Virgin Galactic's Rocket Man

August 13, 2018

Virgin Galactic's Rocket Man

(This article was originally published in the August 20th 2018 issue of The New Yorker Magazine)

By Nicholas Schmidle

At 5 a.m. on April 5th, Mark Stucky drove to an airstrip in Mojave, California, and gazed at SpaceShipTwo, a sixty-foot-long craft that is owned by Virgin Galactic, a part of the Virgin Group. Painted white and bathed in floodlight, it resembled a sleek fighter plane, but its mission was to ferry thousands of tourists to and from space.

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