Peter Siebold (test pilot)

Peter Siebold (* 1971 ) is an American test pilot and a member of the SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo pilot teams .

The experimental rocket aircraft SpaceShipOne was developed by Scaled Composites . On April 8, 2004, he piloted the second test flight with the designation 13P, which reached a speed of Mach 1.6 and an altitude of 32 kilometers .

Siebold holds an aeronautical engineering degree from California Polytechnic University . He has been a design engineer at Scaled Composites since 1996, and in the TierOne project he was responsible for the simulator, the navigation project and the ground control systems.

As one of four qualified pilots for SpaceShipOne, he was a candidate for the second prize flight to win the Ansari X-Prize . However, Scaled Composites successfully carried out this with Brian Binnie on October 4, 2004 and won the prize money of 10 million US dollars.

For testing the SpaceShipOne, he and his colleagues Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie received the 2004 Iven C. Kincheloe Award for outstanding performance in flight testing. In 2009 he again received the Iven C. Kincheloe Award for testing the White Knight Two .

On October 31, 2014, Siebold survived the crash of the VSS Enterprise , a SpaceShipTwo- class spacecraft . While Siebold was able to save himself with a parachute and was seriously injured, his co-pilot Michael Alsbury died .

Web links

• Scaled Composites Biography (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Iven C. Kincheloe Award - List of Past Recipients
2. ^ Scaled Composites' Siebold Awarded Iven Kincheloe Award
3. ↑ Scaled Composites: NewsRelease ( Memento of the original from November 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , November 1, 2014