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Chastened by the 1967 Apollo launch pad fire that killed three astronauts, Young spoke up after the 1986 shuttle Challenger launch accident. His hard scrutiny continued well past shuttle Columbia\u2019s disintegration during re-entry in 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhenever and wherever I found a potential safety issue, I always did my utmost to make some noise about it, by memo or whatever means might best bring attention to it,\u201d Young wrote in his 2012 memoir, \u201cForever Young.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said he wrote a \u201cmountain of memos\u201d between the two shuttle accidents to \u201chit people over the head.\u201d Such practice bordered on heresy at NASA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, who orbited the moon in 1969 as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked its surface, considered Young \u201cthe memo-writing champion of the astronaut office.\u201d Young kept working at Johnson Space Center in Houston \u201clong after his compatriots had been put out to pasture or discovered other green fields,\u201d Collins wrote in the foreword of \u201cForever Young.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, Young remained an active astronaut into his early 70s, long after all his peers had left, and held on to his role as NASA\u2019s conscience until his retirement in 2004.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t want to be politically correct,\u201d he said in a 2000 interview with The Associated Press. \u201cYou want to be right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young was in NASA\u2019s second astronaut class, chosen in 1962, along with the likes of Neil Armstrong, Pete Conrad and James Lovell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young was the first of his group to fly in space: He and Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom made the first manned Gemini mission in 1965. Unknown to NASA, Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich on board, given to him by Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra. When it came time to test NASA\u2019s official space food, Young handed Grissom the sandwich as a joke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ensuing scandal over that corned beef on rye \u2014 two silly minutes of an otherwise triumphant five-hour flight \u2014 always amazed Young. Sandwiches already had flown in space, Young said in his book, but NASA brass and Congress considered this one a multimillion-dollar embarrassment and outlawed corned beef sandwiches in space forever after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two years later, with Gemini over and Apollo looming, Young asked Grissom why he didn\u2019t say something about the bad wiring in the new Apollo 1 spacecraft. Grissom feared doing so would get him fired, Young said. A few weeks later, on Jan. 27, 1967, those wires contributed to the fire that killed Grissom, Edward White II and Roger Chaffee in a countdown practice on their Cape Canaveral launch pad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was the safety measures put in place after the fire that got 12 men, Young included, safely to the surface of the moon and back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI can assure you if we had not had that fire and rebuilt the command module … we could not have done the Apollo program successfully,\u201d Young said in 2007. \u201cSo we owe a lot to Gus, and Rog and Ed. They made it possible for the rest of us to do the almost impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young orbited the moon on Apollo 10 in May 1969 in preparation for the Apollo 11 moon landing that was to follow in a couple months. He commanded Apollo 16 three years later, the next-to-last manned lunar voyage, and walked on the moon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He hung on for the space shuttle, commanding Columbia\u2019s successful maiden voyage in 1981 with co-pilot Robert Crippen by his side. It was a risky endeavor: Never before had NASA launched people on a rocket ship that had not first been tested in space. Young pumped his fists in jubilation after emerging from Columbia on the California runway, following the two-day flight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Crippen called flying with Young \u201ca real treat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnybody who ever flew in space admired John,\u201d said Crippen, a close friend who last spoke to him a few months ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young made his final trek into orbit aboard Columbia two years later, again as its skipper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young\u2019s reputation continued to grow, even after he stopped launching. He spoke out on safety measures, even before the Challenger debacle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBy whatever management methods it takes, we must make Flight Safety first. If we do not consider Flight Safety first all the time at all levels of NASA, this machinery and this program will NOT make it,\u201d he warned colleagues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As then chief of the astronaut corps, Young was flying a shuttle training aircraft high above Kennedy Space Center when Challenger ruptured. He took pictures of the nose-diving crew cabin. The seven Challenger astronauts never knew of all the dangerous O-ring seal trouble leading up to their flight. \u201cIf I had known these things, I would have made them aware, that\u2019s for damn sure,\u201d Young wrote in his book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young noted that even his friends at NASA considered him \u201cdoom and gloom,\u201d and that a shuttle launch \u201calways scared me more than it thrilled me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He always thought the probability was there for a space shuttle accident, he observed in his autobiography, given that it was \u201csuch an incredibly complex machine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t pessimism. It was just being realistic,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet Young maintained that NASA and the nation should accept an occasional spaceflight failure, saying it\u2019s worth the risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI really believe we should be operating (the shuttle), flying it right now, because there\u2019s just not a lot we can do to make it any better,\u201d Young said in 2004, a year after the Columbia tragedy. Another year passed before shuttle flights resumed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, Young maintained the United States should be doing two to three times the amount of space exploration that it was doing. NASA should be developing massive rockets to lift payloads to the moon to industrialize it, he said, and building space systems for detecting and deflecting comets or asteroids that could threaten Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe country needs it. The world needs it. Civilization needs it,\u201d Young said in 2000, adding with a chuckle, \u201cI don\u2019t need it. I\u2019m not going to be here that long.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his book, Young noted that his \u201crelentless\u201d stream of memos about volcanic super-eruptions and killer asteroids was aimed at scaring and educating at the same time. Humans need to start living off the planet in order to save the species, he stressed again and again, pointing to the moon. \u201cSome folks surely regarded me as a crackpot,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBut that didn\u2019t stop me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young spent his last 17 years at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston in management, focusing on safety issues. He retired at the end of 2004, seven months shy of NASA\u2019s return to space following the Columbia accident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young was born Sept. 24, 1930 and grew up in Orlando, Fla. He became interested early on in aviation, making model planes. He spent his last high school summer working on a surveying team. The job took him to Titusville due east of Orlando; he never imagined that one day he would be sitting on rockets across the Indian River, blasting off for the moon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He earned an aeronautical engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952 and went on to join the Navy and serve in Korea as a gunnery officer. He eventually became a Navy fighter pilot and test pilot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young received more than 100 major accolades in his lifetime, including the prestigious Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1981.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even after leaving NASA, he worked to keep the space flame alive, noting in his official NASA biography that he was continuing to advocate the development of technologies \u201cthat will allow us to live and work on the moon and Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThose technologies over the long (or short) haul will save civilization on Earth,\u201d he warned in his NASA bio, almost as a parting shot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein and AP writer Julie Watson contributed. Dunn reported from Cape Canaveral, Fla.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n Legendary astronaut John Young, who walked on the moon and later commanded the first space shuttle flight, has died, NASA said Saturday. Young was 87.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":38451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":12,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[101,12,25],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1725],"class_list":["post-26393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-news-roundup","category-news","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"KZ653BJDQNDXXNLUYNKCJW5IFI","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-navy\/2018\/01\/06\/astronaut-john-young-naval-aviator-has-died\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP_18006693380697-Copy.jpg.jpg\")
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