Fred W. Haise Jr.
Born: Nov. 14, 1933, Biloxi, Mississippi
NASA experience: Haise was a research pilot at the NASA Flight
Research Center at Edwards, California, before coming to Houston and the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, and from September 1959 to March 1963 he was a research pilot at the NASA Lewis Research
Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Haise was one of the 19 astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966. He served as backup lunar module pilot for the Apollo 8 and 11 missions, and backup spacecraft commander for the Apollo 16 mission. Haise was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 13
(April 11-17, 1970) and has logged 142 hours and 54 minutes in space.
Apollo 13 was scheduled for a 10-day mission for the first landing in the hilly, upland Fra Mauro region of the moon. The original flight plan, however, was modified en route to the moon due to a failure of the service module cryogenic oxygen system which occurred approximately 55 hours into the flight. Haise and fellow crewmen James A. Lovell (spacecraft commander) and John L. Swigert (command module pilot), working closely with Houston ground controllers, converted their lunar module “Aquarius” into an effective lifeboat. Their emergency activation and operation of lunar module systems conserved electrical power and water in sufficient supply to assure their safety and survival while in space and for the return to Earth. Military experience: His military career began in October 1952 as a Naval Aviation Cadet at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. He was the Aerospace Research Pilot School’s outstanding graduate of Class 64A and served with the U.S. Air Force from October 1961 to August 1962 as a tactical fighter pilot and as chief of the 164th Standardization-Evaluation Flight of the 164th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Mansfield, Ohio. From March 1957 to September 1959, Haise was a fighter interceptor pilot with the 185th Fighter Interceptor Squadron in the Oklahoma Air National Guard. He also served as a tactics and all weather flight instructor in the U.S. Navy Advanced Training Command at NAAS Kingsville, Texas, and was assigned as a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot to VMF-533 and 114 at MCAS Cherry Point, North Carolina, from March 1954 to September 1956. Haise has accumulated 9,300 hours’ flying time, including 6,200 hours in jets.