Michael Melvill
Michael Winston Melvill called Mike Melvill (* the 30th November 1940 in Johannesburg , South Africa ) is an American entrepreneur and the first astronaut who as a pilot with a privately funded spacecraft by suborbitalem flight to space reached.
Melville's parents moved to Kloof during his childhood . There he attended the Highbury Preparatory School in Hillcrest and the Hilton College in Hilton, outside of Pietermaritzburg .
Melvill left school in the 11th grade to follow his childhood sweetheart Sally Smythe to Europe, who was supposed to finish school there at her father's request. The two married in Scotland and moved from there to the USA.
He has lived in Tehachapi ( California ) with his wife Sally since 1978 and is now a US citizen. The couple have a married son who has four children of his own.
His work as a test pilot
Melvill took off on June 21, 2004 with the spacecraft SpaceShipOne from Mojave Air & Space Port in California on a ballistic flight that brought it to an altitude of over 100 kilometers, and landed safely back on earth a short time later. As early as May 2004 he set a record as a civilian pilot, in which he reached an altitude of 64 kilometers.
Two hours after landing, Melvill was awarded the astronaut badge. He is the first civilian person since an X-15 flight in the 1960s, who received this for a flight with an airplane.
At the time of the flight, the test pilot had 24 years of flight experience and over 6,460 flight hours. He is also vice president of Scaled Composites , the company that built the spaceship.
Melvill is an associate member of the Association of Experimental Test Pilots. In 1999 he received the Iven C. Kincheloe Award for his altitude test flights to develop the aircraft called the 281 Proteus . For testing the SpaceShipOne, he and his colleagues Peter Siebold and Brian Binnie received the Iven C. Kincheloe Award for the second time in 2004 for outstanding performance in flight tests.
He also built his own long-haul aircraft , which he and Dick Rutan flew around the world in 1997. He is the only pilot who, alongside Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager , piloted the famous Voyager aircraft .
Web links
- Biography at Scaled-Composites ( Memento from February 4, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
- Short biography of Michael Melvill at spacefacts.de
- Biography of Michael Melvill in the Encyclopedia Astronautica (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Iven C. Kincheloe Award - List of Past Recipients ( Memento from August 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Melvill, Michael |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Melvill, Michael Winston (full name); Melvill, Mike |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American-South African astronaut and test pilot |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 30, 1940 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Johannesburg , South Africa |