SS1 Xprize pilot

I think his name is Brian something. He seems a lot more qualified than Melvill, he's a real test pilot and has flown prototype spacecraft before.
Why wass Melvill chosen to do the first flight out of the atmosphere over this guy?!?!?!?

there's melvill, siebold, and this brian guy. i think melvill's been with them the longest. i know he did the first few ss1 glide flights.

Melville I think is one of the owners of Scaled composites (or at least a director of the company) so I imagine that had something to do with it!!

James

Binnie flew the Roton ATV, so he's got the distinction of being the only man in the world to fly two privately funded manned spacecraft prototypes. (so far anyway)

Mike Melvill took a radically new design of Mach-3 rocketplane and flew it 60 miles *straight up* without computer control, by the seat of his pants. If that doesn't make him a "real test pilot", I don't know what does

Too right Stellvia, too right!!!!!!


Iain

Designer Burt Rutan and test pilots Brian Binnie, Mike Melvill and Peter Siebold were honored by their peers Saturday night for their work on the pioneering space program, the first privately funded, manned space program to successfully reach and return from suborbital space.

The Society of Experimental Test Pilots bestowed two of its most prestigious awards upon the SpaceShipOne crew during its annual fall symposium http://www.xprizenews.org/index.php?p=493

Melville is now, I think, only one of a handfull of people to fly to space solo multiple times. Many of the X-15 pilots can claim that odd distinction but none of the Mercury 7 can.

actually, out of all the hundreds of X-15 flights, only two of them went over 100 kilometers altitude. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-15

As for Mike M, Burt said on Tonight Show that Mike is the best stick-and-rudder pilot he's ever seen. And Burt's seen a lot.

Mike Melvill, a self-proclaimed high school drop out , actually got hooked up with Rutan when he and his wife decided to buy one of Rutan's kit planes... That was years ago and Rutan ended up hiring both of them to the company. Melvill has tons of flying experience. That's why he was the pilot of the June 21st mission that broke 100 km.... Pete Siebold was actually supposed to be the pilot for the Wednesday launch from what I've heard, but something about health problems prevented him from going up. So Brian Binnie had his turn yesterday...

well, reading Melvill's biography, whatever little there's published online is pretty inspiring.
Now I'm sure with a bit of luck I can become a space pilot myself.

I'm sure that Binnie's previous hard landing of SS1 (which trashed the gear and set Scaled back a couple of months) also had something to do with his position in the back of the rotation.

Well ... unless Rutan's a particularly nasty guy ... I doubt it. It's better to have something happen, learn from it, improve something (even if it's just improved training) and then just get on with it.

It's likely that Rutan know's the difference between incompetence and bad luck. The reason that Binnie was at the end of the draw was probably because he drew last.

DKH

There were three test pilots at Scaled on Tier One, and they were each supposed to fly one flight each. Melvill probably got the first one primarily because of his life's commitment to Scaled, and the fact that he had the most flight hours in SpaceShipOne at that point. To be honest, I doubt that competance was in issue - they can all fly perfectly well.

He got nod the second time because Siebold couldn't do it, and Rutan decided it was better for Melvill - who had already done such a mission - to try the repeat, since he only had literally a days notice.