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NEWS
RELEASE
Hondo, Texas
9 December 2005
For Immediate Release
Astronaut Mike Melvill
to Visit The EAA Texas Fly-In in May 2006
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On June 24th, 2005, Mike Melvill piloted
SpaceShipOne on its first
flight beyond the official edge of earth's
atmosphere into airless, weightless space.
 Friday
evening, May 12th, 2006, Melvill, the world's first
commercial astronaut, will arrive at The Texas
Fly-In in Hondo, Texas, where he will take part in
the educational Forums to be offered there.
E.A.A. Southwest Regional Fly-In President Stan
Shannon made the announcement today. Shannon and
Melvill met at
Air Venture Oshkosh last July, where Melvill and
Burt Rutan, designer of SpaceShipOne, had landed in
the launch vehicle White Knight to give home-built
airplane enthusiasts a close look at the first
civilian space vehicle and winner of the Ansari
X-Prize Competition.
Originally from Durban, South Africa, Melvill moved
to the United States from England in the 1970s and
became a U.S. citizen. Melvill and his wife Sally
have one son and four grandchildren.
Melvill is a vice president and general manager of
Scaled Composites, LLC, Burt Rutan's
 company;
he has 24 years of experience as a test pilot, and
has logged nearly 7,000 hours in over 130 types of
aircraft. Melvill has flown the first flights of
nine of Rutan's aircraft designs. He also helped
develop the docking system for SpaceShipOne.
An associate fellow of the
Society of Experimental Test Pilots, Melvill
received their
Iven C. Kincheloe trophy in 1999 for his work in
high-altitude development testing of Scaled
Composites' Model 281 Proteus. Earlier, he built
his own Long EZ aircraft, which he flew around the
world with Burt's brother Dick in 1997. He is also
the only person other than Dick Rutan or Jeana
Yeager to have piloted the
Voyager aircraft, the first airplane to fly
around the world without stopping or refueling, in
1986.
People attending The EAA Texas Fly-In at Hondo in
2006 can attend forums on Saturday, May 13th, at
which Mike Melvill will discuss how it was to help
design, build and then solo a rocket plane out of
the earth's stratosphere, re-deploy it as a
"shuttlecock" glider and re-enter the atmosphere
safely.
Mike will also be the featured speaker at the SWRFI
awards dinner on Saturday night.
Click here
to purchase
your dinner tickets online now!!
More information
about Mike Melvill, SpaceShipOne and The EAA
Texas Fly-In may be found at
www.eaatexasflyin.org.
Contact:
E. D. Yoes, Jr.
(210) 492-2504
eyoes@stic.net |
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