The Longest-serving Astronaut

Young’s career was full of firsts, the most notable being in April 1981, when he commanded space shuttle Columbia on its first space shuttle mission. It was the first time a piloted spacecraft was tested in space without previous unpiloted orbital flights. Two years later, Young commanded STS-9, the first Spacelab mission. During their 10day flight, the six crewmembers worked round the clock in 12-hour shifts, conducting more than 70 experiments in a range of scientific disciplines.

John Young died on January 5, 2018. JOHN W. YOUNG was the longest serving astronaut in the history of space. Young, 76, retired in 2004, after serving 42 years at NASA. He flew twice to the moon and commanded the first space shuttle mission, was the first human to fly in space six times and the only astronaut to pilot four different spacecraft. In all he has logged in 15100 hours of flying time in jets, helicopters and rocket jets – 835 hours of flying time in his six space flights alone.

John Young was born on September 24, 1930 in San Francisco, California. His interest in flying began around the age of six and throughout childhood, he used to spend hours drawing and making model airplanes.

In 1952, after getting a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Young served in the United States Navy as a test pilot. In 1962, he joined NASA as an astronaut. Young’s first mission was as a pilot of the first manned flight of the Gemini program. He went on to command the Gemini 10 in 1966. He orbited the moon in the Apollo Command Module in 1969, and again in 1972, when he collected more than 200 pounds of lunar samples. Astronaut John Young 3712 / © 2019 Amrita Bharati, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan