New York (CNN Business) Mark “Forger” Stucky, who for six years headed the test pilot program at space company Virgin Galactic before he says he was fired earlier this year, is taking a job with the company’s chief competitor, Blue Origin. Stucky said he will join Blue Origin’s “Advanced Development Programs” team, where he said in a statement to CNN that he will “do my best to contribute to [CEO Jeff Bezos’] amazing vision of humans not just having a continuous presence in space but truly becoming a space-faring species.” Blue Origin confirmed Stucky’s hiring in an email. Stucky piloted the first flight aboard Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo that reached the edge of space in 2018 . That flight was widely considered to be the first crewed mission to space to launch from US soil since NASA’s Space Shuttle Program retired in 2011, and it earned him a pair of commercial astronaut wings. He was also a key figure in “Test Gods,” a recent book by New Yorker writer Nicholas Schmidle, which mapped out previously undisclosed issues with a 2019 flight of SpaceShipTwo. In the book, Stucky also speaks candidly about the risks involved with the spacecraft, including a vivid account… Read full this story
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