USS Flight Mission Specialists
Beth Moses, Chief Astronaut Instructor at Virgin Galactic. Moses obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Purdue University. She worked for NASA’s Johnson Space Center as the extravehicular activity system manager for the International Space Station. She was the first woman to make a spaceflight on a commercially launched vehicle, Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity VF-01 flight on Feb. 22, 2019.
Colin Bennett, Lead Operations Engineer at Virgin Galactic. Bennett obtained a master’s in aerospace engineering at the University of Liverpool and worked as a flight physics engineer for QinetiQ. He later worked as a performance engineer and a flight operations engineer at Virgin Atlantic Airways before joining Virgin Galactic in 2015.
Sirisha Bandla, Vice President of Government Affairs and Research Operations at Virgin Galactic. Born in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh state, India, Bandla obtained a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Purdue University and a master’s of business administration from George Washington University. She worked as associate director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation before joining Virgin Galactic in 2015.
Sir Richard Branson,
70, founder of Virgin Galactic. Branson is an entrepreneur who in the 1970s founded Virgin Group, a conglomerate that owns stakes in Virgin-branded companies in a wide variety of industries. In 1972, he founded Virgin Records, a chain of record stores. He founded Virgin Atlantic Airways in 1981, and in 2004 announced the formation of his space tourism company, Virgin Galactic. He was knighted at Buckingham Palace in 2000. Forbes this year estimated his net worth at $5.6 billion. He and his wife, Joan, have two children, Holly and Sam.