Deke Slayton

Donald Slayton grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm near Leon, where he lost the ring finger on his left hand in a childhood accident and flew nothing more exotic than farm machinery. He enlisted after Sparta High School and flew 56 combat missions over Europe in B-25 bombers, then seven more against Japan in A-26s, his last sortie on August 12, 1945, three days before the war ended. He used the GI Bill for a degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Minnesota, worked briefly as a Boeing design engineer, then returned to uniform, graduating from Air Force test pilot school in 1955 and flying the newest and least forgiving fighters, the F-100 through the F-106, out of Edwards Air Force Base.

Selected in 1959 as one of the Mercury Seven, Slayton was assigned to pilot the second American orbital flight, then grounded two months before launch in March 1962 for an irregular heartbeat and replaced by Scott Carpenter. He stayed anyway, running the astronaut office instead of flying in it, deciding every crew assignment for Gemini and Apollo through the next decade, including the last-minute swap that put Jack Swigert on Apollo 13 and the Apollo 15 crew's reassignment after a postal-covers scandal. A decade of tests cleared his heart in 1972, and at 51 he flew as docking module pilot on Apollo-Soyuz in July 1975, the oldest person to have flown in space and the last Mercury Seven pilot to reach orbit. He later managed the Shuttle's earliest test flights before retiring from NASA in 1982.

For 13 years the man in charge of deciding who got to fly could not fly himself. He ran the office that sent Grissom, White, and Chaffee to their deaths in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, and reassigned crews through Apollo 11's landing and Apollo 13's near-disaster, always from the ground. His marriage to Marjorie Lunney, together 23 years and one son, ended in divorce in 1978, worn down in part by the grounding and the decade of medical appeals that finally lifted it. Even the flight he did get carried a hidden failure: coming down from Apollo-Soyuz in 1975, a stuck valve let toxic nitrogen tetroxide fumes into the cabin, and doctors examining him afterward in Honolulu found a benign lung lesion that, discovered before launch, would have grounded him a second time.

He died of brain cancer in 1993, at 69, and his ashes went back to the family farm outside Sparta where he had grown up. The tributes gathered at the places that mattered to him rather than in astronaut rankings that favor the men who walked on the Moon: a cancer center in League City, Texas, bears his name, so does a Wisconsin highway, and the Deke Slayton Memorial Space and Bicycle Museum sits in his hometown. He was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1990 and three more aviation halls afterward, honors for a career defined less by a single flight than by the decade he spent grounded, running the program instead.

Deke Slayton's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Gemini/Apollo crew rotation system other
  Backup crew became prime crew three missions later; used through the rest of Apollo 1963
• Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission
  Flown as docking module pilot after a decade grounded 1975
• Space Services Inc. / Conestoga rocket company
  The world's first privately funded rocket to reach space, launched September 9, 1982 1982
• Deke! book
  Autobiography, co-written with Michael Cassutt, published after his death 1994

• March 1, 1924 aged 0 Born on a farm near Leon, Wisconsin
• August 12, 1945 aged 21 Flies his last combat mission over Japan
• 1949 aged ~25 Earns a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Minnesota
• April 1959 aged 35 Selected as one of the Mercury Seven astronauts
• March 1962 aged 38 Grounded for an irregular heartbeat two months before his scheduled flight
• March 13, 1972 aged 48 Cleared to fly again after a decade of medical appeals
• July 15, 1975 aged 51 Launches on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project
• June 13, 1993 aged 69 Dies of brain cancer in League City, Texas

• Scott Carpenter 1925–2013
  Mercury Seven astronaut who became the second American to orbit Earth. replaced him on the Mercury flight
• Gus Grissom 1926–1967
  One of the original Mercury Seven astronauts who died in the Apollo 1 fire. astronaut he managed and lost
• Jim Lovell 1928–2025
  Commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, whose calm leadership brought the crew home safely. reassigned his Apollo 13 crew
• Alan Shepard 1923–1998
  First American in space and fifth person to walk on the Moon during Apollo 14. fellow Mercury Seven pilot, also grounded and returned
• Ronald Evans 1933–1990
  Apollo 17 command module pilot who holds the record for most time in lunar orbit. assigned him to Apollo 17