Astronaut walked moon, led first space shuttle crew
Legend worked at NASA for 42 years, was safety advocate.
Legendary astronaut John Young, who walked on the moon and later commanded the first space shuttle flight, has died, NASA said Saturday. Young was 87.
The space agency said Young died Friday night at home in Houston after 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,” 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.”
He flew twice during the two-man 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. Counting his takeoff from the moon in 1972 as commander of Apollo 16, his blastoff tally stood at seven, for decades a world record.
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 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.”
Young was born Sept. 24, 1930, and grew up in Orlando, Fla. He became interested early on in aviation, making model planes. He spent his last high school summer working on a surveying team. The job took him to Titusville due east of Orlando; he never imagined that one day he would be sitting on rockets across the Indian River, blasting off for the moon.
He earned an aeronautical engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952 and went on to join the Navy and serve in Korea as a gunnery officer. He eventually became a Navy fighter pilot and test pilot.
Young received more than 100 major accolades in his lifetime, including the prestigious Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1981.
Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, who orbited the moon in 1969 as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked its surface, considered Young “the memo-writing champion of the astronaut office.” Young kept working at Johnson Space Center in Houston “long after his compatriots had been put out to pasture or discovered other green fields,” Collins wrote in the foreword of “Forever Young.”
Indeed, Young remained an active astronaut into his early 70s, long after all his peers had left, and held on to his role as NASA’s conscience until his retirement in 2004.
“You don’t want to be politically correct,” he said in 2000. “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.