David Mackay

I've been lucky enough to have flown some very interesting aircraft in the past, but SpaceShipTwo is far and away the most exciting of them all. ”

I can still remember them wheeling the black and white TV sets into our classroom at school so we could watch the men landing on the Moon, and that obviously had a huge impact. I later found out those people flying Apollo were ex-military test pilots, so I decided to join the Air Force and become a test pilot. ”

I thought any chance I had of space travel would be military or government-controlled. ”

I watched the moon landing as a boy, and I thought that was the most exciting thing ever, going into space, orbiting Earth and exploring other planets. That looked fantastic. ”

I have watched SS2 evolve over the years into an incredible vehicle that is going to open up space to more people than ever before. ”

I've always hankered after going into space and walking on the moon and Mars. I did want to be an astronaut, and had there been a manned space flight programme in the U.K., I would have been knocking on the door. ”

We go up just into space - space is most commonly accepted to be 100 kilometres above the earth's surface, and we go up just beyond that to about 350,000 ft. ”

Not long after I got my test pilot qualification, I realised there was no manned space flight programme in the U.K., and there was unlikely to be one. ”

In any aircraft you fly, you always think about what can go wrong, and you plan for it in advance. You always have back-up plans. ”

I do have a bit of a fear of heights. But I don't get scared of heights when I am flying a plane. ”