Michael Alsbury (March 19, 1975 – October 31, 2014) was an American test pilot for Scaled Composites. He died on October 31, 2014, during test flight PF04 of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise. (More from Wikipedia)
I go back a long way with Under Appreciation.
Probably the most memorable events of my schoolboy days were seeing the early spaceflights. Regular school went by the boards; the teachers brought in their portable TV sets, and we would all crowd around to watch, beginning with Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital flight in 1961 and John Glenn’s trip in orbit the following year.
I was amazed to find that the intervening sub-orbital flight by Gus Grissom was almost completely forgotten; I just couldn’t understand it. I looked it up on Wikipedia and was reminded that all didn’t go smoothly with that mission; though the whole flight was barely 15 minutes long, the capsule started filling up with water upon splashdown, and Grissom very nearly drowned when water started getting into his space suit also.
Besides this second American flight into space, Gus Grissom was also on one of the Gemini spacecraft and thus the first American to go into space twice. Gus Grissom was among the three astronauts that were killed in the cabin fire during a test for the planned launch of Apollo 1 in January 1967, twice illustrating that being an astronaut is one of the most dangerous professions today. Virgin Galactic had a disastrous launch just last October, killing the pilot Michael Alsbury and seriously injuring the co-pilot Peter Siebold.
(Year 5 Review)
