Apollo 16. Just after planting the flag, Charlie Duke called out to Commander John Young:
“Hey, John, this is perfect, with the LM and the Rover and you and Stone Mountain. And the old Flag. Come on out here and give me a big Navy salute.”
And he did just that, while jumping three feet in the air.
I have taken a particular interest in John Young, the only astronaut to have flown two missions each in the Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle programs (GT-3, GT-10, Apollo 10, Apollo 16, STS-1, STS-9/Spacelab 1), and he co-piloted the first manned Gemini-Titan and Shuttle launches.
I just acquired some wonderful mementos from his personal collection: his jump-shot photo and Apollo and Gemini-Titan access badges and some other maps, such as the orbital path map that flew on GT-3). This photo is a contextual complement to his COAS that was mounted up there in the LM Orion during this photo, and which he later detached and brought back to Earth.
His prior flight, Apollo 10, was the “dress rehearsal” to the first lunar landing. They went through every step of what would be the historic Apollo 11 landing, even descending in the Lunar Module (LM) toward the lunar surface, but pulling back at 50K feet, with the craters in plain sight. So it is understandable that John Young was the most verbally and visually exuberant of the moonwalkers when he finally arrived on Apollo 16.
And by the Shuttle program, he was an old hand, with a peaceful and calm heart rate as monitored by NASA through the maiden launch.
In his detailed book, A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaiken describes Young:
“His sharp, intuitive approach to engineering problems was well known to his colleagues. Inside, Young had an unwavering determination, an overriding sense of responsibility — to the space program, to the country, to his crew — and an almost childlike sense of wonder at the universe.”
Just the sentiment I was looking for on Memorial Day. =)
Chaiken concludes his book, itself a culmination of eight years of primary research, with this wish:
“I want us to do justice to the magnificence of the adventure that Apollo began. To live up to the promise not only of what we can achieve, but who we can become. And once we are living on the moon and venturing out across the solar system, the fact that we waited so long to resume our explorations will hardly matter. Historians of the far future may look back on Apollo and the missions that are yet to come as one great Age of Space Exploration. But in my mind’s eye it is a slow dissolve, from memory to anticipation, from what has been to what will be, from dream to dream.”
NASA video
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