Airbus Lecture

Online Event

Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut

In October 2014, a 38-year-old test pilot was killed when his private spaceship crashed in the California desert. Prompted by this tragic event, Nicholas Schmidle spent the next four years embedded with Virgin Galactic, the company that owned the craft. In this lecture, Schmidle will discuss his reporting on the program, and his forthcoming book about the test pilots, engineers, and visionaries behind Virgin Galactic’s campaign to build a space tourism company – an epic story about bravery and sacrifice, the thin line between lunacy and genius, the new space race, and most of all about pursuing a dream in an otherwise cynical world.

This event will be moderated by Christoph Seidler, Science Editor, Der Spiegel