Ninety Minutes to the End of the Sky

The View That Has No Equal

There is a specific moment, roughly sixty seconds after the rocket fires, when the sky outside the window is no longer blue. It has been darkening since the mothership climbed past fifty thousand feet, above the clouds, above the weather, above every commercial aircraft in service. And then it goes black. Not dark. Black. The absolute, unambiguous black that only exists above the atmosphere, the same black that astronauts have been attempting to describe since 1961, the one that photographs come close to but cannot quite capture. This is the moment you understand, with a certainty that no amount of reading or watching could have prepared you for, that you are somewhere no human being was designed to go.

The Delta Class spaceplane carries six passengers and two pilots. The carrier aircraft, VMS Eve, takes the spaceplane to altitude on a horizontal runway departure from Spaceport America, climbs to release altitude, and drops the ship into clear air. The hybrid rocket motor fires. In under a minute, you are at the edge of space. The motor cuts. Silence arrives. And then the harness releases, and you float.

What happens next is the part that defies useful description. Weightlessness is not the sensation most people expect. It is not a theme park experience. It is the complete and sudden absence of the physical relationship with gravity that your body has had every second of its existence. You move to the window, and below you, recognizable as a single object for the first time, is the Earth. Every ocean. Every continent. The thin line of atmosphere that separates everything you have ever known from the infinite nothing beyond it. You will have several minutes up there. They will be the most clarifying minutes of your life.

The total flight lasts approximately ninety minutes, from wheels-up to runway landing at the same facility where you began. The experience itself spans three days: pre-flight preparation, medical screening, training, and the astronaut induction process that takes place at Spaceport America before your flight.