Lost in space
Test Gods: Tragedy And Triumph In The New Space Race Nicholas Schmidle Hutchinson, £20
Ever read The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s book on NASA’s pioneering astronauts? Nicholas Schmidle has. Test Gods is a self-conscious update of Wolfe’s 1979 classic, recounting the trials, tribulations and tragic crashes of the “New Space Race”. In recent decades, private enterprise has proceeded boldly where a cash-strapped NASA has failed to go. Billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and our own Richard Branson all own spaceships. In Test Gods, Schmidle “embeds” with Virgin Galactic out in the California desert, and becomes a buddy of Mark Stucky, the ex-Marine Corps fighter pilot who is Branson’s chief test pilot. Stucky is as cool as they come, playing Rocket Man on the car radio and refusing to panic when a trial craft spins dramatically out of control. The author, a New Yorker journalist, has an “in” to such rarefied society since his father is a former “Top Gun”. Quite a lot of Test Gods is a reconciliation note of sons to fathers and vice versa. Author Schmidle uses Stucky to understand his father better, while Stucky uses his career to impress his estranged children. The wreckage of high flyers, who tend to be self-absorbed risk-takers, is not confined to accidents with their aircraft. And quite a lot of the book consists of a detailed inventory of Virgin Galactic’s effort to get SpaceShipTwo the 50 miles up that qualifies as “space”. By 2018, when Stucky finally looks out of the window of SpaceShipTwo down at the blue planet, Branson has forked out a billion dollars – and I have learned an awful lot about aeronautical actuator cables. Schmidle confesses a desire for Virgin to succeed because Branson’s “passion felt pure”. A less starstruck observer than Schmidle might query how Branson’s claim to be “democratising” space travel sits with the $250,000 he charges for a ride aboard the Virgin Galactic craft. As with the rest of the billionaire boys’ club building rocket ships, one suspects that Branson’s space trip is fuelled by a heady fuel of ego and self-promotion. In fairness to Schmidle, his role model Tom Wolfe had it rather easier. Wolfe’s astronauts were pioneers exploring the final frontier and NASA was a national crusade. Schmidle’s spacemen and women are glorified bus drivers for multinational corporations. Space has lost some of its sparkle. Somewhere in these pages, a shorter, better book wants to emerge, but Schmidle can’t see the narrative nuggets for the moondust. I kept wanting to press “mission abort”. True, I did stay aboard to the end of the journey. But only just.