A Truly Stellar Honeymoon

Given the recent love-fueled, murderous intentions of a scorned astronaut, couples and space might seem like a dubious combination. But it would take more than some bad press to alter the plans of newlyweds Loretta, 32, and George Whitesides, 33 who are set to become the first honeymooners to cross the space boundary. The pair live in Washington, DC and both work in the space industry; she is a space advocate and former astrobiologist, he is the executive director of the National Space Society. They will take their nuptial trip in 2009 aboard Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft, modeled on the X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne. As company “founders” they will be among the spaceline’s (as opposed to airline’s) first 100 passengers to view the blackness of space, see the curvature of the Earth and experience several minutes of weightlessness. On Valentine’s Day, the couple launched www.spacelove.org to share their story. We asked Loretta to elaborate on why she’s so over-the-moon about her honeymoon plans.

When did you hatch your galactic nuptial plans?
I’ve always known I was going to go into space. As a kid, I thought I’d get there because I’d have my own rocket parked in the garage – I probably watched too much Star Wars. I remember pretending that a crawl space at my cousin’s house was a spaceship.

How did that childhood love of space turn into a real career in the field?
I got myself into Stanford because I read in Omni magazine that astrogeophysicist Chris McKay was at NASA Ames, which was nearby. I worked as a summer intern at the astronauts’ offices in Houston, where they live and work between missions.  I went to Caltech for a master’s, then worked for the X Prize Foundation during their winning launches in the Mojave. Now I promote Yuri’s Night, a global celebration of space that occurs on April 12 in cities around the world.

How did you meet your husband, George?
We were both youth delegates in Vienna in 1999 at the U.N. Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. We went to a ball at the governor’s mansion in Austria, and George was the only one that could keep up with the Austrian Waltz. I was very impressed by that.

So when did you two get hitched?
September 3, 2006, in the Valley of the Moon (of course) in northern California. It was the night the European Space Agency was crashing their SMART-1 lunar probe and creating special celestial fireworks.

Both you and George are “Virgin Galactic Founders.” What does that mean?
The founders are the 100 daring and audacious people who sought out Virgin when they first heard about this and put up the full amount to buy a ticket.

May I ask how much?
$200,000 per ticket.

Will you and George be the only passengers aboard?
There is room for six on SpaceShipTwo, plus a pilot and a copilot. There will be a raffle to decide the lineup of the first 100 to fly. We don’t know who our fellow passengers will be.

Tell me a little bit about what the flight will be like.
We’ll take off from a runway and fly up like a conventional airplane, to about 50,000 feet — higher than you’ve ever been before. At that point, the mother ship will drop the rocket that we’re in, the rocket engine will ignite, and we’ll shoot straight up. We’ll be pushed back in our seats as we experience 3 to 4 Gs. Then we’ll be weightless as we continue to rise up to about 110 kilometers (68 miles) and continue to be weightless even on the way down, until we hit the thicker part of the atmosphere, which slows and decelerates you. The entire flight will last about two hours. We’ll have about seven minutes in space, five of them weightless. It can take up to an hour to glide back to the spaceport runway.

So you’ll get to float around the spaceship.
We’ll be strapped in during the launch, but when the engine is cut, the captain will say it’s okay to float around the cabin.

The 110-km-high club?
Ha.

I want to know what every girl wants to know: what will you wear?
It’ll be a lightweight, sleek and stylish spacesuit. There’s an artist’s conception of it at Virgin Galactic‘s website.

NASA astronauts are typically eligible for a flight assignment two years after starting their basic training. What kind of training will you undergo?
We’ll be doing centrifuge training later this year to give us a sense of what four or five Gs might feel like. And George and I have both worked for Zero Gravity Corporation, so we’ve had the privilege of experiencing weightlessness a number of times. We have even had our first zero-G kiss.

Have you met Richard Branson yet?
Yes, and he is delightful. He’s very humble and disarming, and really genuine. We met at the Oshkosh AirVenture. He called us onstage and surprised us with a special bottle of Space Honeymoon Champagne and two custom-made pins designed by the Queen’s jeweler – they’re two spaceships with intertwined contrails.

So are you going to toast in space?
I think the liquid would fly out of the glass. We’re saving it for now.

Will you and George have a place in the history of space exploration?
I hope so. I want to be known as the person who changed the way space was done and who helped humanity use the clean slate we have in space to design a new society.

Wow, a new space-based society, huh?
I don’t know how long it’ll take. I mean, the most recent settling of North America took hundreds of years to catch on, but what eventually took place here became extremely important. It’s critical to me that we lay the best foundation for that new world.

So what do you predict for the future of space travel?
In the short term, what’s exciting for me, as a founder, is that we’re really getting people excited about going into space in their lifetime. Ultimately, I hope we can create environmentally friendly ways to get from one side of the planet to the other in less than an hour using alternatives to jet fuel. Now, we can go about three times the speed of sound. To travel into space to reach the other side of the world, we’d need to get up to 25 times the speed of sound, like the space shuttle. I predict that we’ll tell our grandkids how we used to spend 26 hours getting to New Zealand. They’ll laugh.

To learn more about Loretta and George, and to follow their journey, visit their website www.spacelove.org. Visit Virgin Galactic‘s website for more info on the flight.