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“California in sight.”

Test pilot Hannah Aarons saw the coastline as a low dark smudge stretching across the curving horizon far, far below. Beyond the cockpit’s thick quartz windshield she could see that the sky along that horizon was bright with a new morning coming up, shading into a deep violet and finally, overhead, into the black of infinite space.

The spaceplane arrowed across the sky at Mach 16 and crossed the California coast at an altitude of 197,000 feet, precisely on course. Through the visor of her pressure suit’s helmet, Aarons saw that the plane’s titanium nose was beginning to glow as it bit into the wispy atmosphere, heading for the landing field at Matagorda Island on the gulf coast of Texas. She began to hear the thin whistle of rarified air rushing across her cockpit.

“On the tick, Hannah,” she heard the flight controller’s voice in her helmet earphones. “Pitch-up maneuver in thirty seconds.”

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