My Suborbital Life Blog 4: My Research Spaceflight Training: Count Down to Launch — S. Alan Stern

It’s just T-6 days to launch on my first space mission, which is set for liftoff on Thursday, November 2nd from Spaceport America in southern New Mexico. Spaceport America is Virgin Galactic’s operations base for commercial suborbital missions. My blog today is about training for this mission. Unlike space tourists, those of us going to do research in space are there to work, and that means a whole different level of training than is needed just to ride aboard the vehicle as it goes through its flight paces. Most of that additional training is to ensure we’ll be ready to get our work done in the compressed timeline of just minutes during the actual spaceflight altitude portions of the mission.

The central hub of Spaceport America in New Mexico (Photo credit: Spaceport America).

Toward that end, I’ve been in almost daily procedures run throughs for my research flight for several weeks. Additionally, to support being physically ready to perform at a high level after launch and in microgravity during the spaceflight, I recently undertook a refresher high-G training course last month on the NASTAR centrifuge in Pennsylvania. That involved six high-G runs up to 5.5 Gs, significantly exceeding the Virgin Galactic suborbital launch and entry profiles. I also did a series of Zero-G Corporation training flights over the past couple of years.

On Saturday, October 28th, my training will enter its last phase when I arrive in New Mexico to begin on site training at the launch site. The main task after arrival on Saturday will be our flight suit fitting.

Then Sunday, October 29th is “L-4”, or launch minus 4 days. The focus of that day will be final payload preparations and a first tour and practice of the flight operations inside Virgin Galactic’s precise, high fidelity spaceship Unity trainer.

The pace picks up on Monday, at L-3 days. That day is focused on suit training, seat training, and high G classroom lessons for launch and entry.

On L-2 day, my crewmates and I will undergo G-awareness training in aerobatic aircraft flights, and further mission simulations with our research gear in the high-fidelity Unity cabin trainer. Then we’ll train on emergency equipment, and we’ll have some availability to interact with media who are attending the launch.

On Wednesday, November 1st, which is L-1 day, we’ll do another mission sim in the Unity cabin trainer, have a master class with previous flyers on Unity, conduct a full launch day dress rehearsal, and a launch readiness review; then we’ll have some time off before show time (our spaceflight!) the next day.

I’ll be blogging more details over the next week, but what’s above is the general plan, and I want you to have that inside view of what we’ll be doing to train as launch training goes into high gear, and then culminates with the flight.

For now, I’m continuing with procedures training runs and really raring to go. As Virgin Galactic’s founding chief spacecraft designer, aerospace legend Burt Rutan likes to say, I’m “Looking up, WAY up!”

Alan Stern is a planetary scientist and aerospace executive. He is a former NASA Associate Administrator for Science, and a former board chair of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. He has now been a part of 30 NASA, ESA, and commercial spaceflight flight mission teams, 15 of those as mission or instrument Principal Investigator, including the almost $1B New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.