Brian Binnie
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Brian Binnie is one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne, the experimental spaceplane developed by Scaled Composites.
Binnie, an alumnus of Brown and Princeton Universities, served for 20 years in the United States Navy as a naval aviator flying the A-7 Corsair II, A-6 Intruder, F/A-18 Hornet, and AV-8B Harrier II. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School in 1988. Binnie also helped test the Rotary Rocket Roton
On 17 December, 2003, the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first powered flight, Binnie piloted the first powered test flight of SpaceShipOne, flight 11P, which reached a top speed of Mach 1.2 and a height of 20.7 kilometers. On October 4 2004 he piloted SpaceShipOne's second Ansari X Prize flight, flight 17P, winning the X Prize and becoming the 434th person, and the first native of Scotland, to go into space. Reaching a height of about 112 km, Binnie become only the second person to earn his astronaut wings on a non-government spacecraft. His flight set a rocket plane height record, breaking the old record set by the North American X-15 in 1963.
Quotes
- "I wake up every morning and thank God I live in a country where all of this is possible. Where you have the Yankee ingenuity to roll up your sleeves, get a band of people who believe in something and go for it and make it happen. It doesn't happen anywhere else." — October 4, 2004, at a ceremony after completing flight 17P [1] (http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,65212,00.html)
External link
- Scaled Composites biography (http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/binnie.htm)de:Brian Binnie