Legendary astronaut John Young who walked on the moon and commanded the first space shuttle flight has died of complications from pneumonia, in his Houston home. He was the only astronaut to go into space as part of the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs. He is the ninth man to walk on the moon.
Lem might like this. I didn't realize until I selected around his space suit with Photoshop's pen tool around a very large photograph and zoomed out even larger that he's carrying a baseball.
5 comments:
The right stuff.
Well, I'm glad he took a baseball instead of a football. Much better ambassador for our way of life should future astronauts encounter Moon creatures or other space creatures. If there is intelligent life in the universe, and the presence of other earth-like planets indicates there likely is, the problem (which may be insurmountable) is the light years away those planets are.
I remember sitting in a meeting one day at JSC. I can't recall the discussion, but I remember it being something supposedly important. Near the end, someone asked "John, what's your thoughts on this?" It was John Young, and this was less than a decade ago. I remember less for meeting him in person, rather than thinking how odd it was that about a week before I was in Orlando driving on the road named for him, and now here I was meeting him. He was a good man, and with the exception of Musgraves, one of the last of a certain breed of astronauts. The ones that really knew how dangerous the mission was, and yet did it for the challenge. The had thing about that previous sentence is really understanding how many think they know the dangers but really do not. John Young knew.
Cool info being in all three programs.
Leland, I always appreciated that scene in The Right Stuff where someone at Yeager's tavern was putting Grissom down for panicking at splashdown:
Jack Ridley: [talking to TV] Attaboy, Gus!
[talking to Yeager]
Jack Ridley: Pull that stuff on flight test, it's all over for him. I say he screwed the pooch, pardner. Plain and simple.
Chuck Yeager: Yeah, well, sometimes you get a pooch that can't be screwed, ya know?
Liaison Man: [chuckling] Exactly! Right now the President's got his own problems with the Bay of Pigs, he doesn't want the astronauts' image tarnished. Nothing these guys do is gonna be called a failure... But you'd think the public'd know that they're just doing what monkeys have done...
Chuck Yeager: Monkeys? Think a monkey knows he's sitting on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys, they know that, see? Well, I'll tell you somethin' - it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that's on TV. Ol' Gus, he did alright."
Great GIF, Chip. Love how he's bouncing in, then out of camera view.
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