Michael Masucci

Early life and education

Michael Masucci, born in 1963, was raised in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, in an Italian-American household. He attended La Salle College High School, a Catholic all-boys school in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania. As a teenager, the Apollo program, Skylab, and the Space Shuttle sparked his interest, leading him to apply to MIT and the U.S. Air Force Academy—the only schools then offering astronautical engineering degrees.

He earned a bachelor’s in that field from the Academy in 1985. He had started flying in 1982, getting a private pilot license through the Academy’s Aero Club, and also joined its flying team, gliding, and parachuting programs. Later, he completed a master’s in mechanical engineering at California State University, Fresno.

Career

After commissioning into the U.S. Air Force, Masucci attended pilot training at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma, flying the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon under call sign "Sooch". He served as a Northrop T-38 Talon instructor for several years before moving to Beale Air Force Base in California to pilot the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, becoming an instructor and evaluator for the U-2 program. He later joined Edwards Air Force Base as a test pilot and taught at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School.

As a lieutenant colonel, he led the 1st Reconnaissance Squadron, the oldest flying unit in the U.S. military, and trained U-2 and Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk pilots. After retiring from the Air Force in 2008, he became a private pilot captain flying the Cessna Citation X for XOJET on charter flights. In May 2013, Masucci joined Virgin Galactic as a test pilot and lead pilot trainer for SpaceShipTwo. He performed five test flights of VSS Enterprise and VSS Unity beginning in 2013 and first flew to space during the VSS Unity VF-01 mission on February 22, 2019, becoming the 6th commercial astronaut and 570th person in space.

He has since piloted 5 crewed sub-orbital spaceflight missions, including Unity 22, Unity 25, Galactic 01, Galactic 03, and Galactic 05. He has flown 11,000+ hours in 80 types of aircraft and gliders, and is an associate fellow of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, and a member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association and Experimental Aircraft Association.