The legendary astronaut John Young, who walked on the Moon and later commanded the first space shuttle flight, has died, NASA announced Saturday. He was 87 years old.
Young died Friday night at his home in Houston due to complications from pneumonia, the space agency said.
NASA described Young as one of its forerunners: the agency's only astronaut who traveled to space with the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs, and the first to go to the cosmos six times. He was the ninth man to tread the moon.
"The historic trajectory of astronaut John Young encompassed three generations of space flights," NASA interim director Robert Lightfoot said in an emailed statement. "John was one of that group of early space forerunners whose courage and commitment generated our nation's first great achievements in space."
If you count your departure from the Moon in 1972 as commander of Apollo 16, your takeoff account into space is seven, a global brand for decades.
John Young participated in a pair of Gemini missions of two astronauts in the mid-1960s, went twice to the moon with NASA's Apollo program, and traveled twice more on the new space shuttle Columbia at the beginning of the decade of 1980.
His career with NASA spanned 42 years, the longest among any of the astronauts, and he was highly respected among his peers for his zeal for the safety of the crews, as well as for his candor when it came to questioning the status quo. of the space agency.
Lectured by the lesson of the fire that killed three Apollo astronauts on the launch pad in 1967, Young made strong statements after the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger shortly after it took off in 1986. His strict scrutiny continued after of the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia when it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere in 2003.
"Whenever and wherever I detected a possible security problem, I always did my best to call attention to it, by memorandum or by any means that could better serve to address the issue," Young wrote in his memoir "Forever Young" ("Forever Young", title in which he plays a word game with his last name), published in 2012.
Young said he had written a "mountain of memoranda" between the two shuttle disasters to "make things clear to some people." This procedure was considered almost a heresy at NASA.
Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who orbited the Moon in 1969 while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the surface of the satellite, considered Young the "paladin of the memoranda of the astronauts' office." Young continued working at the Johnson Space Center in Houston "long after his compatriots were forced to retire or find other promising activities," Collins wrote in the Forever Young preface.
Young continued as an active astronaut until well into his 70s, long after his teammates left, and remained in his role as the conscience of NASA until his retirement in 2004.
"You do not want to be politically correct," he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2000. "You want to be right."
Young was part of the second generation of NASA astronauts, when he was selected in 1962 along with Neil Armstrong, Pete Conrad and James Lovell.