Aiming for the stars – Glide Flight

Source | Virgin Galactic / YouTube | 06 April 2024 1 minute
Marc Stucky “Forger”‘s enthusiasm for spaceflights dates back to when he was 12 years old and loved to follow the U.S. space program and read the article in National Geographic on Apollo 15 and hang gliding. Much has changed since then. Today, he is the Lead Test Pilot for Virgin Galactic, joined Scaled Composites in 2008 and flew three powered test flights in VSS Enterprise. Engineers are definitely early risers, they like to be airborne at sunrise to get quite a few test points done before returning safely back to the ground. Virgin Galactic is a spaceflight company that develops commercial spacecraft that one day will enable suborbital spaceflights and suborbital launces to regular space tourists. So regular space travel as we know it from various Hollywood productions will one day certainly become reality despite quite a few setbacks in recent years. While Sir Richard Branson had initially hoped to experience a maiden flight of this aircraft by the end of 2009, this date had to be delayed several times on a number of occasions, most recently due to in-flight loss of SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise in October 2014. But Virgin Galactic is not a quitter and is continuing its quest for “democratizing access to space for the benefit of life on Earth”. For more please check out www.virgingalactic.com