Peter Siebold

Peter Siebold (born 1971) is a member of the Scaled Composites astronaut team. He is their Vice President of Flight Operations, and was one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo, the experimental spaceplanes developed by the company. On April 8, 2004, Siebold piloted the second powered test flight of SpaceShipOne, flight 13P, which reached a top speed of Mach 1.6 and an altitude of 32.0 kilometres (105,000 ft). On October 31, 2014, Siebold and Michael Alsbury were piloting the SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise on flight PF04, when the craft came apart in mid-air and then crashed, killing Alsbury and injuring Siebold.

Siebold is the only person in history to have survived an in-flight spacecraft breakup, having fallen 50,000 feet (15,000 m) upon breakup, with his parachute deploying automatically at about 20,000 feet.