 I'm David Ignatius, colonist for the Washington Post. It's my pleasure to have this chance to interview my friend, Mick Schmiddle, the author of Test Gods, which is just published today. Nick has been a reporter for The New Yorker, has done some extraordinary work there and was an intrepid, and I do mean intrepid for and correspondent in Paxton. Wrist is neck, I've never forgotten. Nick returning to Washington and speaking about his adventures and every journalist at once felt envious of Nick's daring do and also had a little sugar down the spine thinking how close he'd come to really difficult situations. So Nick, welcome. It's really great to be with you in this little discussion. Yeah, thanks, David. This is a delight and a real pleasure. Thanks. So let me begin by talking just briefly about the book. It's getting fabulous reviews and discussion. If you open the Sunday newspapers, it was hard to avoid seeing references to Nick's book. Publishers Weekly described the book as an exuberant guts and glory narrative kind of thing that authors like and Kirkus compared its discussion of the characters involved in this part of the space race which Nick is gonna explain as evoking the right stuff, the classic nonfiction book about astronauts and space exploration. So all of our viewers should understand as a book that's getting a lot of attention. Nick, I wanna ask you to begin just by telling us a little bit about what the book covers in particular about Virgin Galactic's effort to create a space vehicle that was a different concept and to be from a commercial standpoint in this space race. Give us that overview before we get into details. Yeah, sure. Well, so you mentioned some of the reporting that I've done in Pakistan. I feel like I've made this sort of realization about 10 years ago that instead of writing about my own personal adventures and daring do that I wanted to write about other people doing crazy stuff and this story sort of came to me and I came to this story right around that time as I was making that transition. So Virgin Galactic is one of several space companies right now and so their whole concept, their configuration involves a rocket plane that much like the early generation of rocket planes that NASA and the Air Force were flying in the mid-20th century, it is suspended underneath of a mothership and the mothership tows this rocket plane up to an altitude of about 45,000 feet, drops the rocket plane which Virgin Galactic calls spaceship two. And at that point there are two test pilots inside of this rocket plane who ignite the rocket motor. The ship flies horizontally for a few seconds and then enters this very steep near vertical ascent that takes it up to the heavens, past the threshold of space and then it makes a kind of a spiral descent much like the space shuttle and other glide descent kind of approaches. And so it's very unusual because it's very different than any of the other space companies in their whole kind of approach to how they are doing it. And that was always what appealed to me, this very, there were guys, there were test pilots that were sitting in there sort of at the control and that's what really kind of piqued my interest. So tell our audience a little bit about the character who for the first, the third of the book really drives the narrative that a test pilot who's got a complicated, colorful history but it is in your book working for a Virgin Galactic named Mark Stuckey. Elizabeth. So Mark Stuckey is a, the first time that I met Mark Stuckey, actually the first time that he told me this little nugget from his life, I knew that he was the guy who I sort of, who I could both wrap this bigger story around and that also that his personal story was compelling enough to carry several hundred pages. And so just to rewind a bit, Mark Stuckey has this very clear memory of watching John Glenn's maiden orbital flight. And that afternoon, Mark Stuckey's dad came home. His father was a professor, a physics professor at the local college. They lived in Kansas. And his dad comes home and Mark says to his dad, Mark's like four years old says, that's what I want to do. That's what I want to be. I want to be an astronaut when I grow up. Now, sort of hear this story and you think that, you know, most parents would say, okay, whatever you want to do, son. Mark Stuckey's dad is a conscientious subjector and said to him, impossible, the dream's impossible because no son of mine will ever serve in the military and all test pilots and all astronauts come from the military. So he spends the next 40 years chasing this astronaut dream much like, like all good sons would do in defiance of his father. First by going into the Marine Corps, then he's a NASA for a while, then he's with the Air Force and then he joins this company called Scaled Composites, which is the sort of boutique aviation firm that Virgin Galactic contracted to build, test and, you know, kind of certify their spaceship. And so Mark Stuckey has spent his entire life chasing this astronaut dream. The time that I met him, he had flown Spaceship 2's first three rocket-powered test flights successfully, did not fly the fourth in which his best friend was the co-pilot and committed an unimaginable sort of, just this unimaginable human error that led to the spaceship crashing in the desert and killing his best, leaving his best friend dead. So kind of with that premise, I thought, all right, there's my character to be that I can, that's the individual whom I can sort of tie this bigger story around. You know, there's ambition, there's this dream. He's connected to the program in all kind of realms. And also there are moments of, you know, I already sort of saw there's this moment of loss, there's this moment of sacrifice. And so Mark was always gonna be, was always kind of my main guy. When he told me about his personal challenges, how during the time that he's flying these, I mean, literally like hand-built supersonic vehicles that his kid, you know, he's had this terrible divorce and his kids, he's estranged from his children, his children no longer even talk to him. And you know, and I was a, I was a young father at that point, I had two kids and I just, that was riveting to me. How does someone, how does an elite performer like that compartmentalize all of those kind of domestic and difficult family challenges? So that's kind of a snapshot who Mark Stuckey is. And then what I did for the next sort of two thirds of the book is to follow him and watch him both recover from his best friend's loss and also prepare to get back in that spaceship that just killed his best friend and, you know, hit the ignition button and try and go to space. So halfway into the book, when you arrive physically on the scene after there's been this terrible accident in 2014 where one person from Virgin Black has died and another has been terribly injured, you show up and Mark takes a look at you and says, you remind me of somebody. And then we get what is a powerful theme of the book and I don't hope it's not giving away too much neck to share that with readers and your own personal connection to the story. So pick it up there. You're sitting with Mark and he says, you remind me of somebody and then what? So he tells me, he tells me that I remind him of someone, someone he'd just seen on television lately. Person who'd just seen on television was talking about I think the F-35 program and it was a pilot, a fighter pilot who Mark had known 30 years earlier who was now a three star Marine Corps general talking about the F-35 program. And that guy is my dad. So Mark tells me that not only does he know my dad from 30 at that point 35 years ago but that my dad was his flight instructor in Yuma, Arizona when Mark was just coming into the Marine Corps and I was born in Yuma, Arizona. So there's, I was like two at the time this is all happening. So I had no memory of that but that personal connection, I mean, I always felt like there was something that I was bringing to the story personally. I just wasn't sure what it was for a while. Why was I sort of interested in this? What was driving my interest? What was driving my curiosity about Mark? Because as much as I reminded him of someone he sat down across from me and like, I also felt like I knew him. I knew this, you know, I knew this type, right? I, you know, at one point Mark was telling me about how he had, he had crashed his paraglider and his wife, his first wife had kept telling him after these paraglider crashes, you know, you've got to stop. Like this is just, you know, you can't, you're going to kill yourself in the process of getting to become an astronaut with this extracurricular activity and he broke his back at one point and his wife said, you know, it's either me or the paraglider essentially. And he said, well, I kind of like the paraglider. And so he says to me, he's telling me the story and he's telling me this story kind of to justify what seems to him, I think like potentially irrational behavior. I said, look, I've overheard those conversations before. My dad, when he was working at the Pentagon and when he was a two-star general and a three-star general still raced motorcycles on the weekends and he had several accidents in which, you know, he wrecked going, you know, more than 100 miles an hour and he'd come home and, you know, he'd have broken bones or whatever and, you know, he'd tell my mom, like, okay, I'm done. And now I've, you know, I realize now I'm done, I'm done. And then the bones would heal and, you know, he'd be back putting on those racing leathers again, going back at it wasn't, it wasn't in defiance of my mom. It was just because kind of that's who he was. So when I met Mark, he was also instantly recognizable. I knew kind of where he was coming from in some ways. And so it offered, you know, it offered this really rare opportunity for me to write about Mark, to kind of vicariously write about my dad, for me to be able to think about my relationship with my dad, sort of through my relationship with Mark. I mean, it became very, those two narratives, sort of, you know, were braided together in my mind. And then it was just a matter of trying to figure out how to make it happen on the page without it feeling extraneous. So part of the fun of this book and power of it is the father-son narrative, the deep themes that are implicit in the way that Nick has written this, but it's also a work of journalism. And Nick, you arranged when he went out in 2014 to write an article for the New Yorker to be embedded with Virgin Galactic with this effort. And tell us about that, about how you lived inside the program and what you saw over that period you were reporting the New Yorker piece. Yeah, so after the accident, and I was interested in writing about them, and I went to my editor at the New Yorker and said, you know, what do you think? And he said, yeah, it sounds great, but the concern was that Richard Branson is a very savvy, is very savvy when it comes to the media and his press team is very savvy. And so, you know, they will give access, they'll cooperate with reporters, but as my editor said, you know, the question is, can we get real access? You know, can we see them work? So I went to the president and, you know, at that point, the test pilot corps was five people. Mark Stuckey was actually not at Virgin Galactic at the time, he was at Skillet Composites, he was about to come over. But one of the other pilots, you know, whom I hadn't spoken to in 25 years was, had been my dad's wingman on the first night of the Gulf War and had then gone to NASA and flown four shuttle missions and then gone to Virgin Galactic. So he and I met at the meeting spot in Mojave, California to sort of hash out serious issues, which is the Denny's. And so he and I met at Denny's and I explained to him what I wanted to do. And he said, look, I'm happy to go talk to Mike Moses and tell him that, you know, he essentially said, I don't know, I don't, I know you come from good stock. I don't know much more than that, but, you know, I explained to him about the New Yorker's fact-checking works. I explained, you know, I showed him some other, some of the other things that I'd written and he said, you know, I'll let Mike make the decision, but you know, I'm happy to introduce you. So I met Mike Moses. And you know, I think that he felt, Mike Moses, I know that he felt that Virgin Galactic's PR up until that point and it's press coverage was so focused on the glitz and the glamour and that now they had just suffered this horrible tragedy and the people out there were doing, you know, the guys that were drawing the designs and returning the wrenches were doing serious work and that he felt like there was some, there was a story there to be told. And I said to him, you know, what I want to do is I essentially want to approach this like Buzz Bissinger did for the, for Friday Night Lights. I want to spend a season with your team. And the season would be from the crash, you know, it was kind of the pre-season, if you will. And I want to want you to build another spaceship to replace the one that's just crashed in the desert. And I want to want you returned to rocket powered flight. So that the final scene is a flight in which you light the rocket motor for the first time since the last one to crash rather than ending as many Virgin Galactic stories had done up into that point with a quote from Richard Branson about how tomorrow is going to be the big day. And so we agreed, those were the terms and we agreed on that. And then it initially that was like, okay, that'll probably be 18 months to maybe two years. And then that turned into three and then four years and, you know, praise the editors at the New Yorker who determined and decided that this was a project to continue investing in and sending me to California. So all told, I made 15 trips to Mojave. I did not live there. You know, I wasn't, I was embedded in the sense that when I was there, I was allowed to sort of roam and sit in our meetings as I wished and, you know, record everything. But I wasn't living in Mojave. I still had two kids back home. My wife said, you know, you can go, you can't live in Mojave, especially if it's going to be four years. But yeah, it was incredible access. And I remember the first time walking into the hangar and I try and remind myself of the kind of amazement of that first feeling. You know, when you walk into a football stadium or a baseball stadium and you come through the tunnel, especially a night game, and it's so bright, it's sort of radiant and the grass is so lush and green. And that's how it felt walking into their hangar the first time. And, you know, it's, there are these sort of super powerful Klee lights that are lighting everything up. And then there's the husk of this spaceship on the other side of the hangar that they're building this new vehicle. And it felt sort of surreal and otherworldly and incredibly cool. And that was, you know, I wanted to, sometimes I had to pinch myself and remind myself kind of what I was seeing and witnessing as I was sitting in and in some of these meetings in which they're talking about basic things like bolts and wrenches and screw sizes, but they're talking about them with respect to building this hand building this spaceship. So as we know in our business, being embedded provides enormous benefits for us and our readers, we have a kind of access that we couldn't have otherwise. But sometimes I found that seeing things from inside an organization, being embedded with it can be limiting. And I've also found that when the embed is over and it's time for you to do the journalist thing and tell the truth about what you're seeing, you sometimes end up really upsetting the people you've been spending all this time with who kind of just didn't quite get that you were a journalist and that you were gonna write what you thought. And so I'm curious about that. I mean, I know how this story ends after your New Yorker piece is published, but just share that with our viewers. Yeah, so, I mean, that was always a concern of mine and about, you know, you're empathizing, you're sympathizing, but sort of at what point, you know, you're also trying to simultaneously report using traditional conventional means. And so, you know, part of the advantage of being inside is that, and part of the advantage to the fact that they never really sort of told everyone what the ground rules were for dealing with me. So I remember going out for drinks with people and they would not ask them questions and they'd say, I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about that, but since no one's told me that I'm not allowed to talk about that, then I guess I'll tell you everything I know. And so that was one way that I could kind of, you know, that the access was also translating to kind of real reporting. And also there were people who knew what I was seeing and knew sort of the meetings I was sitting in on and would say, you know, look, I don't know if anyone's told you yet, but like we had, we saw, we've had a real difficulty with the rocket motor program and you should probably know something about that if you wanna understand sort of holistically what's happening here. And then, you know, I was getting documents leaked to me, I was sort of being privy to things that were not, that I was not getting by going into sort of soy through the front door. So that was the access, you know, that's a little bit kind of to the question of the, both the advantages and the kind of the perils of access. And I think that I was able to kind of navigate that, but you're right, when the New Yorker piece came out, they, there was this divide inside of the company as to whether I had told the real story or whether I had focused on the scary stuff. And there were several people at the company, particularly in the London office, which is responsible for selling tickets to, you know, very wealthy individuals to spend $250,000 for a seat on a Virgin Galactic flight who thought that I made it sound exceedingly scary. And I said to them, and exceedingly dangerous, I said to them, guys, four people have already died on the program, you know, three in a 2007 engineering accident and one in a 2014 flight test accident. Like, I'm not the one making it sound scary. I mean, it's, you know, what you're doing is incredibly ambitious and brave and zany and wild and all of those things, but like, it's still, it's, you know, you're expanding the envelope of a whole mill rocket ship program. And even Richard Branson at one point reached out to me about a month after that piece came out and he said, I'm usually reluctant to contact journalists because I don't want to impede on your independence, but I just wanna tell you that that was, I wanted to thank you for that and I wanted to tell you that that was, you know, one of the, you know, finest pieces that anyone's written about us, blah, blah. So, so Richard liked the piece, but Richard's people didn't like the piece. And, you know, and I was, and even though you, you know, you're learning things about the way a company works, though, when you're seeing how these things play out and, you know, I'll jump forward a little bit at one point. You know, I developed this unique relationship with Richard. We were emailing privately back and forth before their first space flight in December of 2018. Richard and I spent the afternoon driving around, you know, just him and I, his assistant and a driver. There were no sort of PR people around. And then I saw him again. I saw him again a couple of months later when they came, when the Virgin Galactic team came to Washington DC to get their commercial astronaut wings. And there was this moment in the Smithsonian Museum when Mark Stuckey, the lead test pilot, had to give a T-shirt to Richard Branson that said, future astronaut training program. And Branson in the middle of Smithsonian takes off his, takes off his shirt, goes bare chested, puts on this T-shirt. So two weeks later, my family was on this cross-country trip on this, driving an RV around California and Virgin Galactic's second space flight was about to happen. And just timing could not have worked out better. And we were able to go and watch the flight. And Mark Stuckey gave us a tour of the hangar the day before the flight. And we go into the hangar and my youngest son sees Branson giving a tour to some airline stewardesses on the other side. And he says, dad, that's the guy who took a shirt off in Smithsonian. So my kids now, that's how they know Richard Branson. But after that flight, Richard Branson invited me to come visit him on Mosquito Island, which is one of his private islands in the British Virgin Islands. He said, come down, we'll spend a few days, we'll be able to talk about the program. He didn't tell anyone, he didn't tell anyone apparently in his PR shop that he was doing this. And about 48 hours before I had plane tickets, we had been, they were lined up the boat transfer from the Tortola, which is the, the Tortola, which is the main airport in the British Virgin Islands to Richard's Island. They had asked me if I had any food allergies so the chef could cook with everything. So the chef could prepare food for the next few days. And then the PR people found out and revoked the invitation. And that was a really interesting moment as I was emailing with Richard and his sort of commercial director, Stephen Attenborough. And in some ways, I kind of felt like I was, I don't know, like vying for the soul of the company. I'm telling, I'm like, Richard, you know me, you've already seen, you've seen the New York article, this is just, this is going to be a bigger version of that. And Stephen is going, well, you know, making up all these excuses as to why I shouldn't be able to come. It was a really interesting moment in the end, you know, I lost and Stephen Attenborough prevailed. And I kind of realized that Richard in some ways can be Richard because he has these people around him to kind of protect him from himself in some ways. He can be the sort of swashbuckling, free spirited CEO. And I don't know how often that happens that then there's someone to get on the phone after, you know, Richard does his thing to say, you know, to kind of correct the record, if you will, or to try and, to try and, it's not even correcting the record, it's almost to try and kind of normalize, you know, Richard's very kind of a freewheeling ways. But yeah, it was a really interesting insight into the program. And that's the kind of thing you get from access, but then you also are, you know, you're not just learning, you know, the access doesn't just give you one side of the picture. So I, before we leave Richard Branson, it's an image that most of us are familiar with, you know, little pointy viking beard, the twinkling eyes. What kind of guy is Richard Branson? Is he a likable person? Does the flamboyant side of his character overwhelm the other parts? You know, I find him really likable. He likable in the sense that, you know, he stammers, he does not, he speaks with notes, he stammers, he's uncomfortable speaking in front of crowds. There's something that is, that is sort of endearing about all of that. You know, I asked him, one of the things that I asked him the first time we spoke was, you know, Virgin Galactic in some ways can't get out of its own way. If they would have just sort of been quiet, if they would have just been quiet, like Jeff, like Blue Origin has done for the past, you know, 15 years, and just quietly built their rocket ship without talking all the time about how it's going to be tomorrow and they're going to fly tomorrow and they've got all these customers lined up. I feel like they would just, they would have afforded themselves a little bit more patience. But what they did is they're always talking about how it's, you know, it's any day now. And I said to Richard, don't you think that's distracting? And he said, you know, it's part of my, it's part of my business philosophy. Like I feel like if you speak ahead of people, speak ahead of your employees, then they have to catch up to your expectations. And so, I don't know, I, and this is what, this is the one thing I can't tell. What I couldn't decipher and that encounter with the British Virgin Islands trip raised a lot of questions and raised a lot of questions for me is how much of the endearingness is calculated because he knows that there are sort of other people, like he can be himself because he knows that there are others to kind of then, you know, to push things forward behind him. And I don't have a clear sense of the inner, inner workings of, you know, Richard's relationship with the board and the kind of the high level. But as an individual, as a person, yeah, I think he's incredibly likable. I think that he's, you know, he's put himself in a great deal of harm's way as well over the years on some of these, on some of these adventures and misadventures he's embarked upon. So, you know, yeah, I think, you know, you sort of want to see him, you want to root for him, except when the question is whether they're kind of misleading as to their readiness. And what does that mean then for the people who are lined up to fly? And that's kind of one of the things that I tried to tease out as we got here. What's your best judgment about the business side of all this? Space has become a very commercial enterprise. You mentioned my boss, Jeff Bezos, is Blue Origin. We haven't talked about Elon Musk's SpaceX, but that's an amazing concern. Launch costs are just plummeting. I've rarely seen a more dramatic cost curve than what we're seeing in launch. Their new propulsion systems, it's just, it's amazingly fertile area. And I've wondered whether Virgin Galactic's approach, sort of basic business model, but also launch concept is gonna make it. But what's your feeling? Are we gonna end up having a space tourism business along the lines that they envision with them running it? I think it'd be hard. It's hard for me to see how they make a viable business out of it. And I think the problem is that actually the configuration and their sort of, their approach via the aerodynamics of their unique ship is very tied in to the viability of their business. The other companies you mentioned, SpaceX, Blue Origin, both use a traditional vertical launch, but also a untraditional vertical landing. So they're reusing their rockets. I mean, watching that, I mean, it's incredible. It's like watching someone drop a pencil from the top of a roof and having it land on the eraser. And it's, so that's pretty spectacular to watch. For Virgin Galactic would always, that human element was what drew me initially, the fact that there were people at the controls, fact that there were, the fact that it was a flown spaceship, a winged spaceship. But I do think that having so many humans in the loop, if you will, hinders its ability to make this a repeatable routine, airline-like frequency kind of operation. And so, I think that they will probably fly to space a few more times, but I just can't see how they can achieve that, the pace that they talk about in some of their financial statements of flying, once or twice a week, per spaceship. I just don't see how they can remember that they only have one mother ship. So they're building a couple of spaceships, but they still only have one mother ship. So if the mother ship goes down, they have no way to get up. And so they're just, the margins seem exceedingly thin. So this is an adventure story. It's about risk takers. It's about the people who go to the absolute limits of what's possible. And there's some stories in the book that are kind of white knuckle stories. Maybe you could describe one of them. There's one in particular where Mark Stuckey is up there and he's just struggling. It's like he's riding a Bronco in space, but just give our viewers a sense of just how hairy this is to be flying one of these things. Yeah. So, you know, curiously, the flight that Mark talks about is being the most terrifying and near perilous flight is actually not a rocket flight, but is a 2011 glide flight. And a glide flight is when, you know, so they don't use a wind tunnel. So the way that they test the vehicles propensity for flutter, which is kind of this arrow elastic phenomenon in which the wings vibrate as you're moving at high speeds is that they tow the vehicle up to the desired altitude. They drop it and then they let the spaceships sort of enter this very steep dive. And that's how they kind of test the vehicle. And so, September of 2011, they're doing this test flight and Mark, they come off the hooks and they go to enter this dive, but the spaceship sort of does a back flop. And suddenly they're upside down and they're spinning and they're in this inverted spin. And, you know, there are a couple of really famous inverted spins. There's the one in the right stuff when Chuck Yeager is sort of fighting to keep this thing from losing control and eventually has to jump out. It's the flight that where he gets all burned up in the end there towards the end there. Interestingly, the test pilot who flew Chuck Yeager's stunts in the right stuff later died when he got into an inverted spin while filming stunts for Top Gun. So, you know, an inverted spin test pilots talk about, you know, you practice entering them and exiting them, but like they're pretty hairy. So they're in this inverted spin. Now, the one thing that all of those, the one thing that other pilots have had is that when you're upside down and spinning, the way you get out is actually by applying power and being able to fly out of it. But now they're in a glide. There's no rocket motor on the back. So this is one of those moments that I thought was a really unique insight into Mark's psychology. So they're spinning and they go, Mark's going through all the checklist and nothing's working. And you know, his co-pilot at one point says, really nonchalantly, I've watched this video untold number of times and the co-pilot says, we are in a left spin. And you know, they're dropping and spinning and you're like, God, this guy sounds like he's just cool as a cucumber, sort of conveying down to mission control what's happening. And one of the unique aspects of Spaceship 2 is that it essentially folds in half. So when they were building it, they needed to figure out a way when they were coming down from space, how not to burn up on reentry. And the designer came up with this notion called the feather. And essentially the tail booms lift up, it turns into a shuttlecock and it sort of floats down. So Mark's upside down spinning and comes up with this idea that, well, we should feather. And the idea is that the feather would maybe bite the air and sort of straighten the ship out. And it did exactly that. And you know, and people in the community still talk about that as like, who would have thought of, who would have thought that doing that in those circumstances would have achieved the proper result? But you know, he was always kind of, he's always one step ahead mentally, psychologically, mentally. And so that's one of those hairy moments. But you're right, there are a few, both going up and coming down that, you know, get the hairs in the back of your neck standing up. Well, I should note that there's one moment in the book where the intrepid author goes up with Mark who takes his plan through some pretty scary maneuvers. And maybe you could describe that. And also I have to ask you, there is in this book the obvious pursuit, son's pursuit of the kind of intensity and adventures father experienced. So maybe talk about those two things, that incident and then the deeper thing that was going on. So that incident, so they have this little thing called an extra. It's a little acrobatic airplane that they take up and they enter all of these really aggressive maneuvers. And they do that to try and build up their G tolerance. You know, much the same way that people go to the gym or they go jogging, you know, it's a way of building up your body's ability to sort of survive heavy G loads. So Mark goes up and he's sort of, I can't remember exactly how we got to the configuration, but more or less kind of nose down and started spinning and tumbling. And doing some version of a Lom Shavak, which is a Czech acrobatic maneuver that it's an acrobatic maneuver that in Czech means, I can't remember whether it means nightmare or death or something, but it says to me later as we land. And you know, we're sort of spinning and the flight surgeon had said to me that her advice was when you are, you know, they talk a lot about sort of lifting, you know, activating your pelvic floor. And I remember the first time I was activating my pelvic floor, how do I do that? You know, she says, well, just imagine that you're, you've got to, you're squeezing a walnut down there and you're short and you're sort of holding that walnut between your butt. And I was like, all right, well, that's all right. I'll try and work on that. So we're coming down and we're spinning and tumbling. You know, I'm thinking, I hope I don't throw up all over. Cause really this would be, this would be a little bit embarrassing, not only that. You know, so I'm sort of focusing on the walnut here and we get down and I said, you know, what was that, Mark? Like, what, what was that maneuver? And he says, well, it's kind of a version of alarm shavak, but it's a variation that I saw on YouTube. And we're testing sort of, you know, we're testing YouTube things. This is where you go, that's not, that didn't seem like the wisest approach. But yeah, there's, you know, the question of kind of living at the edge of that envelope, I reckoned with this question of, of fatherhood a lot. And I reckoned with it because Mark's relationship with his son was distant. I come to this story to write about Mark because I think that he's lived this extraordinary life and has this extraordinary career. And, but his son doesn't talk to him. And I'm thinking like, you know, I'm trying to sort of make sense of, of living in the same way that I kind of lived in that shadow of my dad, right? Where like, I knew that my dad was doing extraordinary things, but my dad was not overly, and is not, you know, he's still alive, is not overly approachable. He never sort of gave me much of a window into his inner life. That's just not sort of who he was. And so thinking about that and thinking about like, what am I doing? You know, I'm much more accessible to my kids. I'm around, but am I setting the same high bar that my dad set and like, you know, just trying to figure out those kind of parental values was a thread that ran through the reporting of this project and then in the writing of it. And you know, I know that I sort of drawn certain values from my dad about pushing yourself into kind of uncomfortable positions, whether that's reporting or whether that's, you know, going, you know, I was 15, you know, my parents, like instead of high school graduation present, instead of letting me go to the beach for a week and kind of giving me money or buying me a new car, they sent me on a rock climbing trip to, you know, the middle of Wyoming to go scare the hell out of myself climbing the Wind River Range. And that, so that was their, yeah, that was their kind of parental approach. And so I just, I thought about that a lot about how do I bring that to bear with my kids? How do I inspire while also being present? And, you know, it's easier said than done. I want to remind our viewers that if you'd like to ask a question of your own to Nick, please go to the Q and A function that's at the bottom of your screen and type that in and it'll get to me. Nick, let me ask you one last question that takes us into the deep water in this book, which is part of why I think it's, it's a really wonderful achievement. You, at the beginning in a display quotation quote Herman Melville in Moby Dick saying, all men live enveloped in whale lines. And that phrase recursed through the book. Explain what that means to you. Yeah, there's a line in Moby Dick, all men live enveloped in whale lines. And the idea is that there are a few things. We are, that these whale lines on a whaling ship are oftentimes they're the coils of rope that tie us to the ship that when the harpoon snaps, they become suddenly those coils of rope become the most dangerous thing on the ship. Because if you're in the way when that thing snaps, you're going to get thrown overboard. It's going to, you know, it's going to, it's going to burn your skin. It's going to trip you and send you overboard. And for me, there was a second meaning to that. So, so it's kind of this notion that like, what we fear is often what is not worth fearing and what we overlook is sometimes the cause of our demise. But it's also this sense that we can't get away from who we are. And those relationships and those connections to kin and to ourselves are kind of illuminate who we are. And so that's, you know, a quote resonated and I kept coming back to it. And it just, it felt, it felt germane. It felt right. And obviously, you know, this quest of this quest for the great white whale was also something with Stucky's life where, you know, once it would be coming an astronaut fulfill all of his dreams. And that's, and that's, you know, ultimately that's the big question in the end. And I think that, I mean, if there's any spoiler, it's, I think, I think it's seeing the way that he, how he responds to that moment when he does become an astronaut, which I won't give them, I mean, that happened. But I think that the emotional space that he finds and the emotional solace that he finds is a really, I think a pretty interesting moment. We'll leave that for readers of the book. So we do have a couple of questions that have come in and I invite people to send more because we have about 15 minutes. Yes, the first question from an anonymous attendee, do you have a sense of whether there's similar experimentation and innovation that we're seeing the US private space industry outside the US? Or are other countries in the space race hampered by state monopoly on space exploration? It's a good question. I am not aware of, I'm not aware of others that have the same sort of thriving commercial space industries. I will say one thing that I think is relevant here, which is this really interesting wrinkle that has that has influenced the way that Richard Branson deals with his own company. So there's this law that prohibits foreigners from prohibits US citizens from divulging or discussing information related to dual use technologies, technologies that are designed for civilian purposes but that have military applications with foreigners. So legally, because a rocket ship is also a cruise missile, Richard Branson is prohibited legally from knowing specifics of the rocket design of the vehicle that he has been sponsoring, funding and kind of hung his legacy on. And so there was one point when I was with him and we were going into this, we were going to this test site and he was asking these questions to the rocket designers and the rocket designer looked at Richard and Richard sort of asked this question, the rocket designer looked at Richard, the engineer looked back at Richard and gave a little bit of a kind of a blank shrug and Richard said, it's because I'm British, isn't it? The idea was like, I'm the face of this company and you're telling me that you can't tell me, you can't answer my questions about it. So I thought that was a kind of this interesting wrinkle in the US legal code as well. So here's a wonderfully direct question. There was a research written. Do you have to be nuts to be a test pilot? Is that the right stuff? There has to be a supreme sense of, you have to be supremely self-confident. Now, whether those that are that self-confident are also a bit crazy, I think, the wiring is different. I mean, if you look at, and I've seen some, the bio readings after Mark Stuckey's first, after one of these rocket ship, after one of these rocket test flights, his heart rate is pretty steady throughout. And I, when I went and I went in the centrifuge with them one time, went and training the centrifuge. And when I get in there and the centrifuge starts spinning and the G start coming on, I mean, my heart rate is all over the place. I've got no control over my body essentially. And for Mark, it's just, it's natural. And so I think that there is a sense that a certain kind of temperament puts you into that world. And then the more you practice, I wrote about this a little bit in the Washington Post this weekend, like the more you not only are exposed to those kinds of risks, but the more you're also surrounded by people that also normalize those risks, your body, your body begins to respond, I think. And your mind begins to respond as well. And you're able to sort of absorb risky behavior and do things that seem inherently insane to most people with calm composure and so I think the answer to the question is probably, yes, you probably have to have a little bit to get into it, but there's also this rigor, there's the scientific rigor that the test pilots bring to their work that I thought was also pretty extraordinary. Here's a question from Andres Martinez who says, congrats on the book, obviously, as a pal of yours. Yes, what's your best guess as to where will be space exploration wise in 15 years? Paint a picture of what that's gonna look like. So with Elon Musk doing what he's doing at the pace that he's doing it, I don't think that it is at all inconceivable that people could be, that Elon Musk in 15 years could be offering sort of fairies around the moon and back. I think that seems, whether people are getting out and walking on the moon, I don't know about that, but like, I mean, Elon, I think it's hard to sometimes comprehend the pace of innovation and the learning, the sort of steepness of the advances, the significance of the advances that he's making these days, that it's really hard to kind of count anything out. I mean, I don't think that we will be, people will be moving to Mars in 15 years, but certainly space tourism, as far as what Elon is doing, as far as putting people into orbit and letting them go around, I think that seems very much kind of on the cards. And I'm gonna tag along with my own question about this future. Like you, I'm astonished by how quickly it's moving driven by the commercial side, by the radical decline in launch costs. And there's, from what I know, talking to my contacts, there's a lot more coming. I'm also struck by the rise of the Space Force as a new branch of the military. I did an interview for Washington Post on Friday with General Raymond, who was the new head of the Space Force. And it's fascinating to think about the future where space is a contested military domain. I mean, we don't look up in the heavens and we think, oh, we think tourism, gosh, would be cool to fly it, but it's a contested domain. Our adversaries have military systems in space designed to take out other satellites that's been declassified and there's discussion, but if anybody wants to pursue it. So I'm curious, Nick, after spending this time thinking about this, what your thoughts are coming from a marine aviation family about the military side of space? Yeah, so it isn't, the question of sort of who's leading the charge right now in the military or on the commercial side is I think intriguing. The day that I spent one day at SpaceX and hope would love to spend more, but I remember sitting in the lobby and watching SpaceX employees come in and badge themselves through the security gates and come in and then seeing a bunch of military officers in uniform coming in, not as guests, not waiting for an escort, but with their own badges, badging themselves in and going through. And I thought, okay, well, like you know that the military is working and interested in what SpaceX is doing, but there's clearly a lot of cooperation there, right? And I know that when Virgin Galactic at one point was ramping up towards the rocket powered, the window of kind of rocket, 2018, when they seemed to be kind of on their way. I mean, there was a great deal of optimism momentum in 2018, early 2019 that has trailed off in recent years. But at one point there was a former Air Force test pilot that was at the Pentagon briefing the Army Chief at that point, I mean, the Air Force Chief at that point on what Virgin Galactic could do with their point to point with their suborbital platform for JSOC teams. You know, you don't have to forward deploy those guys if you could put six or eight of them onto a spaceship two like vehicle and you know, you could leave damn neck, you know and you could be anywhere in the world in three hours do your mission and kind of, you know, get back. And so I think that though the possibilities are of great interest, but you know, in the past the military has always led the national security interests have always sort of driven scientific and sort of exploratory questions. And now on the commercial side, what I can't tell is the extent to which the commercial interests are actually driving kind of military priorities and capabilities and you know, what's within the realm of the possible or whether those are sort of happening in coordination you may have a better sense of that than I do. I'll just offer one observation from my reporting which is that the military is trying very hard to change its procurement practices. It's the ways of developing technology so that it can draw on this extraordinary dynamism in the private space business. I mean, they, and there's some just stunning examples that I'm going to be writing about but in terms of hypersonic vehicles, the hottest thing right now, Putin's bragging about as hypersonic rockets, guess where we're turning for super cheap ways to do this? Well, private company that's already thinking about how to do this. Well, there's this company in Mojave, Strata Launch, which is a, which they, well, they just flew their, they're the biggest airplane, I mean, they just, there was this airplane in Mojave, California that test flew two days ago, I think. I mean, this thing is like the Spruce Goose style massive and the idea is that you'd be able to put a hypersonic missile on there. And so, and that was, that, that vehicle was created and designed by the same people by the same boutique aviation firm scaled composite that initially created Spaceship One and Spaceship Two. So there are two questions here I'm going to combine because they're, they're both about the craft of writing and journalism. One is from an anonymous attendee. How do you balance reporting, your fact reporting with your personal narrative when you're writing a book like this? And then another question, Jake Dean asked, do you have any tips for long form reporting on embedded stories like this for early career journalists? I'd be interested in picking your brain on that too. What are some dos and don'ts for the embedded long form reporter? So let me tackle the first one, the question of sort of fact reporting versus personal. I mean, I think that you need to first, I mean, in this case, I never really thought about the personal side. I wrote the personal side through, but I didn't interview my dad until June or July of 2018 and I'd been working on the story at that point for four years because I wasn't sure where the personal stuff fit in. And I almost needed to write the strictly kind of third person journalism version of it first. And then think about, I mean, it was personal and I had thought a lot about how to incorporate those personal aspects, but until I knew what I wanted, until I had an idea in my mind of what I wanted to look like, I didn't, I wanted to then do the reporting, then talk to my dad, then interview my dad, then there's this episode that I wanted to ask him about. This kind of confirmed his legend as a fighter pilot, a mission that he flew at Ober Bosnia, in which he flew, interestingly sort of stuck, he always wanted to fly as high as he could and my dad always wanted to fly as low as he could. I mean, for my dad, having the right stuff was being able to fly an F-18, 300 feet off the ground, doing close air support. And that was what kind of distinguished, who had it and who didn't, was the ability of that aviator to feel comfortable at that low. So the question of kind of how do you, I think it's organic, I don't know that there's any great answer, I think, but like I said, I think that the personal stuff comes out in the process of writing the facts. The question of kind of do's and don'ts for trying to get into some sort of embedded, you know, into an embedded arrangement, I think it's probably very tough in the beginning because you have to establish yourself as a trustworthy, you know, interloper essentially. And you develop that reputation by being honest, be being straightforward with people by sort of having a journalistic code that you live by in which you, you know, I tell people like, look, I'm gonna come, I'm gonna do all this reporting, then I'm gonna come back to you and I'm gonna make sure that what I heard and what I saw, I'm gonna record it. And I'm also gonna come back to you and make sure that what I heard and what I saw, I'm not taking out of context. Then the New Yorker fact checkers, you know, which, you know, I had a New Yorker fact checker who worked on the magazine story who then took on the book for six months. He's gonna come back and he's gonna then re-report everything and make sure that I didn't sort of either mistranscribe something or take something out of context. And it's not an opportunity to let people change the story. It's an opportunity to let people feel that they're not going to regret. They may regret having said something in front of me. Virgin Galactic, the question earlier, you know, Virgin Galactic may regret having let me in at all. I don't think that they should, but I feel like that, having a process in which you can explain to someone how you perform your craft is very helpful to be able to articulate and to be able to put people's minds at ease as to whether it's worth the risk of letting someone they don't know in. But unfortunately, you know, you kind of need to get a bunch of, the more clips you can get under your belt, the more experience you can get, the more that you can then kind of parlay that into saying, you know, I have a code, I have a reputation, this is the way that I work. So I want to close Nick with a question of my own. It says slightly off the wall questions. What I actually asked General Raymond, but I've gotten interested recently in this subject and I'm asking people. So it's a notable fact that two of our former CI directors John Brennan and Jim Wolsey have said that based on what they know, they think it's entirely possible that there is intelligent life in the universe that may be seeking to communicate with us. And you can go on the internet and see some pretty interesting videos of footage that's been captured by fighter pilots. It's just pretty darn hard to explain. It's just not a good answer. So my question is, you spent all this time thinking about space, edge your eyes, looking upward. What's your own feeling about whether there's intelligent life in the universe and what's your feeling about how we, A should react if that's so and B will react? Well, will react, it depends whether that's a global response or a national response, right? I think that the question of intelligent life, there were a couple of engineers, Berber Tan who designed spaceship one and Luke Colby who was a propulsion engineer, both of whom, I write about it at some length in the book, both of whom are incredibly smart and scientific in their approach to problem solving and engineering. Both of whom confessed to having kind of a pet interest and fascination with UFOs. And I remember thinking it was kind of silly and seeing this as this weird quirk of their, kind of this weird kind of behavioral quirk. But the more, there's something, this is just back to the wisdom of the crowds, right? And just, I was saying earlier about kind of normalizing behavior, the more people that you, whose intelligence you respect that are talking about UFOs in a serious way, the more suddenly you feel like, wait a second, is the joke on me that I don't believe in them? And I kind of feel like we're in this weird moment right now like you said, where there are more and more people, yeah, with whom I respect that, tell me that they sort of are taking these quasi somewhat seriously. I would find it. So I would not be surprised, I try and sort of leave open some element of curiosity for the possibility, but I also, I find it really, it's just, it's hard for me to wrap my brain around what that would look like or sound like or smell like. But I'm, what does General Raymond say? What is your take on this? Yeah, you're also in this. So I'm just, at the point as a journalist of asking the question, General Raymond didn't really have a direct answer. I mean, my question basically was, are we gonna treat this as a military threat or not? And of course he didn't answer that. So this has been a really rich hour. I hope our viewers appreciate that this is a quite wonderful book. Read it, tell your friends about it. And I just wanna thank my friend next middle for asking me to talk with him about the test gods. So thanks everybody for watching. Thanks so much.