for sure.
As you say, they had a major setback in 2014 when there was a crash and these things happen in space exploration and space development.
But the co-pilot dies, the pilot lives but badly injured.
If you can summarize it, and it's not fair to ask you to do this, then how does Virgin Galactic pick itself up and move on from there?
I mean, really one foot in front of the other.
I mean, they realized that they had the backing, the financial, they had the backing of the company and of the board, and they had the financial support.
And so they just started building another spaceship.
And it gave them an opportunity to do things on their terms.
You know, I keep coming back to this other company, Scaled Composites.
And so, you know, the other ship was built by Scaled and Scaled specialized in these prototypes.
And Virgin was now allowed to make the ship a little more, they were allowed to sort of put in fail-safes and redundancies that hadn't been there before.
The challenge is that we are now seven years since that accident.
And Virgin is not where they thought they were going to be, where they thought they would be.
And indeed, SpaceX is taking all the headlines.
SpaceX is taking all the headlines.
And Virgin has found out that this is extraordinarily hard, that proving a concept and doing it once or twice is one thing.
Building a commercially viable, quote-unquote, space line is far more difficult because the standards, the acceptable safety standards are so extraordinarily high and they've set them for themselves.
I mean, Richard Branson has, you know, they've talked about how they want to have airplane, you know, commercial airline-like reliability.
It's just not possible.
It's just not feasible.
But that is kind of the offer, isn't it, for those people?
And I know personally, one of them who've stumped up $250,000 for that first flight.
Exactly.
And that is what's been, that is the sort of, that is what's been sold to them.
And that is what they've marketed.
And it's just not, look, I don't have a pro, like it's, it's, it's the prerogative of those people who are paying, but I think that it's, it's slightly disingenuous to suggest that they're going to, that those first few flights, I mean, maybe the 500th flight, you could say, all right, you know, now we're sort of operating at British Airways like safety standards.
But until then, I mean, they've flown rocket-powered flights less than 10 times.
And not all of them have even gone, you know, many of them have not gone according to plan.
And that's part of the test program, which is fine.
That's the metabolism of a test program.
You work out the bugs.
But there are still a lot of bugs that they're working out.
And time is of the essence.
There are other companies that are profitable and are becoming profitable.
Virgin Galactic is a publicly traded stock that has said it will be doing, you know, it will be flying commercial operations next year.
And it's just sort of hard to see how they're going to be able to sort of turn what is an incredibly ambitious and brave endeavor into a reliable service, if you will.
But that doesn't just go for them.
We have to be fair that Elon Musk is setting targets for himself and maybe Mars that are not going to be achievable to the dates that he claimed they were, that he says they were.
You know, he's very optimistic and we love his optimism.
Ditto for this, people, I think, will probably cut Sir Richard Branson a lot of slack for this because that is just the nature of the beast.
It's the way the game is played.
But I think people want to see it happen.
Yes.
So I think there, totally.
And I agree that it is the nature of the beast.
I agree that these are what you expect in an experimental flight test program.
And also that Elon Musk has gotten ahead of himself and made statements that are overly optimistic.
But in the meantime, Elon, this is the benefit of having an uncrewed rocket because you can continue to test and learn from your mistakes.
Virgin Galactic, the challenge that it faces is that it's all or nothing.
Every time they light the rocket to try and figure out if everything is going to go as planned, they have two test pilots on board.
So there's no such thing as driving around the racetrack in second gear before you stomp on the gas in the racetrack.
You're absolutely going for it.
And sadly, the minutes are running up, but that is why I think the story that you're telling is vital people here, because there's real adventure here.
And it would be a shame if that story wasn't told.
I'm glad you told it.
I have a theory about most men, Nicholas, and you may agree with me here, that most of us spend our lives, even after our fathers depart this plane, but while they're here and while they're not, trying to understand our fathers and what they were about.
And this story has helped you do that, I think, hasn't it?
Because there are parallels between Mark Stuckey and your dad in reverse.
Yeah, yeah, very much so.
And the first time that I met Mark Stuckey, he told me that I reminded him of someone.
And the person who I reminded him of, that I reminded him of was my dad, because my dad had been Mark Stuckey's flight instructor when they were both young Marines in the early 80s.
And, you know, Mark Stuckey was sort of, I couldn't claim to know him when I first met him, but I felt like I knew his type.
I felt like I could understand that streak of individualism and that passion and that focus.
And, you know, my dad, you know, my dad is still alive and is in his, is in his mid to late 60s, just recently sort of kind of stopped racing motorcycles, kind of, sort of stopped flying single-seater fighter jets, but like still would do it tomorrow if the opportunity arose.
Still got it.
Exactly.
And it was an opportunity for me to reckon with why I didn't sort of follow in those, in his footsteps and try and go into the Marines or try to become a pilot.
And also what kind of father I wanted to be to my kids.
You know, I'm certainly around and emotionally more available and physically more available.
But am I the towering figure for my kids that my father was for me that I'm always trying to impress?
And am I always trying to sort of push myself harder?
I don't know.
And that's, you know, they're sort of, that's the rub of it all, right?
How do you be, how can you be both?
How can you both inspire and be available?
And that's part of the question I think that I tried to wrestle with throughout telling the book as I'm telling Mark's story and telling Mark's story in a way that I could never tell my dad's story.
I could never sort of get into my dad's head the way that I felt like I got into Mark's head.
And so, yeah, it was a way to kind of vicariously rummage into my father's inner life by truly rummaging into Mark's inner life.
I think it's beautifully written.
I wish you, I'm sorry that we didn't have more time to talk about it because we could have done two hours, maybe three about this.
But I think the reviews are very pertinent.
One of them describes this book as an instant classic.
It's a lovely piece of writing.
You even get people like Bear Grylls to review this book, which I think is pretty damn cool, Nicholas.
Yeah, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks.
It's been a lot of fun.
It's been a good ride.
Well, no, I've enjoyed this.
I hope we get to talk again.
And the book is called Test Gods, isn't it?
Tragedy and Triumph in the New Space Race.
And Nicholas Schmidt, thank you very much for helping me.
Thanks for having me on.
It's been a lot of fun.
Nicholas Schmidtl, the book is called Test Gods, and I have read it, obviously, to do that conversation with him.
And I thoroughly and totally recommend it, not only for the story that it tells, the inside story, but for the quality of writing, which you would expect from somebody who writes for the New Yorker magazine.
He writes fabulously.
So totally recommended.
And the full five stars from me, I would say.
Not that I'm a literary critic, but I know good writing when I see it.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of The Unexplained.
So until next we meet here, my name is Howard Hughes still.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe in this world.
Stay calm in this world.
And please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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