Peter Siebold (born 1971) is a member of the Scaled Composites astronaut team. He is their Director of Flight Operations, and was one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo, the experimental spaceplanes developed by the company. On October 31, 2014, Siebold and Michael Alsbury were piloting the SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise on flight PF04, when the craft came apart in mid-air and then crashed, killing Alsbury and injuring Siebold. (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)
