Happy Birthday John Young: First commander of Space Shuttle

William Atkins
Monday, 24 September 2007 20:29

Science - Space

Former NASA astronaut John Watts Young, born on September 24, 1930, was the commander of STS-1 on April 12, 1981. Oh, by the way, he also walked on the Moon on April 21, 1972, during the Apollo 16 mission.            

Besides these two accomplishments, Young was the pilot of the first manned flight of the Gemini program (Gemini 3, March 23, 1965), along with commander Virgil “Gus” Grissom.

Young was also the commander of Gemini 10 (July 18-21, 1966) of which Michael Collins was the pilot.

In all he piloted for different spacecraft: Gemini, Apollo (Command and Service Module), Apollo (Lunar Module), and the Space Shuttle—the only person to have piloted so many spacecraft.

He was the 18th person in space, and the 1st person to make five spaceflights and, also, the 1st person to make six spaceflights.

On Apollo 10 (May 18-26, 1969), Young flew the command module around the Moon as his fellow astronauts Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan flew their lunar module to a point about 8 miles (15 kilometers) from the lunar surface.

He got his chance to walk on the Moon when, as commander of Apollo 16 (April 16-27, 1972), Young became the nine man to walk on the lunar surface. Charles Duke also walked on the Moon during this mission, while Ken Mattingly few the command module in orbit.

Young commanded the maiden flight of the Space Shuttle program, STS-1 (April 12-14, 1981) with the space shuttle Columbia, with his pilot Robert Crippen.

Later, Young was the commander of flight of STS-9 (November 28-December 8, 1983), also with space shuttle Columbia, which was piloted by Brewster Shaw and an astronaut crew of four mission specialists.

A biography on Young is entitled “John W. Young: American and International Hero”: http://www.johnwyoung.com/bio/bio.htm.

A biography on John Young also appears at the NASA website: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/young.html.

[Author's note: As noted by a reader, I corrected my writing about Apollo 10. Obviously, Stafford and Cernan did not walk on the Moon before Apollo 11, but they did observe the lunar landing site (the Sea of Tranquility) in preparation for Apollo 11 in two months. John Galt appeared in Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged".]