In late 2023, I flew in space. But I didn’t fly as a NASA astronaut or a space tourist. Instead, I flew on a training and research mission aboard a Virgin Galactic spaceplane for my company, the more-than-3,000-person research and development nonprofit Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). The mission, named Galactic 5, was barely an hour long, but it was jam-packed with activities for nine separate mission objectives — all of which were successfully accomplished.

We took off and landed from Spaceport America in southern New Mexico, where Virgin Galactic is based. Aboard the flight with me as passenger crew were space tourist Ketty Maisonrouge and space researcher Kellie Gerardi, who was funded by the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences in Boulder, Colorado. For the three of us, it was our rookie spaceflight. The mission’s Virgin Galactic flight crew, consisting of commander Mike Masucci, pilot Kelly Latimer, and instructor Colin Bennett, were all multiple-spaceflight veterans.

The spaceflight came about by proposing to NASA to test whether the Virgin Galactic spacecraft — known as SpaceShipTwo — would be suitable for performing astronomical observations that had previously been done on the space shuttle and suborbital sounding rockets. Specifically, we aim to find out if observations aboard SpaceShipTwo are significantly compromised by effects like exhaust films, spacecraft glints, and window micro-abrasions.

With NASA funding, I am going to test that — perhaps as early as 2026 — by taking into space a SwRI astronomical imaging system for which I was the principal investigator. This camera previously flew on two space shuttle missions and took images of stars, comets, planets, and the Moon through the shuttle’s windows. I will look at the same or similar star fields, but through SpaceShipTwo’s windows, then compare the data from both platforms.