Forger Stucky
@Stuck4ger
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Test pilot/commercial astronaut who’s Forest Gumped his way through an amazing aerospace piloting career. Didn’t write “Test Gods”, just takes the blame ;)
Cape Canaveral, FL
Joined February 2015
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I’m on X for two main reasons - 1) to give unique insight into aerospace topics garnered from my unusually broad test pilot career. 2) To inject humor (usually sarcastic and sophomoric at best) in the hopes of getting at least one person to smile.
Follow me if you want to live…
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A few years ago we arranged for this collection of Burt Rutan designs to meet at Mojave for a unique heritage formation flight.
Viggen-Charlie Spinelli / Brian Maisler
Long-EZ- Mike Melvill
Veri-EZ - Klaus Savier
Defiant- Steve McShea
Boomerang- Forger Stucky / Tres Clements
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I’d like to have heard the Tower’s clearance for this landing and taxi. If you have a choice between being lucky and good, why not take both?
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From David Attenborough FaceBook: This photo was taken by Nathan Province from a C-17 at about 40 minutes from Oahu, Hawaii. The unusual glow is from a sun angle below the horizontal plane illuminating shallow altocumulus clouds, generating a remarkable, unexpected view
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@FOXWeatherDesk
@SpaceX
Yes, I took the video but I don’t want it shared on
@Fox
because I don’t want a simple factual video to somehow be associated with heavily biased news.
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NASA wanted a close chase of the X-38 in gliding flight to calibrate the air data system. I used an F-16 with 3 empty fuel tanks for maximum drag. I also had the landing gear down, speed brakes out, & used full rudder and opposite aileron up to the few seconds of data collection.
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I feel sorry for that dude that spent a year rendering V1
Yeahhhh
@elonmusk
was right when he said Raptor 2 was a lot simpler than Raptor 1 🤯 that is hard to even recognize as a Raptor!!!! Incredible!!!
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During my military and NASA flying days I never scheduled a photographer for me. Not once. Over a quarter of a century after the fact, I just got sent this photo of me taxiing out in the very cool F-16XL with an even cooler SR-71 in wait.
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My sister captured the
@SpaceX
#CrewDragon
capsule reentry early this morning from our hometown, Salina, KS.
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Saddened to hear of the passing of Soviet test pilot Anatoly Kvocher at age 72. He gained international recognition in the late ‘80s for his impressive MiG-29 flight demonstrations, one of which culminated in a very last-second ejection at the 1989 Paris Air Show due to a bird
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I don’t normally post work stuff but it was great day for New Space in New Mexico Space! The team at Gateway to Space, Eve, and Unity knocked it out of the park today!
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One day when I was flying a F/A-18 proficiency sortie at NASA-Dryden, I noticed the winds were over 150 kts so I turned directly into them & slowed down until my ground speed showed zero. After a few minutes of it, ATC finally asked me what I was flying.
I replied, “an F-18.”
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Wife: can you explain why you have a hickey on your neck?!
Husband: well, uh, you see this seal slapped me with an octopus!
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Tremendously saddened to learn a friend and true American hero passed away last night. Enjoy your final flight and may you RIP, Dick Rutan.
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These days it’s extremely unlikely to inadvertently land on the wrong aircraft carrier but it was once a thing. I remember when an F-14 that was based on a nuclear carrier landed on a diesel carrier! The “gaining ship” always returns the bounty but only after a bit of rebranding.
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@SciGuySpace
@nickschmidle
The most misleading statement today was
@virgingalactic
’s. The facts are the pilots failed to trim to achieve the proper pitch rate, the winds were well within limits, they did nothing of substance to address the trajectory error, & entered Class A airspace without authorization.
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Another gate crasher trying to get a front row seat to watch
@richardbranson
fly to space on
#Unity22
at
@Spaceport_NM
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Even after
@FAANews
of grounding
@virgingalactic
following
#unity22
, there continues to be a huge disconnect between company statements & my take on what went wrong, why, & the pilots’ failures to follow procedures & take appropriate actions. Time for an independent review?
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That’s true, the boosters launched separately, retracted their legs, burned for a few seconds and then coasted upwards, eventually joining with the center core in space.
#cant
-argue-with-crazy
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BREAKING — it appears that a large number of
@virgingalactic
’s Mojave, CA workforce were just told to gather their personal belongings and go home.
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@smartereveryday
They should be just tight enough to crack the plate, then whatever additional to make them horizontal.
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This 9/11 photo by Robert Clark really captures the horror of the moment of realization that our nation was under attack. The anniversary brings weird emotions to me. I was a newly trained United B-767 pilot that was scheduled to fly that flight on 9/18. I eventually lost my job
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Well this sucks. Whatever you might say about Brian, he was always the consummate gentleman. May you Rest In Peace, my friend. Nickel.
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The alignment pin can be clearly seen falling away from the WhiteKnightTwo pylon with the release of SpaceShipTwo Unity in the
@virgingalactic
publicly released flight video
Virgin Galactic: "The alignment pin and shear pin fitting assembly performed as designed during the mated portion of the flight, and only the alignment pin detached after the spaceship was released from the mothership."
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For some reason I was selected as a NASA astronaut finalist while I was still a TPS student. In the big board interview, John asked me “as a test pilot, I’d like you to critically compare for us the flying qualities of the F-18 to the F-4.”
Today we honor the legacy of astronaut John Young on his birthday.
John completed test pilot training in 1959 and worked on Crusader and Phantom fighter jets in the US Navy. He also set the world time-to-climb records to 3,000-meter and 25,000-meter altitudes in the Phantom.
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OTD in 2011, WK2 released us in
#SpaceShipTwo
Enterprise for the last planned high speed flutter glide flight prior to powered flight. It was just a 0.02 Mach increase from my previous. Unknown to all, the subtle change in trim setting meant the horizontal stabs were fully
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You could eject from an SR-71 at design mission speed of M3.2 because dynamic pressure is normally a bigger constraint for surviving aircraft ejection. It would be a heck of a thermal problem but you could design an ejection system that would be survivable to orbital Mach.
When Maverick ejected at Mach 10.5, he was going 7,000 mph, giving him 400 million joules of kinetic energy — the explosive power of 100 kg of TNT. A situation that human physiology is not designed to survive.
So, no. Maverick does not walk away from this. He be dead. Very dead.
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There is a lot of dark/dry/harsh humor in the fighter pilot biz. Two years ago I earned my commercial astronaut wings with
@virgingalactic
but I still have this fake motivational poster that I was given after a failed NASA astronaut selection process. It still makes me smile.
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Somewhere in this timeline the leadership came to the realization they were glad the team size wasn’t any larger.
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I once did a talk at the NYC Explorer’s Club and there were some
@virgingalactic
customers in attendance and one said that he had been to almost all the countries in the world and he wanted to fly on SS2 so he could see them all at once. I gave a tight-lipped head nod.
#marketing
Spending some time with
@DrSianProctor
learning about what it’s like to see Earth from ~575km. We tried to use a tortilla for scale to illustrate how large 🌎 looks in your field of view (first circular object we could find lol). We needed a bigger tortilla. Our planet is huge!
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It seems all the artist conceptions of balloons that claim a space or need-space experience show views from altitudes that are well beyond low earth orbit. I’m enclosing a Google Earth view from a more realistic altitude.
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Yesterday was the 11th anniversary of the first powered flight of SS2 Enterprise (myself and Mike Alsbury). We had Brian Binnie fly Proteus up ahead of us and ~800 ft lower in altitude. Photo by Michael Fuchs.
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Well since the post about flying slow in a standard F/A-18 seemed to resonate, I guess I’ll mention that at the time I also flew the thrust vectoring F-18 HARV. The bottom line is once you’ve tasted thrust vectoring you never want to go back to a standard fighter. You could sit
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Well I guess we know who will die in the movie.
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I know a lot of astronauts but I am awestruck by the fact that it took an outsider to do such a damn great interview. Perhaps
@rookisaacman
had no master that could discourage him from being candid but whatever the reason, thanks
@thesheetztweetz
for doing such a great interview!
I spoke to
@inspiration4x
commander
@rookisaacman
about the crew's time in orbit, the launch and reentry experience, his highlights and regrets, feedback for SpaceX, and more.
"The single most impactful moment for me was the moonrise."
Read the Q&A here:
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From the first time I saw the
@virgingalactic
eyeball in 2007, I thought it was a stunningly beautiful, elegant, & visionary graphic. But now something so well crafted & recognizable has suddenly been replaced. I’m curious what the public thinks of the original vs the new logo.
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OTD in 2020, 5+ years after the tragic crash of
#SS2
Enterprise, another VG employee & I drove up into the Garlock Mts. until the 4WD Land Rover couldn’t go any further & continued on foot to a set of coordinates that on Google Earth looked like a possible piece of wreckage. We
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When I left
@virgingalactic
I turned in my company phone & declined their offer of keeping the phone number. Today’s Facebook message got a chuckle out of me…
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RIP Paul Tompkins, may you climb high and dive deep. Your contributions to the industry were great and Team Blue will forever miss you 😰
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Probably the hardest thing about faking an Apollo moon landing would be figuring out where to hide all the hardware (that tens of thousands of spectators saw launch before their eyes) from the Soviets and Chinese who would have loved nothing more than to expose us if we cheated.
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An official
@virgingalactic
going away momento might have seemed insincere but a surprise unauthorized personalized photo from your teammates —
#PRICELESS
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After failing to trim down in the vertical [I have an excuse!!!] the nose pitched beyond the vertical & I got a GLIDE CONE caution as we accelerated away from the field. So I did a 180 roll and flew inverted to fix the caution & drive the reentry point directly over MHV. Whew!
On this day in 2018, we heard the words “Welcome to Space” for the very first time. Take in the view from
#VSSUnity
’s inaugural spaceflight.
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Primary objective: airspeed comparison (fly abeam, co-altitude, two wingspans of separation for as long as possible)
Biggest challenge: X-38 has a glide much worse than any chase plane, is released below stall speed, and accelerates quickly.
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Since I was around 30,000 feet altitude, this meant my indicated airspeed was around 90 knots. It was achievable but I was in full afterburner and in an elevator going down!
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Be careful what you brief and who you trust in your backseat! Can’t remember if you pulled the ejection seat handle? You’ve gotta be kidding me! If they recover the seats it should be pretty easy to prove who pulled it!
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The FAA issued a Special Flight Authorization for
@boomaero
to conduct supersonic flight operations within the established supersonic corridors within the R-2508 lateral boundaries.
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I’m hearing that astronaut-test pilot-fighter pilot extraordinaire and all around great human — General Joe Engle has passed away.😢
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Eleven years ago the NASA Shuttle Carrier Aircraft flew by Mojave Air and Spaceport ferrying the Shuttle Orbiter Endeavor to retirement. The B-747 on the ramp was one of two taken apart to build the Stratolaunch Roc aircraft.
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Not a bad day at the office.
#dontscrewthepooch
“I just let it go and it flew beautifully.” Fascinating reflections of
@virgingalactic
pilot – now astronaut - Forger
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I always enjoyed Halloween as a kid and I still enjoy passing out candy to the kids. But it will always be a somber day for me and a very sad day for some loved ones. Thanks
@Astro2fish
for flying mini’s name tag to space.
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Why do aerospace companies use “anomaly” for what the average person would call an explosion, crash, loss of vehicle-type event? It’s a euphemism that I feel alienates those they are hoping to placate. Whether facts or rumor, the truth will come out & up front candor is best.
Regarding last week’s Centaur V anomaly, here’s a photo of the resulting explosion at Marshall Space Flight Center. Good luck to ULA on its investigation and getting the Vulcan Cert-1 mission off the ground.
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Incredible that
@blueorigin
*and* the astronauts agreed to release full video & audio of the entire flight from crew-up to landing. Certainly something that you won’t see from a certain other company’s last suborbital flight ;)
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Check out the fascinating story by
@SciGuySpace
on just how ingenious Ingenuity was. Main computer based on a modern cell phone chip with incredible performance and cost benefits vs the NASA-standard ~$250K rad hard chip using last century tech.
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I don’t normally retweet work stuff but this is just too cool.
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@VeryBadLlama
Congrats, you’re now on the WADNP hit list for reparations. (World Association of Descendants of Neanderthalic Peoples)
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Controlled fusion has been tantalizingly just out of reach for decades. This could be huge for humanity.
BREAKING NEWS: This is an announcement that has been decades in the making.
On December 5, 2022 a team from DOE's
@Livermore_Lab
made history by achieving fusion ignition.
This breakthrough will change the future of clean power and America’s national defense forever.
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Cool t-shirt. I wonder if they meant to depict Russian jets flying out of the USA red white and blue?
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One of the things I pushed for
@virgingalactic
was electronic polling for the various commit points in the mission timeline. Even though it has years of heritage “go” and “no go” seem like an invitation for a simple clipped transmission to become a critical link in an accident.
So my big remaining question about Firefly’s launch is whether the half assed ‘abort’ heard over the loop was relevant to the engine failure, or something else. Was it unrelated, or did we misunderstand.
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The operating costof the Blackbird also included the 3 tankers used for operational missions, one that went to the assigned route, the other two that went to decoy routes.
Reading SR-71 operating cost estimates from the late 1980s that range from $160k to $200k PER HOUR.
That would place it at around a half a million dollars per hour to fly, when adjusted to today’s inflation.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Cold War was crazy.
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I never heard a shock wave in a plane until I did a transonic dive glide test and the first couple short rocket burns in SpaceShipTwo. In the composite vehicle you can hear the “train” form overhead the cockpit and as you go supersonic it races aft and disappears behind. When you
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And again, Carla Thomas was in the back seat and got the incredible and iconic photo.
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And in the category of NASA mission t-shirts that probably wouldn’t get made today…
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When I first started working at
@ScaledC
in 2009, I was assigned to Bob Morgan (chief designer of WhiteKnightTwo) and given the task of studying escape methods for the crew of what became Roc. Here he is playing chess under the approach path yesterday. Photo by Noah Joraanstad.
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@torybruno
Congratulations on a successful stage separation. (I’m avoiding a fairing reference)
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My view one year ago today. Going to space upside down so we can enjoy the view!
#becausewecan
#spaceshiptwo
@virgingalactic
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Anatoly visited NASA Dryden where he got to fly the F-15, F-16 and F/A-18 and really loved the F-16. After trying a practice field carrier landing at China Lake, on departure he did an unbriefed low altitude aileron roll. We were waiting for the phone call from the Navy brass but
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There’s a lot of FUD about
@Tesla
FSD but I have a very close friend who realized something was very wrong & used FSD to drive home before dialing 911. Thankfully no permanent damage from the mini-stroke.
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My rule of thumb is to always strive to leave yourself *two* ways out. This appears to be horrendously violated by:
1. Flying at full power while pushing the glider for max aerodynamic speed (highest risk of collapse) without hands on the controls to deal with such an event.
2.
Paramotor Pilot and Youtuber Anthony Vella suddenly falls 85ft out of the sky in horrifying crash
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@Erdayastronaut
@elonmusk
It’s great that you are secure enough to be able to be honest. It would be easy to self-censure to not risk any repercussions to your day job.
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@SpaceX
#FalconHeavy
booster’s amazing supersonic approach to Landing Pad 1 & 2 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station! Sorry about the poor autofocus!
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@johnkrausphotos
@AstroJaws
@Astro_Andreas
@Astro_Satoshi
@NASA_Astronauts
@esa
@JAXA_en
@roscosmos
You realize you can’t up your game forever, right?
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What I remember well was when he got a tour of our ejection seat shop, he made the comment, “American ejection seats are little more than a stool with a rocket.” Touché
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@SpaceX
faring migration season is surprisingly short as I saw these two flying south a few days ago but they are already on the final leg north returning to their roost. I expect it will soon be faring mating season.
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There are only a few hang glider companies left in existence & one of the best is Aeros, a Ukranian company. Yesterday, their chief sail maker was killed at the Russian front.
#UkraineRussiaWar
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@elonmusk
We always here about how bad the methane in cow farts is for global warming. Don’t your engines run on methane? Aren’t there a lot of cows in Texas?
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The NASA F-15 ACTIVE was certainly impressive. I remember chasing it through a MIL power 5g turn test point at 30,000 feet. I was in full afterburner in a F/A-18 and it left me in the dust.
Adding canards and vectored thrust to the F-15 massively reduced take-off roll and the length of runway needed to land - so it could be used from very short strips and damaged airfields. Should it have gone into production do you think?
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A very insidious cycle. More thrust = more propellants. Where? New tanks or CTN means a new qual program. Very hard to get one or two custom tanks. More weight? Oops, beefier brakes & landing gear. Wing now needs reinforcements. Now even heavier — needs even more thrust! 1/3
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Impressive transparency from
@relativityspace
🧵 A quick breakdown of the reasons for our aborts during terminal counts today:
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