Virgin Galactic Flight Test Director Mark Stucky Leaves Company

Mark “Forger” Stucky, flight test director and pilot for Virgin Galactic, is no longer with the space tourism company.

“I am now a former director of flight tests and a former pilot of SpaceShipTwo,” Stucky wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

He added in a comment on LinkedIn that he had not left the space tourism company “on my own schedule.”

Virgin Galactic confirmed to CNBC that Stucky “is no longer employed,” but did not explain further.

“We thank him for his 12 years of service in the flight test program,” a spokesperson for Virgin Galactic said in a statement.

Stucky helped develop Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo system, first serving as an engineering test pilot for Scaled Composites – who built the spacecraft for Virgin Galactic – before spending the last six years as a pilot of principal test and flight test director of Virgin Galactic.

He flew the first Virgin Galactic test flight that reached space, launched on December 13, 2018. The Federal Aviation Administration awarded Stucky – the 568^e no one to fly in space – the “Commercial Astronaut Wings,” an honor the United States has bestowed on those who cross the 80 kilometer border the government recognizes as space.

In addition to leading Virgin Galactic’s first space flight test, Stucky was also the pilot commanding the first glide and rocket-powered flight of the SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity spacecraft.

Stucky has flown over 170 different types of aircraft throughout his career, which also included the US Marines, NASA, and the US Air Force.

Virgin Galactic has seven pilots on staff to fly the VSS Unity and the VMS Eve carrier aircraft. The company recently added two pilots to this corps in October 2020, when it hired Royal Canadian Air Force pilot Jameel Janjua and US Marine Corps pilot Patrick Moran.