This is Dave MacKay, a 53-year-old pilot from Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. He has been selected to be the first captain of Virgin Galactic’s fleet of suborbital spaceships. He will fly the SpaceShipTwo when it launches in 2013.
MacKay watched the Apollo 11 landing as a kid and, since then, he always wanted to be a space pilot. He joined the Royal Air Force and stayed there for 16 years before he joined Virgin Atlantic, Sir Richard Branson’s normal air fleet. Now he’s going to be the first captain of the first commercial space fleet in history. [Virgin Galactic via Daily Mail]