RIP John Young

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

I think from memory that we gave Gene Cernan his own obituary thread on here, so why not John Young?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/o...oung-dead.html

Hell of a CV. He came across as a no-nonsense interviewee in Andrew Smith's wonderful book Moondust.

[Various Artist]

We did indeed EEG, as near as dammit one whole year ago – it's actually the only OTF thread I've ever started.

It's quite startling to think of commanders of the Space Shuttle dying of old age, but then it was over 36 years ago now that John Young commanded Columbia on its first flight and he was a 51-year-old veteran of the Gemini and Apollo programs at the time. Being the only man to pilot all three craft assured him of a place in history even aside from his two moon missions – but having scouted out the terrain ready for Armstrong and Aldrin with Apollo 10 then made it onto the ground himself with Apollo 16 he's also one of a very select few to have been to lunar orbit twice, as well as one of the last of the dozen ever to have set foot on the surface. By my reckoning his loss means more than half of all the Moon-walkers are now gone: I think it's just 5 of the 12 left now.

I'd forgotten that Cernan himself was on Apollo 10 too, as the Lunar Module pilot. Young was the Command Module pilot, i.e. the 'Michael Collins' figure who remained in orbit while the other two staged a dress rehearsal of the landing in the LM – albeit without their ever getting below about 8 miles of the surface. Young thus became the first man ever to fly solo around the Moon, and was also part of two other remarkable records on that mission – the fastest-travelling human beings in history, clocking 39,897 km/h (11.08 km/s, 24,791 mph or roughly 32 times the speed of sound) on May 26th 1969 during the return journey; and, thanks to a combination of quirks in the Moon's orbit of Earth, the planet's own rotation and the timing of Apollo 10's orbit around the far side of the Moon, the furthest humans have ever been from home at a peak 408,950 kilometers (220,820 nautical miles) from Houston.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Indeed. 9 of the 12 moonwalkers were still alive when Andrew Smith started his quest to interview them all for Moondust. Now just 5 of them, aged 87, 85, 85, 82 and 82. Buzz Aldrin (the 87 year old) is still very active in promoting space exploration though.

The two things that come across to me most strongly from accounts of Young's career, apart from his awesome space flight record and the huge personal courage and immense "right stuff" talent that he shared with fellow Apollo astronauts, are the anger he gave vent to at the Nasa bureaucracy's cavalier sloppiness with astronaut safety on the Shuttle programme and his consciousness of existential risk to the human race from meteor impacts, supervolcanoes etc.

[Snake Plissken]

The two things that come across to me most strongly from accounts of Young's career, apart from his awesome space flight record and the huge personal courage and immense "right stuff" talent that he shared with fellow Apollo astronauts, are the anger he gave vent to at the Nasa bureaucracy's cavalier sloppiness with astronaut safety on the Shuttle programme and his consciousness of existential risk to the human race from meteor impacts, supervolcanoes etc.

For balance, as Mike Mullane's superb "Riding Rockets" detailed, Young was a terrible man manager and a very poor defender of the Shuttle astronauts until after Challenger. He also used his position to manoeuvre himself into two Shuttle flights, with a third cancelled post-Challenger, when crew recruited and trained for a decade were still sitting on the sidelines wondering why they were not getting their chance. Mullane may have a bit of an axe to grind, but he lost good friends, one of which was bumped off a previous flight and into STS-51L by a Congressman. As Mullane pointed out, if Young cared so much about safety, why was he happy to go up three times and promote untrained civilians over trained astronauts?

No denying his achievements as an astronaut, however.