Pioneering astronaut who walked the moon dies at 87
Legendary astronaut John Young, who walked on the moon and later commanded the first space shuttle flight, has died, NASA said on Saturday. Young was 87.
The space agency said Young died Friday night at home in Houston following complications from pneumonia.
NASA called Young one of its pioneers — the only agency astronaut to go into space as part of the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs, and the first to fly into space six times. He was the ninth man to walk on the moon.
“Astronaut John Young’s storied career spanned three generations of spaceflight,” acting NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot said in an emailed statement. “John was one of that group of early space pioneers whose bravery and commitment sparked our nation’s first great achievements in space.”
Counting his takeoff from the moon in 1972 as commander of Apollo 16, Young’s blastoff tally stood at seven, for decades a world record.
He flew twice during the twoman Gemini missions of the mid-1960s, twice to the moon during NASA’s Apollo program, and twice more aboard the new space shuttle Columbia in the early 1980s.
His NASA career lasted 42 years, longer than any other astronaut’s, and he was revered among his peers for his dogged dedication to keeping crews safe — and his outspokenness in challenging the space agency’s status quo.
Chastened by the 1967 Apollo launch-pad fire that killed three astronauts, Young spoke up after the 1986 shuttle Challenger launch accident. His hard scrutiny continued well past shuttle Columbia’s disintegration during re-entry in 2003.
“Whenever and wherever I found a potential safety issue, I always did my utmost to make some noise about it, by memo or whatever means might best bring attention to it,” Young wrote in his 2012 memoir Forever Young.
He said he wrote a “mountain of memos” between the two shuttle accidents to “hit people over the head.” Such practice bordered on heresy at NASA.
Young remained an active astronaut into his early 70s, until his retirement in 2004.
“You don’t want to be politically correct,” he said in a 2000 interview with the Associated Press. “You want to be right.”
Young was in NASA’s second astronaut class, chosen in 1962, along with the likes of Neil Armstrong, Pete Conrad and James Lovell.
Young was the first of his group to fly in space: He and Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom made the first manned Gemini mission in 1965. Unknown to NASA, Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich on board, given to him by Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra. When it came time to test NASA’s official space food, Young handed Grissom the sandwich as a joke.
The ensuing scandal over that corned beef on rye — two silly minutes of an otherwise triumphant five-hour flight — always amazed Young. Sandwiches already had flown in space, Young said in his book, but NASA brass and Congress considered this one a multimillion-dollar embarrassment and outlawed corned beef sandwiches in space forever after.
Two years later, with Gemini over and Apollo looming, Young asked Grissom why he didn’t say something about the bad wiring in the new Apollo 1 spacecraft. Grissom feared doing so would get him fired, Young said. A few weeks later, on Jan. 27, 1967, those wires contributed to the fire that killed Grissom, Edward White II and Roger Chaffee in a countdown practice at Cape Canaveral.
It was the safety measures put in place after the fire that got 12 men, Young included, safely to the surface of the moon and back.
Young commanded space shuttle Columbia’s successful maiden voyage in 1981. It was a risky endeavour: Never before had NASA launched people on a rocket ship that had not first been tested in space. Young pumped his fists in jubilation after emerging from Columbia on the California runway, after the two-day flight.
Co-pilot and close friend Robert Crippen called flying with Young “a real treat.”
Young made his final trek into orbit aboard Columbia two years later, again as its skipper.
Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, Young maintained the U.S. should be doing two to three times the amount of space exploration that it was doing. NASA should be developing massive rockets to lift payloads to the moon to industrialize it, he said, and building space systems for detecting and deflecting comets or asteroids that could threaten Earth.
“The country needs it. The world needs it. Civilization needs it,” Young said in 2000.
Young was born on Sept. 24, 1930, and grew up in Orlando, Florida. He became interested early on in aviation, making model planes.
He earned an aeronautical engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952 and went on to join the U.S. navy and serve in Korea. He eventually became a fighter pilot and test pilot.
Young received more than 100 major accolades in his lifetime, including the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1981.