Meet the Designer Perhaps it’s an ego thing, but I assumed that some people might be curious about the man designing the aircraft.  Who is he, what are his qualifications, why is he doing this, etc.  So let me introduce myself. Hello, my name is Mike Fox.  It’s been my goal to design and build my own airplane since I was a teenager.  I earned a Private Pilot certificate when I was 18 and enjoyed flying for the next twenty years.  Eventually my priorities changed.  I got married and began to re- evaluate my career in engineering.  I’d been designing spacecraft at TRW for ten years and wanted to try something different.  Got a job at Advanced Aerodynamics & Structures Inc. (AASI) as a design supervisor working on the JetCruzer 500.  AASI went bankrupt and I ended up at Scaled Composites, the most fun technical job I’ve ever had.  Went to lunch with Burt Rutan.  Watched SpaceShipOne get built and witnessed the first private manned space flight.  Got tired of low pay and Mojave after three years.  Returned to my family and TRW, which then got bought by Northrop Grumman.  I worked as a section manager and design lead on various spacecraft programs and ended up on the James Web Space Telescope, which is where I am today. I’ve always had a strong interest in aviation, especially unconventional designs, VTOL aircraft, and electric propulsion.  Decades after first thinking about it, I have acquired the knowledge, experience and financial resources to pursue my dream.  I chose a difficult challenge: Improving the comfort, safety and performance of current canard aircraft.  The Apollo is far from perfect but it achieves my objective.  It is my design and my vision and now I have to build it. If you’d like to learn more about my experiences at Scaled Composites and the development of SpaceShipOne, be sure to download the PDF briefing entitled “My Big Fat Scaled Adventure” from the Downloads page. Site Map Email the Designer Copyright © 2012 Apollo Canard