Brian Binnie
William Brian Binnie was a naval aviator, test pilot, and commercial astronaut who piloted SpaceShipOne's prize-winning Flight 17P. That flight completed the Ansari X Prize campaign and helped define the early commercial suborbital era.
- Born
- April 26, 1953
- Died
- September 15, 2022
- Birthplace
- West Lafayette, Indiana,United States
Flights
1
Spacewalks
N/A
EVA time
N/A
In space
About 5 minutes above space boundary
Bio
Binnie was born in Indiana, spent part of his childhood in Scotland, and later studied at Brown and Princeton. He served twenty-one years in the United States Navy, flying aircraft including the A-7, A-6, F/A-18, and AV-8B before moving into private .
At Scaled Composites, Binnie became one of the key SpaceShipOne pilots. He flew the first powered SpaceShipOne test flight in 2003 and then piloted Flight 17P on October 4, 2004, reaching 112.01 kilometers.
Flight 17P won the Ansari X Prize for the SpaceShipOne team and set a winged-aircraft altitude record at the time. Binnie later continued flight-test and aerospace work with companies including Scaled Composites and XCOR.