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March 7, 2013 by Michael Behar

Virtuoso Life | March/April 2013

This is Your Captain Speaking Download PDF

As Virgin Galactic’s passenger flights near, we take a look at the key faces and technologies behind the world’s first commercial spaceline.

When he wants to relax, David Mackay, 55, flies an Extra 300L, a performance aerobatic aircraft, doing vertical rolls and knife-edge spins. This helps him stay sharp at his day job: chief pilot for Virgin Galactic. At the moment, Mackay is flight-testing WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo—the mother ship that will shuttle tourists to 47,000 feet, and the rocket plane that will decouple there and blast into sub-orbital space—and is scheduled to begin flying tourists to space next year. The Scotland native made his first flight in 1977. “I did it with the University Air Squadron, which gave students experience with the armed forces,” he recalls. After graduating, Mackay joined the Royal Air Force (RAF), flying a Hawker Harrier GR3, a fighter known for its unique ability to take off and land vertically. “I always wanted to be a test pilot,” he says. “So as soon as I had sufficient experience, I applied to test pilot school.” He remained in the RAF as a test pilot until 1995, when he left to fly for Virgin Atlantic, and then, in 2009, joined Virgin Galactic to become the world’s first commercial spacecraft pilot. Continue reading →

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February 18, 2013 by Michael Behar

It’s Alive | February 18, 2013

Welcome to my new website, which went live at 3:10 PM MST on January 2, 2013. I’m a month-plus late in getting up this post. Sorry. My old site had been virtually unchanged (except for article updates) since it launched sometime in 2001, which speaks to the mad skills of its designer, a former colleague from Wired magazine, who managed to create a simple, fresh look that endured for more than a decade. With my new site, brilliantly envisioned and created by Heather Mann, I tried to embrace a more visual format that works across platforms big and small—including all those schmancy mobile devices. Social-networking doohickeys appear across the site as well. That’s something, right? So click away and please email me if you find bugs, typos, or really hideous things that should never be done on online. Compliments are okay, too.

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February 18, 2013 by Michael Behar

Pretty Good First-Try Skis | February 18, 2013

At some point during the production cycle of my article in Skiing magazine about building my own skis, there was a temporary headline slapped on the layout: “DIY Skis? Try WTF Skis?” Though the headline didn’t stick, it sums up the insanity of trying to build skis from scratch in my garage. But having done so, I have to admit that my home-built boards were close, very close to being a rideable pair. It turned out that I had made the wood cores too thick, and this left me with skis that were a bit herky-jerky on the hill. If I had to do it over, I’d go much thinner, less fiberglass, less wood, less epoxy … less of everything. Continue reading →

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January 16, 2013 by Michael Behar

Skiing | February 2013

The Skis That Mike Built Download PDF

What could be more satisfying to a lifelong skier than handcrafting his own boards? A couple of flesh wounds, a few noxious fumes, and some serious marital strife later, you start to get an answer.

Not long after moving to Colorado, I purchased a pair of all-mountain skis from a local shop. Initially naïve to the meteorological quirks of the region, I soon discovered that it’s no place for a one-ski-quiver. The wild temperature swings and big dumps that bookend long droughts demanded a more versatile portfolio. I’m a firm believer in trying before buying. Doing so with skis, however, only propelled me into a black hole of demo indecision.

Titanium sandwiches, pulse pads, multidirectional composites, sintered bases, triaxial braiding, double monocoques—ski peddlers love to spew technobabble. To grasp how design variables affect a ski’s performance, I needed a hands-on education. As a kid, whenever I got a new toy, I’d have it disassembled into its component parts within an hour. (I wasn’t nearly as deft at reassembling.) It’s impractical to reverse engineer skis like childhood toys, so I decided to take the opposite tack: I was going to build my own boards—from scratch. Continue reading →

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September 24, 2012 by admin

SKI | October 2012

Your Brain on Skis Download PDF

What happens in that six feet between the couloir walls depends on what happens in the six inches between your ears.

I’m at Silverton Mountain, Colo., crippled with fear. Standing on the lip of a heinously steep couloir known as Meatball — a six-foot-wide chute hemmed with serrated crags sharp enough to disembowel an SUV — I try contemplating a line but soon sit down in the snow. My guide has toured me through some of Silverton’s most formidable terrain and I never flinched. Now I’m paralyzed.

Fear arises in the brain from tiny, almond-shaped bundles of neurons called amygdala. Ignited by an external trigger — a precipitous couloir will do — the amygdala dumps adrenaline into the bloodstream and jacks up the pulse. It fires without permission, a subconscious hijacker channeling primal instincts: fight or flight. I choose flight, but my guide offers an alternative. “I’ll go first,” he instructs. “Then you follow, making your turns exactly where I do.” I reluctantly agree, and the demanding cognitive effort it takes to mimic his every move quells my anxiety.   Continue reading →

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September 24, 2012 by admin

Virtuoso Life | September/October 2012

The Great Space Coaster Download PDF

Climb aboard NASTAR Center’s flight simulator for an out-of-this-world experience.

On a drizzly summer morning in a leafy Philadelphia suburb‚ I commence my journey into space. The adventure begins at the National Aerospace Training and Research (NASTAR) Center‚ a 20‚000-square-foot complex of prosaic training bays and low-slung offices in Southampton‚ Pennsylvania‚ where astronauts and fighter pilots get schooled on how to cope with the rigors of high-performance flight. At the moment, I’m inside the cockpit of a $30 million centrifuge called Phoenix—the world’s most sophisticated flight simulator—strapped into the pilot seat with a five-point safety harness, a contraption that keeps passengers anchored during maneuvers such as the one I’m about to attempt.

Greg Kennedy, NASTAR Center’s director of education, sits at a panel in the mission control room. When he addresses me through speakers embedded in the backrest, it’s as if his mouth is inches from my ear. “Today, Michael, we are flying out of Mojave,” he announces in a soothing voice. “At 360,000 feet, you’ll be able to see the California coastline.” The centrifuge begins to spin with me perched at the end of its 25-foot-long rotating arm, gradually at first, and then, with a sudden jolt, it accelerates fast enough to generate more than 3.5 g’s—or about three and a half times the force of Earth’s gravity. This, my fellow students and I are told, is what it feels like to sit inside a spacecraft that zooms from zero to Mach 3 (roughly 2,300 miles per hour) in less than a minute. Continue reading →

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September 1, 2012 by admin

The Atlantic | September 2012

Burning Question Download PDF

Why are wildfires defying long-standing computer models? 

Clint Dawson’s bloodshot eyes evince his 14th straight day at the High Park fire’s Incident Command Post, in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is late June, and the fire has already charred 70,000 acres. Dawson’s job is to guess what it will do next. As a fire-behavior analyst, or FBAN, he runs modeling software that predicts where a fire might be headed. When fires behave themselves, such models work well. But wildfires are getting bigger: their average size has tripled since the 1980s. And bigger fires are more complex than smaller ones, presenting more challenges for forecasting software. “We are definitely tweaking our models more on this fire than usual,” Dawson tells me.

Since the 1970s, modeling programs such as Farsite, FlamMap, and FSPro have become an essential part of fighting wildfires. The models, which are calibrated against how past fires have typically progressed, consider vegetation type; topography (flames prefer to travel uphill); a fire’s perimeter; and air temperature, wind, and humidity. They then predict where a fire will go, and when. Continue reading →

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August 31, 2012 by admin

Virtuoso Life | July/August 2012

Birth of a Spaceliner Download PDF

Virgin Galactic, Spaceport America, and Scaled Composites bring astrotourism to reality. The view from the Upham Hills, a lowly cluster of wind-scoured knolls protruding about 500 feet from New Mexico’s high desert, encompasses mostly hardscrabble flats. Three years ago, had you looked north a dozen miles, you’d have seen nothing—ranchland and perhaps a few roaming cattle. Today, however, a humongous orb about the size of a Costco punctuates the bleakness. What looks like an alien saucer is, in fact, Virgin Galactic’s new terminal and facilities at Spaceport America, the world’s first commercial spaceport.

It’s the culmination, some say, of New Mexico’s manifest destiny, set forth in the 1930s when Robert Goddard, the preeminent patriarch of rocketry, developed the first guided missiles at a secret site in nearby Roswell. Since then, aerospace has played an integral role in the state’s economy and identity, chiefly through projects at White Sands Missile Range, the largest U.S. military complex, which abuts Spaceport America’s property. Continue reading →

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August 23, 2012 by admin

OnEarth | Summer 2012

Dreamboat Download PDF

Royal Caribbean wants to clean up a notoriously dirty industry. Can it be done?

It’s dawn in early December, and I’m standing barefoot on a deserted beach that overlooks Falmouth, a colonial-era port, population 7,800, on Jamaica’s breezy northern coast, about 90 miles from the capital, Kingston. The air is deliciously cool and silky. Seabirds are pecking in the sand, scavenging for mole crabs at low tide. On the opposite side of the harbor, across shimmering blue water, there is a new $220 million port development for cruise ships. Royal Caribbean International and the Port Authority of Jamaica partnered to pay for its construction. Opened in March 2011, it was built to accommodate the largest passenger ships in the world, Allure of the Seas and Oasis of the Seas. Owned by Royal Caribbean and costing $1.4 billion apiece, they are sister ships—identical twins—five times the size of the Titanic, each carrying up to 6,300 passengers and 2,400 crew members.

When I first spot her, Allure is a pearly flyspeck on the horizon. But steaming toward Falmouth at 22 knots puts her on top of me in minutes. The ship, a skyscraper in repose, soars 213 feet above the waterline. Her port side, closest to shore, is near enough that I can make out sleepy-eyed passengers clutching coffee mugs on stateroom balconies. They’re snapping photos, too, with cameras flashing like glitter in the twilight. Continue reading →

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June 14, 2012 by admin

Is bigger always better? | June 14, 2012

Allure of the Seas is a Brobdingnagian spectacle. It’s a ship in name only. No, it’s not a ship. It’s Vegas on floats. While reporting my story on cruise-ship sustainability for OnEarth magazine, I drove from Miami to Fort Lauderdale to visit Allure. But I spotted her when I was still miles west of Port Everglades, her homeport. I was inland, driving on I-95. Allure rose above Florida’s verdant flatlands like a snowy mesa. I boarded her (I realize that sounds kinky) through a terminal building coupled to her

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