The Trials And Torments Of Space School
Sending people to space has always involved a frank assessment of their defects, and in the early days, it was a matter of finding people without any. First it was fighter pilots—calm in a crisis, physically perfect, unquestioning in their execution of mission control’s instructions. Then, as it became clear that space was more than a military objective, space agencies began to train scientists for flight, placing otherwise reasonable researchers into fighter jets and swimming pools and screening them relentlessly for defects of vision, circulation, or character. Now a new category of space traveler is headed beyond the stratosphere. Not the combat pilots and astrophysicists who train for at least two years just to get a shot at a trip, but the rest of us, with our carry-on bags, our iPads, our motion sickness. Folks. Citizens. Regular people. At press time, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo had already survived its first Mach-1 test flight,...