John Young

John Young was two when his father lost his job and the family left San Francisco for Cartersville, Georgia. They moved again in 1936, to Orlando. When he was five his mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and taken to a state hospital, and after Pearl Harbor his father joined the Navy as a Seabee and left the two boys with a housekeeper. Young went to Georgia Tech on a Naval ROTC scholarship, graduated second in his class in aeronautical engineering in 1952, and spent the Korean War as a gunnery officer in the Sea of Japan before flight school. By 1962 he was testing the F-4 Phantom at Patuxent River and had taken two world time-to-climb records in it, one of them 3,000 metres in 34.52 seconds.

The record is the argument. Six flights in 19 years, across three programmes that shared almost no hardware. Gemini 3 in 1965 and Gemini 10 in 1966. Apollo 10 in 1969, on which he flew the command module alone around the far side of the Moon while the lander went down without him. Apollo 16 in 1972, on which he became the ninth man to walk on it. Then STS-1 in 1981, the first Space Shuttle flight and the first American crewed spacecraft ever flown on its maiden launch with no uncrewed test behind it, and STS-9 in 1983.

Partway through Gemini 3 in March 1965, Young produced a corned beef sandwich he had smuggled aboard in his suit and handed it to Gus Grissom. It came apart in weightlessness, crumbs drifted through the cabin, and Grissom stowed what was left. The House Committee on Appropriations held a hearing, where members complained that the crew had wrecked a scheduled food test. The same instinct cost him far more 21 years later. After Challenger, Young told the Rogers Commission and anyone else who would listen that the accident came out of a management culture that had stopped counting risk, and he put it in writing, repeatedly. In May 1987 NASA replaced him as chief of the Astronaut Office and made him a special assistant on safety. He was certain the two things were connected. He never flew again.

He stayed anyway. He worked on the solid rocket booster redesign, drag chutes for the orbiters, satellite navigation, and the design of the space station, and he did not retire until December 31, 2004, 42 years after NASA took him on. A seventh command, the flight that was to carry the Hubble Space Telescope, had died with Challenger. Young died at his home in Houston on January 5, 2018, of complications from pneumonia, at 87, and was buried at Arlington the following year. He never became a public figure the way Armstrong did, and the memorials had trouble compressing him: an Orlando parkway, a planetarium, a cargo ship named S.S. John Young. The record does the work instead.

John Young's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Gemini 3 mission
  The first crewed Gemini flight — and the sandwich 1965
• Gemini 10 mission
  Commander. A dual rendezvous with two Agena targets and a crewed altitude record of 764 kilometres 1966
• Apollo 10 mission
  Command module pilot, and the first person to orbit the Moon alone 1969
• Apollo 16 mission
  Commander. Three days in the Descartes Highlands with Charles Duke and 94 kilograms of rock 1972
• STS-1 mission
  The first Space Shuttle flight, crewed on its maiden launch 1981
• STS-9 mission
  Carried the first Spacelab module into orbit 1983

• 1962 aged ~32 Takes two world time-to-climb records in the F-4 Phantom 3,000 metres in 34.52 seconds and 25,000 metres in 227.6 seconds.
• September 1962 aged 31 Selected for NASA Astronaut Group 2
• March 23, 1965 aged 34 Flies the first crewed Gemini mission with a sandwich in his pocket Gemini 3, with Gus Grissom. The House Committee on Appropriations later held a hearing about the sandwich.
• July 18, 1966 aged 35 Commands Gemini 10 and rendezvouses with two Agena vehicles The mission set a crewed altitude record of 764 kilometres.
• May 22, 1969 aged 38 Becomes the first person to orbit the Moon alone Apollo 10. Stafford and Cernan took the lunar module to within 14 kilometres of the surface and did not land.
• April 21, 1972 aged 41 Steps onto the Descartes Highlands as the ninth man on the Moon Three days and three excursions with Charles Duke, including the largest rock collected in the Apollo programme.
• April 12, 1981 aged 50 Commands STS-1, the first Space Shuttle flight No uncrewed orbital test had been flown first. Young and Robert Crippen rode the vehicle on its maiden launch.
• May 1987 aged 56 Removed as chief of the Astronaut Office after his criticism of NASA management He was reassigned as a special assistant for engineering, operations and safety, and believed the move was the price of speaking.
• December 31, 2004 aged 74 Retires from NASA after 42 years

• Gus Grissom 1926–1967
  One of the original Mercury Seven astronauts who died in the Apollo 1 fire. flew with
• Alan Shepard 1923–1998
  First American in space and fifth person to walk on the Moon during Apollo 14. succeeded as chief astronaut
• Harrison Schmitt b. 1935
  Apollo 17 lunar module pilot and only professional scientist to walk on the Moon. backup commander for
• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. testified before
• Sally Ride 1951–2012
  First American woman in space and physicist who flew on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983. testified before
• Christa McAuliffe 1948–1986
  Teacher selected for the Teacher in Space program who died in the Challenger disaster. lost on Challenger