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A
This week on Books the Battles, we're bringing you a special preview of the SAS Space Power Discussions. Now, if you're a regular listener to this podcast, you'll remember that our students were recording their own podcast for our Space Power course. All those will be coming soon over on their own channel. This week, we're bringing you One of the 12 new podcast episodes produced by them this year. If you'd like to check out more, you can search for Space Power discussions on your favorite podcast cast platform. And you can catch last year's season one while we anticipate this year's season two. We hope you enjoy.
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B
Hello and welcome to our episode of the SAS space power discussions. My name is Lieutenant Colonel James McKinney, United States Air Force.
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C
And I am Jonathan Copenhagen, also United States Air Force.
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D
And My name is Lt. Col. Dan Musleve, United States Air Force. To begin, all opinions expressed here are our own and not necessarily representative of the Department of Defense, the Air Force, or any other affiliated organizations.
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B
This episode is one in a series of discussions that we and our classmates are recording about space power and space strategy as part of our Spring 2026 space power course at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.
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C
So for today, we're going to be talking about the book Test Gods by Nicholas Schmidtle. That's a story of Virgin Galactic in the making of a modern astronaut. Or so the book says.
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B
Yes. Thanks, Gopen. So I'll start with a quick summary of the book, get you caught up on who Nick Schmiddle is and what he's writing about. But first of all, Nick Schmiddle is a journalist. He comes from the New Yorker. He's got a long history there doing international reporting, but he transitioned into focusing on Virgin, kind of a new area for him. And he joins the Virgin Galactic family in the wake of we'll talk about a 2014 crash. And he chronicles the rebuilding of the organization as it comes back from that new flights in 2017 and 2018. However, the story in Tesco goes back even further than the time he spends with the organization. He goes all the way back to 2004 with SpaceShipOne and the X Prize, which was a private sum of money, $10 million offered to the first crew, private space crew who could get a developed new spaceship into suborbital space to kind of prove that commercial space is viable and that you can do it outside of being sponsored by the government. Following that, Spaceship 1 scale composites is the company that is hired to do that by Paul Allen that gets bought, essentially or hired by Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic. And they years just past that, hoping to build that product out into a more viable commercial solution. There are issues along the way, testament to the risk and hazards of space travel and developing a new capability. In 2007, they have an explosion of a test rocket motor that ends up killing three employees. In 2011, the main author or subject of the book, I should say Copeland, will talk about as a harrowing issue in the spacecraft causes him to nearly die. And then finally in 2014, somebody actually does perish through to a mistake during one of the test flights. So it is a hazardous venture, but they do make progress and that's what Schmidtl likes to talk about. But in order to kind of get all of this together and make it comprehensive and cohesive, he focuses on one of the test pilots in particular, and that's my pilot with the last name of Stuckey, Mark Stuckey and Copeland. Why don't you tell us a little about him and how he gets involved.
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C
Yeah, so that was a great overview. The way this book kind of flows out so schmiddle like he talked about it being a reporter, like he, he went very journalistic with this and he took a very person centric approach to this. And Mark Stuckey, a test pilot, comes from a Marine Corps fighter pilot background, followed by test pilot and once he gets out of the service starts doing down these commercial ventures. So Mark Stuckey is the name of the guy. And most of this book focuses on. It's like a semi biographical account of Mark Stuckey as he goes through this. But how that fits in with the broader picture of what Virgin Galactic is doing. I mean you hit a lot of the big picture stuff that the, the book actually covers. And so it's a history of this commercial space flight industry specific to Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson's efforts here. And like you said, it goes through the origins, like the development periods, the, the failures and a lot of like personal stuff that Mark Stuckey has throughout the book, which for our purposes of like strategic analysis are kind of neither here nor there for what we're looking for. But they, they do make it a really entertaining and like easy read to go about. And ultimately it culminates in some successful suborbital test flights of the spacecraft to, for Virgin Galactic, which they carry forward even beyond the end of the book here. It was an entertaining read for sure.
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D
And I'll zoom out just to add on to what, what Copen was saying. I think Test Gods, the core arc is about ambition Delay the tragedy that James mentioned, persistence and impartial triumph, like Copen mentioned. And Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004 with the primary goal of flying paying customers by the end of the decade. And 17 years later, that dream is still only on the verge of reality, as Richard Branson in the book mentions, through repeated delays in a catastrophic crash. So just to give like a one line overview, it's really a book about the conversion of aspiration into capability. And the commercial space rhetoric is simultaneously about vision and disruption. And what Virgin has to confront is when vision and disruption confront engineering realities, institutional weakness and mortality in the case of the crash.
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C
I'll add on too to that, that there's a huge part of this that talks about the risk. So the vision and the disruption. And there's a tension that kind of comes up throughout the book as well about the risk analysis that whether it's between test pilots or engineers, that's really where a lot of the tension comes in. Because of this very commercial focus. Engineers tending to be more risk averse, the test pilots realizing they need to kind of push things forward to keep things moving. And that tension comes to play at a couple different instances. We'll share some of the stories a little bit as we go, but I think that plays a lot into what the ARC has as well.
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B
All right, thanks again for those, for the extra input there, Dan. So what are some of the major strengths of the book? What can we start to look to this book to help answer as far as key questions with commercial space?
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C
Yeah, so I've touched on it a little bit, at least for what I thought. Like, it's a very entertaining and accessible read. I feel like you don't need to be a strategist to read this thing. If you're interested in space, you're interested in kind of like the engineering, the development, if even just people interested in kind of the, the test flight aspect of things. I mean, it's, it's called Test Gods. Right. So it's a lot about that test program. So it's, it's entertaining and it's accessible. And what I thought was good for the ARC of what we've been studying, our space power course here, has been that Virgin Galactic is a company that hasn't been covered a lot. I mean, it's obviously in the space domain and it's obviously relevant in this environment, especially during the time period here. But a lot of our readings focused on the rocket companies, you know, not the suborbital flight type aspects and especially not the Commercial aspects that Virgin Galactic goes after here. Commercial in the same way, I should say commercial for the sake of putting people up there for space tourism, which is Virgin Galactic's focus. So takes a little bit of the spotlight off of the Blue Origins and a little bit of the spotlight off the SpaceX and the rocket Labs and a lot of those other companies, and gives a totally different perspective with a totally different focus to what we're trying to go read about here. And that highlights the different approach that Virgin Galactic took. Richard Branson at the beginning of the book talks about his motivations for this. And it kind of goes back to the history of like what he observed in space flight in the 20th century and what the spaceships did for him. And that overview effect that people who have gone to space came back and talked about being this life changing moment. And so he has this kind of humanistic desire to make that accessible to people that we can debate whether that actually is like democratizing space if it's available only to billionaires. But maybe a different question, but then the commercial viability of this company too. And feel free to chime in whenever you want, but the commercial viability is something that they took a totally different approach than what the rocket companies did as well. Do you guys see anything different?
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B
Yeah, I actually, I appreciated the. Yes, Virgin Galactic, while it kind of gets in the headlines every so often when Richard Branson maybe does something crazy or does another publicity stunt, but is pursuing something different, which I was not as aware of as you are for SpaceX and Blue Origin, but kind of in a different take. I saw some similarities actually between the challenges that Virgin Galactic faced in designing their spacecraft, as SpaceX has. And one of those dichotomies was automation versus human control. So we've seen with SpaceX in particular in the Dragon capsule, the desire to use technology in a way that makes it much more predictable in a domain that maybe is somewhat austere and difficult to operate in. But here the space plane concept was heavily focused on the individual flying the spacecraft. And that was Scale Compilot's kind of philosophy. And a lot of the switches and design of the spacecraft was reliant on the skill of the operator and took, you know, more of a focus on that over automation, which I thought was just highlighting that how different companies may choose a different approach to that key question. And then the other thing that I think the book highlighted really well that we've seen with Musk and Bezos over the decades as well, is the tension of pr, public relations Promises against engineering realities. You mentioned a little bit about that, but in this case it's Richard Branson and his side man, Steve Attenborough that are always pushing the claims forward. We're going to be in space in six months, space in a year. And that's always intention, of course, with the engineering team that's trying to pull them back to reality. And regardless of the claims you make, Musk will make if we're going to be Mars or Bezels are going to go back to the moon, there's always that desire of the visionary leader to push forward, but there's, but not always in line with what they're capable of doing. So I thought that was a good highlighted portion of the book.
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D
Yeah, and I'll, I'll kind of expand on that last part that you mentioned there, James, a little bit. I think one of the biggest strengths of the book and one of my, one of the things that I really liked about it was that it, it strips away the, the PR version of commercial space where Branson is absolutely the, the front man and he's the marketing guy and he, he has this grand vision and it's attractive, especially in the commercial space sector. But you get that and you see the branding and the billionaire optimism that Branson brings. But it also gives you the checklists, the engineering challenges, the bad weather, the missed deadlines, tons of missed deadlines, cockpit technique. I thought that was a really interesting piece, Mark Stuckey and just the almost no margin of error to operate and make these missions successful and then the, just the constant looming possibility that something can go wrong. I think looking at kind of the, the sas, our, our readings, we saw a lot of that with when the Heavens Went on Sale. This was Test Gods was the kind of the Virgin Galactic story which was different. And then you've got rocket dreams with SpaceX and, and blue Origin. And it, I think it gives us kind of the darker side of what from what you see on the website in the, in the PR and ultimately that, that dark side middle access to Virgin Galactic where you had insider access towards the end there, Virgin wanted to shape the narrative and I think he did a good job of reporting all facets of, of Virgin Galactic space efforts.
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C
Yeah, I mean you bring up a good point too, like the difference in approaches here in the way that Virgin did things. And SpaceX in particular is coming in mind with the example you mentioned the idea that they wanted to use the stick. They took the pilot centric way of doing this and they mentioned here how even stuckey the test pilot, like, had to adapt his way of flying to the realities of this. He had to put hands on the side of the stick because he couldn't fully grip the stick because it just wasn't working that way. He had to develop new ways. The other companies, they focused on a different way of tackling that problem. Like SpaceX for their docking vehicles, used touchscreens, which was hugely pushed back upon by the NASA astronauts that were flying with them. And so, like, it's just a different way of approaching the engineering problem and a different risk tolerance and different way of thinking that I thought was really interesting to contrast between some of those
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B
other ones building off that risk tolerance. I thought this gave an example of overcoming setbacks in a way that maybe you didn't see with the other companies that we read about in that a lot of times people are so afraid of failure that like a rocket explodes or something, you know, happens that isn't what you plan for. It could be catastrophic. A company could lose its investors. It could be. The dream could be off because of that. But for this, there's actually been a human cost in development of the spacecraft. And it's interesting to see that even perished in the pursuit of space flight excellence, so to speak, that the interest is there to keep going. The customers are still there. The Richard Branson is still involved. And so it shows that actually there might be more of a motivating factor behind this than we expect.
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C
Yeah, there were still some things, like, we enjoyed these aspects of the book. Right. But there were some things that I think from the academic perspective that it's worth, like, stepping back and say, like, what can we take from this? Because it was journalism focused, it was focused on one person. And so there were some weaknesses to the book as well.
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D
Yeah. And I'll hit on some of those. SAS students love to critique and discuss weaknesses. So there's no, there's no shortage of talking points from these three podcasters. I think there, there's two frames to look at the book.
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B
There's.
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D
This is a book that I read as a person, not necessarily with my sass hat on. And it, it was a really entertaining book from that perspective. However, when, when we're analyzing it and looking at. At it from a strategic perspective, I, I would say it was. The weaknesses were a little bit more glaring. And my, I think my biggest critique is that the book never fully commits to whether it's about Stuckey Branson or Virgin Galactic as an institution or the author. And it, yeah. Nicholas Schmidtle kind of gets into his, I guess, fraught relationship with his father and uses Mark Stuckey as kind of an entry point into understanding his father. And it, it dips in between all of those somewhat randomly if it seems so. At times it's a biography of a test pilot, Mark Stuckey. At other times it's a study of founder mythology and what drives Richard Branson. It's sometimes a study of a company under strain. And as, as it's flowing between those narratives and viewpoints, it makes the, it makes the narrative center feel a little bit unstable. And Branson's clearly central to the Virgin story and the book is, is shown through that lens, the over optimistic evangelist for commercial space. But because it's so anchored and Stucky Virgin, the Virgin story and the Branson story can sometimes feel like a background force in Schmidt doesn't fully interrogate that. And it's, it's a bit odd because of so much of the company's signaling and public credibility flow through Branson and the marketing of commercial space through Virgin Galactic.
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C
And so to me, like you said, it was entertaining. Like as a person I really enjoyed reading it. But my problem was that like if, if I'm looking at it in terms of like how can I apply this to future policy or thinking of long term strategy, like it lacks a bit of kind of the academic rigor that would make me make me really dive into the Virgin Galactic model because it is very person focused, whether it is on the author himself or Stucky or whoever the cast of character is you want to dive into. So it doesn't have kind of that academic rigor that would really lead to deep strategic thinking.
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D
Yeah. And just to add on to that last point, Copenhagen, I don't discredit the author for writing the book that he didn't intend to write. I will say Vance in When the Heavens Went on Sale and Davenport and Rocket Dreams do more of talking about the commercial ecosystem, the full spectrum between politics, commercial economics, investor logic and the broader industrial space race. I think Schmittle's advantage is you get a really good view of the, the life of testing and the culture of risk, but you don't get the full strategic map of space. And like, like I said, it's, it's not necessarily a flaw of the book, but it is a limitation. This, this book is more narrow than some of the other pieces that we've read.
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C
Yeah, basically I can see why we didn't read it as a class book, but I do think it was a good book to read. Maybe That's a good way to, to sum it up that.
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B
Yeah, but, but you said this is sitting inside of a collection of other books that we've had to read for the course. And because of that we can start to kind of mind map our way into how does this build on or support other things that we've explored, explore, explored within space power. And the biggest connection that we can start off with out of many is space tourism as a concept. Because, say, for example, you brought up before Dan, when the Heavens go on Sale. It talks a lot about other rocket companies in this commercial space sector, but they are focused on space launch. They are focused on constellations of satellites in leo. And what we see with Virgin Galactic is now a complete focus almost on space tourism passengers into suborbital flight and paying customers to do that through the thrill to experience the overview effect, but basically just individuals not having a good time. And so what you can see is the challenges of that sector of commercial space. Through this book. And just to bring it up a little bit to today, we see that the tourism portion of space is struggling a little bit. Obviously Virgin Galactic has gone beyond 2021, where the book ends, done more flights, it's rebuilding a new spacecraft. We'll talk about that a little bit later to increase the economics. But it's on pause right now. It's not flying customers. Still. Even Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos this year said he's going to pause space based tourism to focus on the moon. And so tourism seems to be a second class focus among commercial space. So it's good to notice that alongside the more optimistic tales of SpaceX and Blue Origin as it goes forward, another thing we've connected to in the same book is founder leadership style. So we know that Branson is such a heavy handed figure here. Same thing with Bezos and Musk. But one of the questions that I've hassled with reading this book is how much expertise in your field you need to be successful. So Peter Beck, Rocket Lab, very technically motivated. Even Will Marshall, Planet, also very technically motivated. Chris Kemp, we read about him. Astra, maybe not as technically motivated, seems to be struggling more than his competitors. Branson, he's very much a branding experience guy. He's a vision. He wants to go for it, but he's not going to be doing the building of a spaceship. He's not going to be doing the technical driving of these people. He may not be able to know if they're behind schedule or what the real roadblocks are. And so this does serve as a bit of a Casey, I think for how well plugged in your CEO or your founder should be to what you're actually building and how far removed they can be from that generating hype or getting investment. So yeah, and I'll, I'll just add
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D
on to, I think you bring up some good points with the commercialization of space and specifically space tourism. One thing that, that I took from the book is when you're talking about an emerging domain like space, which it very much is, the, the players in that space, they have to do what Branson did. They need the hype to get capital, to get attention, to get momentum. But Test Gods really gives us insight into the downside of when Branson in his narrative gets too far ahead of capability. So what Branson says is there's a huge delta between what the engineers are, what they know, what they're planning for and just as a, as kind of a fun analysis, I pulled some of what I think were, I'll call them broken promises, but things that Branson said or committed to and then what actually happened. So all the way back before Virgin Galactic, Branson, he had a Virgin Hotel prediction and he said in five years that'd be 2004. He wanted reusable rockets to go to space to stay at a Virgin Hotel. The reality that never happened. Coming forward a little bit, he said he made a 3,000 astronauts promises and said by 2009 Virgin will have created over 3,000 new astronauts from many countries. Reality as a publishing There were only 12 space flights and a few dozen astronauts, which is far short of the 3000. Another one, there was a rollout claim in 2009. At a desert party in 2009, they were celebrating the completion of Spaceship 2 and Branson was telling reporters that SpaceShipTwo would be flying to space in a little over a year. And the again the engineers had no idea where he, where he got these dates. And the reality was that Spaceship 2 didn't successfully cross the 50 mile altitude until December of 2018. So he was eight years late on that. And then just to kind of cap it all off, Branson was quoted in the book as saying it would be embarrassing if someone went back over the last 13 years and wrote down all my quotes about when I thought we would be in space. So I think there's, there's utility in making these promises and you, you obviously have to be optimistic and, and a dreamer and visionary, but there's a downside to that as well.
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B
So yeah, I think Dan, it's A good point because that starts to show who's holding all the risk in that scenario. Now it's moving. Private investors may be putting a lot of money that may be slightly different risk sharing than we've seen before. Copenhagen and I got some thoughts on how this is varies from the government versus the private risk sharing we've seen with other endeavors.
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C
Yeah. If you look back in kind of the history that, that we read about, especially thinking back to like call it the Strategic Defense Initiative, like Reagan era type space funding, like all of those big developments and the controversies that came along with them, like they were government driven, government funded, the government was accepting the risk which is a different model than what we have today. Right. And I think part of what you're getting at there, Dan too of like them saying something and then not delivering on it. Like these are, they're just different ways of looking at risk. Right. He's looking at like commercial risk. Right. And what can he do with commercial risk which is different from government risk? And I think there's an interesting transfer from the government to the commercial side as like the environment has evolved. And to Dan, to your point too, I mean the other space providers are not averse to these risks either. Right. SpaceX is known to make big promises and fail fast. Musk makes huge promises and then oftentimes never delivers. But I think a big difference between what we see with Virgin Galactic and what we see with the other space companies that we've read about is that those other space companies were willing to adapt the way that they present the risk and how they seek their funding and what their long term objectives even tend to be in order to adapt to the government commercial marriage. Right. So SpaceX has taken on things to the moon. When Musk talks about really wanting to go to Mars, Blue Origin's been had to adapt some of their processes to either target the moon or target launch. It just depends on what the government needs at the time. We don't see that with Virgin. Right. Virgin has always had this commercial flavor like the space hotels. And that makes me question the viability of the commercial market of where that's capable of going, what type of risk they're willing to accept. I mean that's again it's a commercial risk, not a like strategic risk necessarily. And Virgin didn't adapt the same way that the other rocket companies did, which I thought was an interesting contrast to some of the other opportunities that we saw through the readings.
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B
So we discussed a wide variety of topics. So now let's kind of Shift a little bit and think about what are some of the major takeaways we want from this book. We already mentioned that maybe it's a little more difficult to parse than a typical book we would have in this, in this course. But what do we think are some of the things we want to learn and bring with us?
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C
Yeah, bring this down to, like, what, what does this have to do in terms of like the strategic competition for the U.S. on a national level? But then like, I mean, it also goes down to commercial competition. Right. That adaptation that I was just talking about there as well. By not adapting the funding streams, Virgin also kind of tapped themselves out of other research and development markets. They weren't willing to change what they were doing in order to really tap into the funds. Yes, they had tests that have gone up, especially since the publishing of the book, where NASA's provided some funding. Some of the other scientific labs around the country have started putting people on the Virgin Galactic spacecraft, at least until they stopped flying recently, to try and get some scientific testing done. Those are all true, but they are like a drop in the bucket of what Virgin does in terms of what they need to sustain commercial viability. And because of that, by 2018, it mentions in the book that Richard Branson himself had put like a billion dollars of his own money into sustaining the company. So they had to try and make some of these adaptations. And so they went to the dod, they went and talked to Goldfein, the chief of staff at the time, and pitched hypersonics, like, can we create a vehicle that like, makes hypersonics viable for you in the military? And while it's a great idea, goldfeid wasn't ready to give them money because it was, it wasn't a thing yet for them. They, they didn't actually have anything demonstrated because they hadn't tapped into the funding, they hadn't gone into the research and development. Similarly, they had to look for funding with the Saudis at one point and they got a pledge for like a billion dollar investment from the Saudis. And then the whole Khashoggi incident happened and the PR for that didn't look good, so they had to pull back. So they recognized they needed it to adapt, but it never really materialized the same way it did with the other companies.
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B
Yeah, and I think that's a good point. It's difficult to be a space specialist. SpaceX and Blue Origin are marketing themselves as you can do many things with us. We'll take any kind of payload, do any kind of mission. You Want. But Virgin is very much a specialty space company and obviously that narrows the basic customers. But on the same token, we have seen competitors to Virgin in that high altitude space. I'll bring up an example outside the book, but related in that the company that made the initial Spaceship 1 and the first model of Spaceship 2 for Virgin is called Scaled Composites. They now make a aircraft that does very similar where you have a high speed rocket test vehicle carried by a larger aircraft. And their company called TR Launch and they actually have pushed into this hypersonic testing area where there's value in having the ability to carry something to a high altitude, let it go and then have it launch to provide that flexibility of being able to do tests maybe outside of normal test ranges or be able to move things around and test in different areas. And so there is sign that if they were to be a bit more aggressive or ambitious to push themselves outside of their narrow focus. The technology there has other uses, but version has chosen very deliberately to be that space airline feel towards the future.
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C
Yeah, they're looking to adapt the research funding to meet what they're doing rather than the other way around, which that's the opposite of the model that you see with the SpaceXs and the Blue origins, et cetera. Like Lawrence Livermore. Right now if you go on the Virgin Galactic website, they've got a partnership with Virgin Galactic to do some experimentation for high altitude reconnaissance stuff. But they don't want to necessarily use the spacecraft for that. They want to use the launch vehicle. They want Virgin Galactic's like high altitude dropship essentially to help them with this research. Again, that's the research basically finding this niche, not Virgin Galactic adapting what they're doing in order to provide the avenue for the research funding.
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D
Yeah, and I'll just add one. One of the big takeaways for me was the human element of this story. And I think Schmidtle does a really good job of giving the reader insight to that. And there, there were kind of two big themes that I saw. One was the. The founder charisma and in Richard Branson it can, it can help and it can distort at the same time. So while his, while his approach and excitement helps sell the project and draw attention, which naturally draws investors and keep belief alive, it also distorts priorities. If his narrative starts out running the, the engineering and the reality on the ground. So I think the repeated promises and missed timelines matter and it. There's a fine balance and you kind of have to find the sweet spot for, for the economics of it and also just to drive people beyond their comfort zone. And then the other takeaway, which I think was unique to this book compared to some of the other readings, is that there is a very specific archetype or personality that's attracted to this business. And the, the people willing to fly these vehicles are a distinct type. So Stuckey, he's, he's not just thrill seeking and, and risk loving, which he, he is that he's, he's got a, a side passion for paragliding and gets hurt multiple times, seriously hurt throughout the book. But he's also obsessive, disciplined, technically serious. He, he digs through the history of space engineering and he'll send the engineers questions that are, that are deep into the technical side. And he's identity driven. He, he reads more as someone that needs, that seeks mastery rather than Branson, who kind of seeking applause in pr and that, that makes him a really good case study for the kind of person that's willing to assume personal risk in order to push the boundaries.
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B
Okay. Yeah, so he's got some takeaways about personalities that are attracted to this industry, the industry itself, maybe specific companies. So I'll wrap us up with just a couple of updates on where Virgin Galactic is today. So, as we said before, the book ends in 2021, so that's already five years old since the publishing of the book. In July 2021, Branson actually makes it to space. He gets on a full flight. They have two pilots, four passengers, first time it's happened. And he beat Spizos to space the same year. So the first space billionaire is Branson, even though all the trials and tribulations. But in 2024, they paused operations to reevaluate the spacecraft to make it bigger, more economically viable, to be able to fly more often. And that's where we are right now. We're waiting for the updated spacecraft, the Delta Class, to be built and to restart operations supposedly in 2026. But we'll see if that promise is just another Richard Branson fantasy or if it'll actually become reality. So thank you so much for listening today. We'll end our Space Power podcast. We appreciate you tuning in and look
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C
forward to the next clips.