Fred Haise

Fred Haise grew up in Biloxi, Mississippi, worked as a journalist for a hometown paper before he ever flew a plane, and only got into aviation through the Naval Aviation Cadet Program in 1952, after two years at a junior college on a journalism scholarship. He flew fighters for the Marine Corps, then the Air National Guard while finishing an engineering degree at the University of Oklahoma, then test aircraft for the Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base, building the kind of flight-test record NASA wanted. By 1966, when NASA picked its fifth astronaut class, Haise had logged more than nine thousand hours in the air and had never been to space.

Haise trained as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 before flying the real seat on Apollo 13 in April 1970, alongside Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert, a late substitute for an astronaut pulled over measles exposure. Two days out, an oxygen tank exploded and crippled the command module, and the mission became a four-day improvisation: the crew moved into the lunar module, built to support two men for two days, and stretched it to support three for four, while Haise developed a kidney infection that made the return more painful than the accident already had. He was headed to become the sixth person to walk on the Moon. Instead he helped fly what remained of the spacecraft home.

Haise never reached the Moon at all, on Apollo 13 or afterward: NASA assigned him to command Apollo 19, then canceled the mission for budget reasons before he ever got a second flight. He moved to the shuttle program instead and in 1977 became the first person to fly the orbiter Enterprise, landing it after release from a modified 747 in a series of tests that proved the shuttle design could actually glide and land. Three years earlier, testing a replica World War II dive bomber for a film production, he had crashed on a runway in Galveston and suffered second-degree burns over half his body. He recovered, flew again, and never flew in space.

Haise left NASA in 1979 for Grumman, the company that had built the lunar module that saved his life, and worked there as a test pilot and executive until he retired in 1996. He is the last surviving member of the Apollo 13 crew and, as of 2026, the last living Apollo astronaut who came within a hundred miles of the lunar surface without landing on it. A statue of him went up in his hometown of Biloxi in 2022, and a stretch of highway there now carries his name. Bill Paxton played him in the 1995 film that made the mission's near-catastrophe part of the standard American story of what went right when almost everything went wrong.

Fred Haise's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Backup crew, Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 mission
  Backup lunar module pilot for both missions 1968
• Apollo 13 mission
  Lunar module pilot; helped bring the crippled spacecraft home 1970
• Space Shuttle Enterprise approach and landing tests mission
  First person to pilot the orbiter in free flight 1977
• Never Panic Early book
  Memoir, co-written with Bill Moore 2022

• November 14, 1933 aged 0 Born in Biloxi, Mississippi
• 1959 aged ~26 Earns a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Oklahoma
• 1966 aged ~33 Selected as a NASA astronaut in Group 5
• April 11, 1970 aged 36 Launches as lunar module pilot on Apollo 13 An oxygen tank exploded two days later, aborting the Moon landing.
• August 22, 1973 aged 39 Survives a plane crash and severe burns testing a stunt aircraft Second-degree burns over half his body in a crash at Galveston, Texas.
• 1977 aged ~44 Commands the first free flights of the space shuttle Enterprise
• 1979 aged ~46 Leaves NASA for Grumman Aerospace
• 1996 aged ~63 Retires from Grumman
• February 13, 2022 aged 88 A statue of Haise is unveiled in his hometown of Biloxi

• Jim Lovell 1928–2025
  Commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, whose calm leadership brought the crew home safely. Apollo 13 crewmate
• Gene Kranz b. 1933
  NASA flight director who led Mission Control through the Apollo 11 landing and the Apollo 13 rescue. Apollo 13 flight director
• Alan Shepard 1923–1998
  First American in space and fifth person to walk on the Moon during Apollo 14. traded Apollo missions with
• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. fellow Apollo astronaut