Astronaut hero John Young died today. May he rest in peace having ventured forth so bravely on the final frontier. I will share here the most incredible artifact I have from his space adventures — the Apollo 16 cuff checklist he wore as he took the historic jump salute 3 ft. off the lunar surface.
Young is the only astronaut to have flown four different spacecraft, and he was the focus of my initial space collecting interest. He is 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). He flew the first manned Gemini mission, and even more bravely, the very first flight of the Space Shuttles (there were no unmanned test flights before his flight).
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.” You can see why I was smitten.
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.”
And by strange coincidence, I was with Astronaut Chris Hadfield and former NASA Ames Director Pete Worden today brainstorming the next generation of lunar exploration and settlement when we heard the news of John Young’s passing.
Hadfield followed up with this memory from their time together: John Young was a relentless dreamer engineer test pilot. He put his life on the line for what he believed in, over and over. I love what he said here: “My life has been long, and it has been interesting. It’s also been a lot of fun, and a lot of hard, challenging work. If I could do it over, I would do it over the very same way. Most of it has been a marvel to me.”
Young’s EVA 1 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tL64qoIqyA
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