https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/r...ilot-35gnvqgfm
Virgin Galactic jettisons its chief test pilot
Virgin Galactic has parted company with its flight test director Mark “Forger” Stucky, the daring flying ace seen as an integral part of Sir Richard Branson’s
quest beyond Earth.
“Departing a company not on my own timeline was a first for me,” he told
The Times, after announcing the news on his LinkedIn page. “If life throws you lemons, then maybe it’s time to learn to juggle,” he added.
A respected aviator who flew with the US Marines, navy and air force, including combat missions during the first Gulf War and the Iraq War, Stucky, 62, became a test pilot for Nasa in 1993.
After stints in the commercial airline industry and back in the military, he was hired as a test pilot in 2009 by Scaled Composites, a California aerospace company run by Burt Rutan, whose success with experimental suborbital rocket planes led to Branson founding Virgin Galactic.
Branson hired Stucky in 2015, ten years after partnering with Rutan to co-found The Spaceship Company and build more spacecraft with the intention of ultimately flying passengers.
Stucky was central to a book by Nicholas Schmidle titled
Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut published just weeks ago.
It chronicled Virgin Galactic’s rise from a faltering space start-up to the first suborbital passenger space liner, including a disaster in 2014 that killed the pilot Mike Alsbury during a test flight of the company’s rocket ship VSS Enterprise over the Mojave desert, California.
The previous year, Alsbury and Stucky had piloted the spacecraft to 48,000ft on its first powered flight, breaking the sound barrier and marking a key milestone in Virgin Galactic’s path to space.
Terry Virts, a former commander of the International Space Station and a colleague of Stucky, said: “He’s a great test pilot and has been a big part of helping Virgin Galactic get their spaceship flying.”
Others in the industry said that losing Stucky was “hard to fathom” and “makes no sense”.
Virgin Galactic declined to share the reasons for the separation.