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Michael Tyner 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.
At the time of his death, he had 1800 flight hours, 1600 of them as a test pilot and engineer with Scaled Composites.
In 2013, he received the Ray E. Tenhoff Award for the most outstanding technical paper at the Society of Experimental Test Pilots symposium along with Mark Stucky and Clint Nichols.
On October 31, 2014, Alsbury was test flying the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, VSS Enterprise with Peter Siebold. The craft broke up in-flight, resulting in a total loss of VSS Enterprise, which crashed in the California Mojave Desert. Alsbury was unable to exit the spacecraft, and his remains were found still strapped to his seat in the fuselage. The pilot, Peter Siebold, survived. It was the ninth time that Alsbury had flown aboard the aircraft.
His name was added to the Space Mirror Memorial in 2020.
He was posthumous award the FAA Commercial Astronaut Wings in 2021.
Legacy
On November 4, 2014, episode 5 of BBC One's Human Universe, presented by Brian Cox, was dedicated to Alsbury, as it had a sequence on Virgin Galactic test pilot David Mackay.
Categories: 1975 Births, 2014 Deaths, Accidental Deaths In California, American Test Pilots, California Polytechnic State University Alumni, Commercial Astronauts, Scaled Composites, Space Program Fatalities, Victims Of Aviation Accidents Or Incidents In 2014, Victims Of Flight Test Accidents, Virgin Galactic
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