Mike Melvill
Michael Winston Melvill, called Mike Melvill ( born November 30, 1940 in Johannesburg, South Africa), is an American entrepreneur and the first astronaut with a purely privately funded spacecraft reached by suborbitalem flight as a pilot space.
Melvill was born in Johannesburg. His parents moved into his childhood Kloof. There, Mike attended private schools: the Highbury Preparatory School in Hillcrest and later the Hilton College, Hilton, outside Pietermaritzburg.
Melvill left in 11th grade school to follow his high school sweetheart Sally Smythe to Europe because she was there to stop her father's wish the school. The two married in Scotland and moved from there to the USA.
Mike, who is now a U.S. citizen, lives with his wife Sally since 1978 in Tehachapi ( California). The couple has a married son, who now has four children himself.
His work as a test pilot
Melvill was launched on 21 June 2004 with the spacecraft SpaceShipOne from the Mojave Air & Space Port in California on a ballistic flight that brought him down to about 100 km altitude, and landed a short time later safely to the earth. In May 2004, he presented as a civilian pilot to a record in which he reached a height of 64 kilometers.
Two hours after landing, Melvill was awarded the astronaut badge. He is the first civilian man has an X -15 flight in the 1960s, who received this for a flight on an airplane.
At the time of the flight, the test pilot had completed a 24 -year-old flight experience and over 6,460 flight hours. He is also vice president of the company Scaled Composites, the company that built the spacecraft.
Melvill is an associate member of the Association of experimental test pilots. In 1999 he received the Iven C. Kincheloe Award, an award for its altitude test flights for the development of the aircraft with the designation 281 Proteus. For the testing of SpaceShipOne, he was awarded his colleagues Peter Siebold and Brian Binnie in 2004 for the second time with the Iven C. Kincheloe Award for outstanding performance during flight testing.
He also built his own long-haul aircraft, which he flew around the world along with Dick Rutan in 1997. He is the only driver besides Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, the famous airplane Voyager controlled.