Dave Mackay: ‘I’d love to go to the moon. I’d love to go to Mars’

The astronaut who leads Virgin Galactic’s mission to take humanity to the stars has lived an adrenaline-fuelled life. As the company gears up to start taking paying customers, the first Scot in space reflects on the experience of leaving earth, why it’s worth the risk and how a boy from the Highlands ended up piloting a rocket ship

BY CHARLIE BURTON

02 Jun 2019

CHRIS CRISMAN

he day that Dave Mackay first went to space began with a problem. It was 22 February 2019 and Mackay, the chief pilot of Virgin Galactic, had arrived at the Mojave Air & Space Port in the desert to the north of Los Angeles at around 5am. As was standard before a test flight, his first task was to practise the mission in a flight simulator that would emulate the conditions he was about to face. However, the weather balloon that had been sent up earlier had popped at just 80,000 feet, so the engineers had no data on the wind above that altitude. They had to input an assumption instead and the improvised conditions proved challenging. “That day the simulator rides didn’t go too well,” recalls Mackay, a 62-year-old Scot. “The sim was actually really difficult to control. We did it a couple of times.” Still, Mackay didn’t let it trouble him. “We knew what the reason was so we just put that down to experience and continued with the rest of the process.”

Mackay and his copilot, Mike Masucci, went for a short briefing and then left the hangar to strap themselves into the cockpit of VSS Unity, a spaceship that looks like a rocket with wings. Unity was attached to its mother ship, a catamaran-style aircraft called WhiteKnightTwo. On this flight, Unity’s pilots were being accompanied by a passenger, Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor, Beth Moses, who took her seat in the back. A little after 8am, WhiteKnightTwo took off with Unity suspended between its twin fuselages.

Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity

WhiteKnightTwo’s role was too carry the spaceship up into the sky and launch it at 45,000 feet. The climb took around 45 minutes, during which time Unity’s pilots did not have much work to do. They sat in near silence to minimise radio chatter, accompanied by their own thoughts. Mackay was used to this part from flying Unity within the earth’s atmosphere on previous test flights. “I don’t go through what we’re about to do, because we’ve done it hundreds of times already and I don’t want to get myself worked up,” he says. “I just tend to look out the window and admire nature and the view.” When the craft reached the target altitude, Mackay extended his arm to his copilot and the pair shook hands: let’s do this. Half a minute before release, Mackay felt the adrenaline start to flow. He took two big breaths to relax himself.

The countdown came over the radio: “Three. Two. One. Release, release, release.”

Unity plummeted from WhiteKnightTwo. Seconds later, Masucci called out: “Fire!” The pilots ignited their rocket engine, thundering out 70,000 pound-force of thrust, and headed for space.

‘It’s important to get people into space to let them see how fragile our planet is’

AVE MACKAY GREW UP IN HELMSDALE, A SMALL HIGHLANDS VILLAGE SITUATED IN A DEEP VALLEY THAT LEADS TO THE HEART OF NORTHERN SCOTLAND. ALMOST EVERY DAY, FAST JETS FROM RAF LOSSIEMOUTH AIR STATION WOULD PASS OVERHEAD. THEY FLEW LOW AND LOUD AND THE EXCITEMENT OF WATCHING THEM KICK-STARTED MACKAY’S INTEREST IN AVIATION. IN 1964 HE WAS AWARDED A PRIZE AT SUNDAY SCHOOL – A BOOK CALLED EXPLORING SPACE WITH A CUTAWAY OF A MERCURY CAPSULE ON THE COVER – AND AS THE APOLLO PROGRAMME DEVELOPED OVER THE COURSE OF THE SIXTIES, HE DEVISED A PLAN. HE WOULD BECOME AN RAF PILOT, THEN A TEST PILOT AND FINALLY AN ASTRONAUT.

Two of Mackay’s heroes spurred him on his way. When he was 15 years old, he wrote to the aircraft manufacturer Hawker Siddeley and told them about his aviation ambitions. He got a reply from its chief test pilot, Duncan Simpson. “Simpson actually comes from the same part of the world as I come from,” says Mackay. “Here was a local person who had done what I wanted to. He had become a test pilot. That proved to me that, yes, it was possible.”

He also drew inspiration from Neil Armstrong. “Not so much for walking on the moon but for landing on the moon. That final descent from lunar orbit to landing was an amazingly complex task. He did it for the very first time while dealing with an overloaded computer and while running out of fuel. He was targeted at a particularly bad area on the moon, so he took manual control and landed it safely. In my opinion, that was probably the most remarkable piece of flying ever.”

Mackay joined the RAF in 1979 and began test pilot training in 1987. In 1995, he joined Virgin Atlantic to fly commercial aircraft and later saw an opportunity to realise the final stage of his master plan. Sir Richard Branson had set up Virgin Galactic in 2004, with the ambition of taking tourists on suborbital space flights. In 2005, Mackay started working for Galactic on a part-time basis and went full-time four years later. “My wife originally had some concerns – it’s a rocket ship,” he says. These days, however, she is more relaxed. “I encourage her to come to every single flight I’ve done. She talks to people who work here, other pilots, engineers, managers, and I know she has become more and more confident. She says to people, ‘He doesn’t seem worried about it. He sleeps like a log before the flight.’”

On Mackay’s first space flight, after the pilots had ignited their rocket engine and pointed their nose at the sky, they let the engine burn for about a minute. The spaceship accelerated to 3.04 times the speed of sound, pushing Mackay hard back in his seat, and soared up to 295,007 feet.

‘There’s no sign of borders or conflict. It allows you to see the earth as a planet’

As Mackay performed a planned manoeuvre, flipping the spaceship on its back, he realised they had crossed Nasa’s definition of the edge of the earth’s atmosphere. He was now the first Scot – and the 569th person in history – to have gone to space. He called out over the radio, “Welcome to space, Scotland!”

On this test flight, one of the official tasks was an enjoyable one: to take note of what could be seen out of the window so they could give an accurate account when asked by the public. The view astonished him. “It was as if I could see half of America. I could see so much it was disorientating.” He was also struck by the contrast between the earth and space. “The earth’s surface is staggeringly bright, almost confusingly bright. And space looks densely matte black. You have seen it on a photograph, but the human eye picks up so much more. The other awe-inspiring thing is the atmosphere itself – it just looks incredibly thin, but very, very beautiful.”

Gravity eventually took its course, and Unity re-entered the atmosphere. During this final phase, it is unpowered, so the pilots glided it back to Mojave and would have just one shot at landing it safely – which they did, at 9.08am. Mackay had a Scotch to celebrate.

The flight marked the second time that Virgin Galactic had reached space. The first was last December, a moment many years in the making. Progress has been slower than anticipated: a major setback came in October 2014 when the first Virgin Galactic spaceship, VSS Enterprise, broke apart after pilot error subjected it to catastrophic aerodynamic forces. One of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, was found dead in the wreckage. The other, Peter Siebold, survived.

Inside the cockpit during Mackay’s first space flight, 2019

Mackay’s determination for Virgin Galactic to succeed is partly about honouring the memory of Alsbury. “He was very much in our minds in the run-up to the flight and afterwards,” says Mackay. “I was actually just thinking about him this morning. I think he would have been thrilled by what has happened and delighted that we hadn’t given up.” Now that Virgin Galactic is testing in space, the ultimate goal of taking paying passengers is finally in sight. This is welcome news for Virgin Galactic’s 600 “future astronauts”, each of whom has paid between $200,000 (£153,000) and $250,000 (£192,000) upfront for a ticket.

Critics of Virgin Galactic have questioned whether it’s worthwhile. Yet Mackay is convinced of the intrinsic value of seeing the earth from space. “There’s no visible sign of borders or conflict. It allows you to see earth as a planet just floating around in space with this kind of worryingly thin atmosphere around it. It’s important, I think, to get more people into space to let them experience that and see how precious and fragile our planet is.”

Mackay hopes to see even more. “I’d love to go to the moon. I’d love to go to Mars. I don’t know if it will happen in my career as a pilot – at some stage I’m going to have to hang up my flight boots.” At 62 years old, does he think about retirement? “I think about it and I don’t like it, so I don’t think about it too much,” he says. His mother recently asked him a similar question. She has only flown once and didn’t enjoy it, so can’t understand why he does it. “After the space flight, she said to me, ‘So, David, you’ve achieved your life’s ambition...’ I knew exactly where she was going with this line. So I interrupted her and said, ‘Yes, Mum, and I’m looking forward to achieving it soon again.’”

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