We Are Test Pilots

We Always Had The Right Stuff

(Astronaut Edward H. White II, Pilot for the GT-4 Space Flight, NASA Identifier: S65-30433)

Life is filled with barriers, hidden and unspoken, ordinary and extraordinary.

One such barrier was flying. Another, flying faster than sound, like a bullet.

The sound barrier was broken by one man flying a machine built by those who broke through the barriers of centuries of fantasies and impossibilities. What was impossible became everyday reality.

We do the same every day. Our existence was built on top of impossibilities.

We are test pilots of the present, testing limits left over from the past, piercing the veils of impossibility, discovering new potential for the future.

Our mission is to break the invisible intimate barriers in our lives, and sometimes, the air will crack with a booming change which resonates so far and long, that it is felt by others. Inspired, they suit up and take to the skies.

This is about everything we do. If you’re reading this you have worries, problems, and responsibilities. You have had nightmares you want to keep in dreamland, you have dreams you want to make a reality. Welcome, Pilot.

We are recruited the moment we are brought into the world, and we are debriefed by time’s unfolding. The mission remains the same: save our world, or more rather our place in it and our posterity. Our loved ones, our dreams. The pre-flight checklist is only the beginning. The test flight lasts a lifetime.

There will be turbulence. We will shake loose what is loose. We will break what is faulty. And we will seek solutions. The gravity of reality is not our prison. We will design and devise better wings. This is the way of Daedalus.

It is a relentless sequence, of an endless series of events between moments, with refueling in the places between deep spaces. We either move, stay in place, change course, or sometimes stop - perhaps for good. But that is the way, the only way, if we are to stay in the air.

I have noticed some want to turn back and park the miracle of it all back in the hanger and hand over the keys. To retreat. Does everyone feel this way?

There’s been a feeling lately in some quarters that something is off. It’s not turbulence but a fuel shortage, and that fuel is a faith in the flight program. That program has been running for a long time. But pilots come and go.

Since the first sunrise, humanity has pushed further, faster, and higher. There have been tragic quiet periods as long as an era but the last sunset may never come, because the cumulative forces of our acceleration has raised the flight ceiling to way out of the gravity well of our world. Our modern lives are miracles.

The program may run long after the sun becomes a red bloated leviathan, and when our best and brightest pilots have grazed the gravity wells of outer worlds and leapt past the Oort cloud, for the longest game of the cosmos.

But First, there are feelings which tether us to cold deep caverns, under the thrall of horror stories, shadows splayed across the rockface, cast by the light of ancient dread. Smoldering coals of half-forgotten fears were stoked, and a fire was reignited.

And second, every so often, a brazen conceit takes hold in the cockpit, as every blinking indicator light demands a forestalling of a stalling, of falling into a power-dive into an Age of Icarus. Fear and greed, handmaidens of distraction, can blind pilots, and then true disaster follows.

Without fail, when we are about to break a new barrier we cry about crashing, or boast of taming formidable forces. That is when we must increase our attention, focus, and desire, to maintain flight.

If anything has been been found wanting, it is the distraction of our attention, focus, and will for exploration through experimentation. The desires, envies, and rivalries of others hijacks the senses, bundled in a short-game. A short-game dazzles and blinds us as if we were flying towards the sun, vulnerable.

This distraction of fear and fun, from others, is an easy play-now-pay-never game which saps the will to find our own flight-path. We lose sight of staying on course, on our terms, our way, based on thick lasting models of our own making, regardless of the desires and rivalries of others. The real danger.

Each person and generation has the same opportunity, we can push outward the envelopes engulfing humanity, and fly out and escape.

To widen just one of an infinite number of invisible overton windows changes both the pilot who did the impossible, and inspires untold missions of future pilots who have yet to take-off. The horizon-line of the future beckons.

The desire and willingness to suspend a disbelief about ourselves - of what we can and can’t do in and with our lives - is a call to fly. Who volunteers?

Do we have the right stuff? Yes (but if you have to ask…).

I say we stop asking ourselves if we have it, and join the others who do not give such questions a moment’s breath, and went ahead. So, get on the tarmac, up and off the runway, and get some altitude. Get on the launch pad, strap in, and prep for count-down. You’ll know when to “Punch It”.

You have “The Right Stuff”.

Mission time will elapse.

One day, your flight ends.

So, Godspeed and good luck, pilots.