Anastatia Mayers couldn’t stop smiling. Rocking nose rings and a cascade of purple box braids, the teenager high-fived her way along a line of 200 cheering guests and press before throwing her hands up with an exuberant “Yeah!” She then turned and hugged her 46-year-old mother, Keisha Schahaff. Steps behind, limping slightly from Parkinson’s disease, waved Jon Goodwin, an 80-year-old British Olympian and adventurer, who had waited 18 years for this moment.
The trio emerged in black flight suits from the soaring atrium of Virgin Galactic’s “Gateway to Space,” the undulating metal and glass terminal at the Spaceport America housing the space tourism firm founded by Sir Richard Branson in 2004. Beyond them, the New Mexican desert stretched toward the horizon, bathed in the golden glow and calm of an early August morning.
From there, luxury SUVs drove them to a six-seater spaceplane that would rocket them at 2,300 mph to the edge of space for three minutes of weightlessness, with a view stretching 1,000 miles in every direction highlighting the curvature of the Earth and her thin blue line of atmosphere. Ninety minutes later, they were back on land as newly minted astronauts.
“That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done—a childhood dream has come true,” gushed Schahaff, a health and wellness coach from Antigua and Barbuda, before cheekily adding, “And if anyone was wondering, the Earth is round.”
“You stole my line!” laughed Mayers with mock petulance. When Schahaff won two seats through a 2021 Virgin Galactic fundraising raffle for the non-profit Space for Humanity, her daughter, now an 18-year-old physics and philosophy student at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, insisted on being her plus one. Now she was at a loss for words. “The only thought I had the entire time was, `Wow.’”
Goodwin, a canoeist in the 1972 Munich Olympics, was more quietly overcome. Back in 2005, he’d dropped a then-bargain $250,000 for his seat before Virgin’s extensive delays competed against his advancing age and weakening health.
“Nine years ago, when I contracted the disease, I thought, `That’s the end of me going into space,” he said during a post-flight press conference. But Virgin “never stopped me doing what I wanted to do. I’m hoping I instill in other people with Parkinson’s that it doesn’t stop you from doing things.”
