In his living room, Brian Binnie watched on television as the irrepressible Burt Rutan talked to CNN about the XPRIZE flight scheduled for the next morning, Monday, October 4. The Scaled team was not just going to hit a “home run,” Burt told the CNN interviewer. They were going to hit a “grand slam.” Brian couldn’t help but think, Ohmygod, isn’t the bar high enough already?
Brian paced the room, his emotions bouncing between fear and optimism. When the interview ended, Brian turned off the TV. He settled into the couch, where he was spending the night so his in-laws could have the master bedroom upstairs. His wife, Bub, had thought the arrangement would be best for him, allowing him to wake at 2:15 A.M., make his coffee, and be out the door early as needed.
But just as he started to doze off, he was jolted awake with some new worry. The family dog, an oversized golden retriever named Tanner, trying to claim his usual territory on the couch, wasn’t helping either. Instead of counting sheep, Brian tried going over the numbers of his flight. He’d been in the simulator almost nonstop since finding out at six P.M. Thursday, three days before, that he was the pilot for X2. There on the couch, he visualized the course. He was inside the cockpit. Dropped from the White Knight, he positioned SpaceShipOne’s nose at about sixty degrees. To avoid the spins that Mike had endured, Brian would fly at between eighty-one and eighty-seven degrees.
He dozed off again, numbers and images swirling in his head. Then he’d wake up, panicked he’d slept through his alarm, only to find his dog’s paw across his face. At some point, he got up and wrote down the goals of the flight:
Then he wrote, “1 & 2 are mandatory. 3 is more in the nice to have territory & 4 is all about me.”
Even in his half sleep, he was lucid enough to know he was in limbo, caught between reality and dreams, past and future. With the ticking of the clock, he was moving closer to clarity. The gift of this flight was in the possibility it presented. The cloud of sand that had enveloped him after his crash landing had dissipated quickly. The cloud of doubt remained.
His wife had been praying for him more than usual. A devout Catholic, Bub had jumped into action when she learned he was getting a second chance. She started a prayer chain that by now had stretched across the globe. She made sure the prayers being offered were the same, and that they were specific. “God likes specifics,” she said to her fellow Catholics. “Be specific in your prayer.” The prayer she sought for Brian was this: “Safe flight up. Safe flight down. Safe landing.”
Brian put his faith more in American ideals than in biblical commands, but he welcomed help from any corner. At some point in his fitful night, he even said his own prayer, promising God that he would be “forever grateful” for a successful flight start to finish.
When the alarm beeped at 2:15 A.M., it was almost a relief. Brian was already up. He wanted to be at Scaled by 3:00 A.M. Once outside his house, he inhaled the cool fresh air. The night was clear and silent. He gazed at the stars and spotted the Milky Way. The sky seemed to be beckoning.
On his fifteen-minute drive to Mojave, he turned on the AM radio and landed on a show called Midnight in the Desert: Late Night Paranormal. The show’s host, Art Bell, was talking about the “other dimension” that exists beyond the reach of most people. As Brian listened to this odd early morning show, his mind revisited an encounter he’d had a few days after his December 17 flight of SpaceShipOne. It was one of the strangest things that had ever happened to him. He had been awake in bed, waiting for his 5:45 A.M. alarm to sound, when suddenly the bedroom lit up like a television had blinked on. Only it wasn’t the TV. He got out of bed and went to the window, where slivers of bright light peeked through the curtains. His backyard was lit up like daylight, while the rest of the neighborhood was dark. There were bubblelike shapes—the size of beach balls and volleyballs—roaming, airborne, playful looking. After only a minute, this magical performance of translucent shapes faded back into darkness. He stood still for several minutes, not wanting to move or speak. He didn’t believe in the paranormal or in extraterrestrial beings, but he knew what he had seen. It was beyond understanding. For whatever reason, the moment gave him hope at the time and buoyed his spirits now. Turning in to the Mojave Air and Space Port, Brian looked again at the sparkly sky. What did the heavens know that he would soon find out?
—
Before five A.M. in nearby Palmdale, about 1,500 schoolchildren boarded buses from three different pickup sites to be driven to Mojave to watch SpaceShipOne, a junket that had been dreamed up by Stuart Witt, Peter, and the XPRIZE planning team. The once-in-a-lifetime field trip was funded and organized—permission slips, insurance, chaperones, and buses—by a local real estate developer, R. Gregg Anderson, who saw an opportunity to place kids in a moment of history that would inspire them for the rest of their lives. Anderson also wanted to see local youth introduced to the aerospace industry and to glimpse how the team at Scaled Composites had achieved a global audience. Witt had said to Peter in one of their early planning meetings, “You see pictures of Kitty Hawk and there are no children.” Peter thought the idea would create a “Lindbergh moment” for a new generation. Instead of Le Bourget, they would have Mojave.
Upon arrival at the spaceport, the kids were escorted to the flight line, where they watched, waited, and cheered at the sight of the White Knight. The mother ship approached and then did a hairpin turn in the direction of the mountains.
Near the runway, Peter took a moment to appreciate every detail: the crowds, reporters, celebrities, billionaires, kids, astronauts, NASA and FAA administrators, his family, the cloudless blue sky, and the strangely beautiful White Knight mated with the spaceship. He didn’t know what today’s flight would bring, but he was struck by how far they’d come. As his childhood friend Scott Scharfman had reminded him: he had launched a space prize without the prize money; he had wanted to do something privately that only governments had done; he had believed it was possible to make a spaceship that wasn’t thrown away after one use; and he believed that if he offered a prize, teams would come. One more flight was all that was needed. The other teams founded to capture the XPRIZE were continuing to build; the dream of space was not going away if the prize was won. The passion would persist. Rockets and hardware were being built in Romania, England, Argentina, Texas, and elsewhere. Richard Branson had secured a deal to develop SpaceShipTwo, using Rutan’s technology and feather design. Peter’s friend Elon Musk was taking on the aerospace establishment with his private rocket company, and former SEDS chapter head Jeff Bezos was beginning to apply his massive wealth to space. This was the inflection point, Peter believed, in which the downward spiral of manned spaceflight turned around.
Peter watched SpaceShipOne. He had three treasured books in the ballast box behind Brian’s seat: The Man Who Sold the Moon; The Spirit of St. Louis, given to him by Gregg Maryniak; and Atlas Shrugged, a gift from Todd Hawley. He and Todd had that favorite line: “All that lunacy is temporary. It can’t last. It’s demented, so it has to defeat itself. You and I will just have to work a little harder for a while, that’s all.”
—
After the preflight briefing, Burt reminded the crew, “This is the money flight.” He keeps adding on the pressure, Brian thought. A grand slam! The money flight! Brian got into his flight suit and headed to the hangar. He stepped on the scales holding a small bag that he planned to bring on board. He was five feet eleven and weighed 165 pounds, having lost weight through all of his running and stress. He had two American flags that he wanted to fly to space—one a heavy-duty cloth flag and the other polyester—and an assortment of things handed to him at the last minute by colleagues. The official ballast boxes were already full and included ten thousand pennies added by Dave Moore to make weight and have as space souvenirs. Brian’s weight allocation was 200 pounds, and he was slightly over. He reluctantly opted to bring the lighter polyester flag and, taking a cue from Charles Lindbergh, tore unnecessary pages out of a hefty flight checklist. He was in trouble if he didn’t know the flight checklist by now. He wore multiple pairs of socks to protect his feet from the minus-seventy-degree air on the other side of the rocket. Only three layers of carbon fiber separated his toes from the outside world. He wasn’t going to pare back on his socks. Finally, when he’d made weight, Brian began the walk to the plane.
On the way, he was intercepted every few feet by a procession of well-wishers. Brian finally gave up trying to stay in his game-day zone, and now understood one reason for sequestering astronauts before a flight. Test pilot Chuck Coleman, who had survived more crashes than anyone could remember, and who would pilot the chase plane today that would guide Brian toward his landing, said, “Meet you at fifteen thousand feet.” Robert Scherer, who owned the Starship chase plane, said solemnly to Brian, “The world is with you. The heavens are with you.” Jeff Johnson, who knew of Brian’s determination and efforts to get back into the cockpit, embraced him. Brian saw Erik Lindbergh and Peter Diamandis, who told him that he was “the day’s Charles Lindbergh,” the one who was going to make history.
Heading his way next was his mother-in-law, Maria Anderson, looking well rested and holding a cup of McDonald’s coffee. The woman had never been shy, and was not easily thwarted. Brian eyed the coffee and his mother-in-law with equal wariness. Before he could say anything, she threw her arms around him in an expression of good-luck and do-right-by-my-daughter. What came next happened in a rush: the tight mother-in-law hug, the hot liquid flowing on his neck and down his back. Hot, he thought, just as advertised. The contents of the sixteen-ounce cup soaked his white T-shirt under his flight suit. After the shock and awe, as he called it, he somehow found humor in the moment, pointing out that she had generously saved about four ounces of the sweet-smelling vanilla-flavored stuff for herself. Aerodynamicist Jim Tighe assessed the situation in terms of weight added by the coffee and its possible impact on the altitude reached. He informed Brian that he was “wearing about four hundred feet of apogee,” close to the margin that Mike had made it to space on his June 21 flight.
Brian continued his march toward the plane. Bub was now at his side, wearing a shirt that she had made with the pattern of the American flag. She kissed him, removed her wedding ring, and tucked it into his pocket, saying, “Think of me being with you up there.” She had her crystal blue rosary with her and would feel the beads as Brian flew. Her prayer group was similarly armed and ready.
Soon, Sally Melvill approached. She offered Brian their lucky horseshoe, which he gladly accepted. Then there was Mike, mentor and friend. Brian knew Mike had gone to bat for him to get this flight, but he didn’t know that Shane had told Mike this morning, “We’ll soon know whether this was a good decision or not.” But Mike was confident and told Brian, “You can do this. I know you can do this.” That was exactly what he had said when they were out in the Long-EZ. Mike added, “We’re going to have a great day.” For this flight, Mike was the bus driver, piloting the White Knight.
Finally, there appeared Burt—boss, friend, golfing buddy. He looked excited rather than nervous, leaned into the cockpit, and delivered his advice—in golfing terms—for how Brian should fly: “Take out the driver, swing smooth, and go long.” Seconds later, the door closed and Brian was alone, back in the cockpit that held his dreams and fears. Instead of experiencing some profound moment of illumination, Brian was overcome by something else—the smell of French vanilla coffee.
—
At 6:49 A.M. local time, the White Knight reached 130 miles per hour and lifted off runway 30. Brian had an hour-long ride underneath the White Knight as it flew its approved pattern and climbed to altitude. Brian hadn’t known how he’d feel being back in the hot seat, waiting for his moment to fly. But he was ready. And he was calm.
Exactly one hour later, at 7:49 A.M., the White Knight was at 47,100 feet. Brian pushed the control stick forward to prepare for the release.
Mike called the release: “Three-two-one—release,” and Stinemetze pulled the lever to drop SpaceShipOne.
“Released, armed, fire,” Brian said.
“Holy crap, that was close!” Stinemetze said of the spaceship’s quick turn upward. Brian had charged out of the gate.
A handful of seconds later, Shane in Mission Control said, “Rates look good and low. Doing okay?”
“Doing all right,” Brian said. This time, he knew the bull he was riding. He expected to be shaken, tugged, and beat up. He waited for the noises that sounded like the start of World War III. His breathing was steady. He had this.
“Little lateral oscillations,” Brian said.
Shane said, “Copy. Thirty seconds. A little nose-up trim. Forty. Trajectory perfect.”
Mike added, “Brian looks great.”
On the Mojave floor, crowds held cameras to the sky. They had seen the separation, where the White Knight veered to the left and the rocket shot straight up, leaving a thick white vertical contrail. The wind was calm, the visibility perfect. Stuart Witt was back providing commentary, as was Gregg Maryniak. Today, the cheers were, “Go Brian!”
It was time for the motor’s transition from liquid to gas, when the nitrous oxide begins to run low in the oxidizer tank. Brian focused on exiting the atmosphere without any rolls.*
“Three-fifty, recommend shutdown,” Shane said. The altitude predictor showed that Brian would end up at 350,000 feet if the motor was shut down now. This already put him safely past the Karman line.
Brian wanted more. He was going to squeeze every molecule of energy from the motor. He started a slow-motion response, hoping to see 370,000 feet on the predictor.
At eighty-four seconds, the engine finally shut down. Mike had flown the engine to seventy-seven seconds on X1 and seventy-six seconds on June 21.
Shane formalized it: “Engine shut down.”
“Feather up,” Brian said. “Feather green.” Then, looking out at the black sky, he said, “Wow. I’m upside down.” He was in space. And he’d gotten there without a hint of a roll.
During his journey past the Karman line, Brian had felt strangely guided, and not by Mission Control. The feeling was as clear as this morning’s sky. Now, away from the pull of gravity, he gazed at the pale blue curvature of Earth against a black dome.
“Feel good?” Shane asked.
“I’m feeling great,” Brian said. “Wow, it’s quiet up here.”
“Copy that.”
“Better get the camera out.”
“Roger that.”
Brian took pictures and then released a paper model of SpaceShipOne that someone had given him before the flight. The paper spaceship effortlessly took its own gravity-free flight around the cockpit.
Then Brian heard Burt’s voice: “X-15 record.”
In Mission Control, Burt pumped both fists in the air. Paul Allen patted Burt on the back. Brian was more than 10,000 feet above the highest altitude ever reached by the X-15, which was 354,200 feet in 1963. This was the boss’s grand slam.
Burt was studying the numbers. The engine had shut down at 213,000 feet, going Mach 3.09, and SpaceShipOne had continued like a ball tossed in the air on its own momentum. But the amount of that momentum was a surprise. The spaceship kept going upward until it reached 367,550 feet.
“Outstanding,” Brian said.
Having reached its top altitude, SpaceShipOne began its quick descent. Brian could still smell the vanilla-flavored coffee.
“Here come the gs,” Shane said.
“Five gs,” Brian called.
Burt took notes on a legal pad and alternated between looking at Shane and studying the screen.
“Peak gs are done, coming through seventy-five thousand feet,” Shane said to applause in Mission Control.
“Feels a little loosey-goosey now,” Brian said of the spaceship.
“Copy,” Shane said. “Get the roll trim back to neutral as you defeather.”
At around 63,000 feet, Brian retracted the feather. Mission Control watched anxiously as the tail booms went from their upward bend of sixty-three degrees slowly back down to locked position.*
“Feather lock,” Brian said to more cheers in Mission Control. Burt’s ingenious design, taking inspiration from the dethermalizing model planes of his youth, had performed flawlessly. The moment was not lost on Burt, who wiped tears from the corner of his eyes. After all, Burt knew that his entire space travel program would succeed or fail based on how the feather worked. Many experts had told him that the feather was unworkable, that it was sheer lunacy. But once again, as he had done all his life, Burt found breakthroughs where others saw nonsense.
With only the landing remaining, Burt and Paul Allen headed out onto the tarmac to join Richard Branson, Peter, Erik Lindbergh, and the pilots’ families. At one point, Burt, Paul, and Richard could all be seen pointing up at the sky with their left hands.
Nearby, Bub was working her prayer beads, believing all of the prayers were guiding Brian home. Their kids held up signs: “GO DAD!”
The wind socks on the runway were hanging calm. Mojave was green for landing.
Brian extended the landing gear for the moment of truth. Would he stumble again at the finish line? In his heart and soul, and after his breathtaking experience in space, Brian knew the answer: He was going to make that perfect stop. He was going to let his confidence take over—and vanquish his doubts once and for all.
Brian focused, not like a quarterback who needs to throw a Hail Mary pass, but like a painter poised to make the perfect last stroke. He heard the call: “Looking good, right down the middle.”
SpaceShipOne was gliding in, the motor now spent. There was no wind, no buffeting. Brian didn’t see the cheering crowds or satellite trucks or emergency response vehicles. He saw only a centerline. The little spaceship, its nose clouded with stars, was close to touching down.
From the chase plane, Coleman made the calls: “Two hundred mph, one hundred, looking good.”
Brian thought about all those practice landings in the Long-EZ, about all the training runs, about all the work in the sim. Brian kept it coming, leveled off, the small shadow of his ship sweeping the runway below. There was no aircraft carrier, no arresting wire. This was his canvas.
Three-two-one-down. Softly, on the centerline. It was perfect.
“Congratulations, Brian!” Shane said. The Oracle was showing some emotion.
In the mother ship, Mike couldn’t help himself, offering another “Yeehaw!”—this one for Brian. Then, with his voice choking, Mike added, “Proud of you, man.”
Brian responded to his mentor, “Thank you, Mike.”
—
Out on the runway, Burt reached Brian and congratulated him. “How ’bout them apples! You got the X-15! This is so cool.”
Sally and Bub jumped into a truck on the flight line—the wife of a test pilot knows to have keys to a response car—and headed straight for Brian. When their truck got close, Bub jumped out and ran the rest of the way. She climbed into the cockpit and said, “You did it!” over and over. Brian held her close and blinked back tears. He didn’t trust himself to speak yet. Elton John’s song “Rocket Man” blasted across the spaceport: I’m a rocket man/Rocket man; Burnin’ out his fuse up here alone. He’d nailed it. He’d earned his astronaut wings.
As the crowd continued to cheer, the schoolchildren were shepherded to their buses. They still had a day of classes ahead. When a reporter for the local Antelope Valley Press stopped and asked a group of middle schoolers whether they wanted to be astronauts, all hands shot up—no hesitation.
There was singing, dancing, and the spraying of champagne. Several of the XPRIZE contenders were there, including Pablo de León, standing next to Loretta Hidalgo and George Whitesides.* “This is the beginning of a new era,” de León said, tears in his eyes. “There is a before day and an after day. Things will never be the same after today. This is the end of the government’s monopoly over manned launch.” The celebration moved to an area in front of Scaled. Peter stood on a makeshift platform with Burt, Paul Allen, and Richard Branson. Erik Lindbergh and the Ansaris were close by. Peter’s voice carried to the end of the long runway and back:
“For forty years, we have watched as spaceships have flown,” Peter said. “Crowds of people had to be moved five miles away while those few astronauts got on board and ignited those engines. Today, SpaceShipOne has landed, and stands not five miles away but five feet away.”
Peter continued, “We are at the birth of a new era—the personal spaceflight revolution. It is our pleasure to announce today in Mojave, California, that SpaceShipOne has made two flights to one hundred kilometers and has won the Ansari XPRIZE.”
When Peter returned to the crowd, he stood with his family and Kristen. His parents might not understand orbital versus suborbital, and they couldn’t begin to know all of the planning, heartache, and passion that went into making the XPRIZE happen. But in their own way, Tula and Harry were the ones who could understand best just what this meant to him, to the boy who had raced around with the energy of a rocket and could not be contained. The boy who sat them down for lectures on space and kept note cards on every episode of Star Trek. The teenager who stashed explosives in the house and made experimental rockets that often turned into missiles. The college student who started student space clubs and a space university. The grad student who finished medical school to please them, but always had his own dreams, including one that came true today.
Tula allowed, jokingly, that she should probably stop asking Peter when he was going to practice medicine. Harry told Peter that he had brought great pride to the family name. To Peter, this day was a beginning. As he listened to Burt, he kept thinking one thing: We lit the fuse of a new Space Age.
Burt addressed the crowd and said, “If you look at the twelve months after Yuri Gagarin was flown to space by the Russians in 1961, that first year, there were five manned spaceflights. Now, this year—forty-three years later—how many spaceflights are there? There are five. We did three of them with our little program, and the Russians did two. Our little team was able to show American exceptionalism.”*
Brian, standing next to Burt, was up next. He spoke forcefully: “I wake up every morning and thank God I live in a country where all of this is possible. Where you have the Yankee ingenuity to roll up your sleeves, get a band of people who believe in something, and go for it and make it happen.” Just hours earlier, Brian’s fate was uncertain. Now he was the 434th human to go to space.
—
Later that day, after most of the crowd had pulled out of Mojave, Peter, Paul Allen, Burt, Mike, and Brian and the Scaled team gathered in a conference room. They had a call coming in, from President George W. Bush. The president, aboard Air Force One, noted that his plane was not nearly as cool as SpaceShipOne, and not nearly “as exciting as Mike’s and Brian’s flights.”
Mike and Brian were side by side—Mike the world’s 433rd astronaut—across from Burt and Peter. The rest of the crew huddled close. After some pleasantries about the program, President Bush said, “The sky of Mojave is very big. And you’ve got very big dreams there.” He added, “Thank you for dreaming the big dream.”
That night, Stinemetze, Losey, and the others lingered over beers. There was a quiet and calm they hadn’t felt in years.
“People talk about the magic of the early days of the Apollo program,” Stinemetze said. “That’s what it feels like happened here. All the right people just showed up to play a part. Every person was key to the success. We had magic.”
Not far away, as SpaceShipOne was being put away for the night, Burt had told the team, “You put your hearts and your talents into this. This is not an end. It’s just a very good beginning.”
In a month, Burt, Paul Allen, and the team at Scaled would head to St. Louis for the awarding of the $10 million check. Then SpaceShipOne would take to the skies one more time, under the mother ship’s wings, toward its final destination.