Civilian Space Projects
After leaving NASA, Searfoss served as a judge for the Ansari X-Prize, where he officially declared SpaceShipOne to have won the competition on October 4, 2004 after completing two flights within a two week period.
Searfoss is a test pilot instructor at the National Test Pilot School at the Mojave Spaceport.
Searfoss is one of two test pilots qualified to fly the XCOR Aerospace EZ-Rocket. He also served as XCOR's only test pilot for a rocket-powered prototype racing aircraft. He has a total of 52 rocket-powered flights and is the world's only tri-qualified rocket pilot (Space Shuttle, EZ Rocket, Rocket Racer prototype).
Most recently, in 2008, he was a featured guest in a Volkswagen commercial, where he argued with a black Beetle about who has more engineers between Volkswagen and NASA.
Read more about this topic: Richard A. Searfoss
Famous quotes containing the words space and/or projects:
“When my body leaves me
I’m lonesome for it.
but body
goes away to I don’t know where
and it’s lonesome to drift
above the space it
fills when it’s here.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)