Some of the first tourists in space have described what it was like to go to space, from the months of preparation to the spaceflight experience and how it changed them. Keisha Schahaff, 46, and Ana Mayers, 18 and a philosophy and physics student, became the first mother-daughter pair and the first Caribbean women ever to go to space where they went with Virgin Galactic in August.
You are never too young, or too old, to dream big, and to live your dream.
— Antigua & Barbuda (@antiguabarbuda) August 12, 2023
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You’re invited to space
The space odyssey started with Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, knocking on Schahaff’s door in Antigua to tell her she’d won two tickets worth $450,000 each in a Space for Humanity raffle she had entered while taking a different flight. Schahaff proceeded to Facetime her daughter at Aberdeen University, Scotland to invite her along for the trip to space.
The “free trip” nonetheless involved 8 to 10 months training at the company’s Spaceport site, in Sierra County, New Mexico. The would-be astronauts followed a Preflight Space Readiness Program of seminars and flight simulations, to help familiarise themselves with their spacecraft, the VSS Unity. The experience of training together brought the mother and daughter closer together, leading them up to the day of the space trip, when the sky seemed “remarkably clear,” Schahaff said.
I could see the stars, I could see the moon, and it felt like the Universe was connecting with me again. It said ‘you’re invited, come.
Keisha Schahaff
Timeless awe
You may wonder if astronauts have any sense of misgivings before they travel, especially a parent taking their child on such a potentially risky mission. Let’s not forget Schahaff and Mayers climbed aboard their space craft just two months after the Titan submarine disaster that killed a group of deep sea tourists, including a father and his son.
If Schahaff felt any anxiety, it was likely relieved by Mayers’ attitude, who has said she knew “there was no other thing [I] would rather be doing.”
And then came the flight itself. Lasting around 90 minutes, the mission involved VMS Eve, Galactic’s carrier plane porting the Unity up to 50,000 feet (over 15 kilometres). At this point Unity was “launched” and flew onward to its maximum altitude of 280,000 feet (85 kilometres). Although this is just below the notional boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space, the space tourists experienced four minutes of weightlessness – which Schahaff described as a freeing and peaceful moment: “It almost feels like gravity is what sets the thoughts in our mind,” Schahaff said. “Without that gravity, I felt like I was timeless—all I had was awe.”
Everything that we are
Other space voyagers, such as Star Trek actor William Shatner, have also described the transformational feeling of seeing Earth from space, but for Shatner, the experience was not as positive as he expected.
In his book Boldy Go, he expresses surprise at the “cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing.” It wasn’t until he “turned back toward the light of home,” he writes, that he “could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.”
Schahaff was similarly moved. “Looking back on our planet, I felt this deeper connection to love,” she has said. “I did not feel myself as an individual. I could actually see and feel everything that we are.”
Virgin Galactic flew another four astronauts to the edge of space in January 2024 and is due to announce its 2023 Q4 earnings on 27 February. It is due to phase out flights by mid-2024 in order to focus on new craft.
