Astronaut Thomas P Stafford, who commanded a dress rehearsal flight for the 1969 moon landing and the first US-Soviet space linkup, has died. He was 93.
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Stafford, a retired Air Force three-star general, took part in four space missions. Before Apollo 10, he flew on two Gemini flights, including the first rendezvous of two US capsules in orbit. He died in a hospital near his Space Coast Florida home, said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma.
Stafford was one of 24 NASA astronauts who flew to the moon, but he did not land on it. Only seven of them are still alive.
"Today General Tom Stafford went to the eternal heavens which he so courageously explored as a Gemini and Apollo astronaut as well as a peacemaker in Apollo Soyuz," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said via X, formerly known as Twitter.
"Those of us privileged to know him are very sad but grateful we knew a giant."
After he put away his flight suit, Stafford was the go-to guy for NASA when it sought independent advice on everything from human Mars missions to safety issues to returning to flight after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident. He chaired an oversight group that looked into how to fix the then-flawed Hubble Space Telescope, earning a NASA public service award.
"Tom was involved in so many things that most people were not aware of, such as being known as the 'Father of Stealth'," Ary said in an email. Stafford was in charge of the famous "Area 51" desert base that was the site of many UFO theories, but the home of testing of Air Force stealth technologies.
The Apollo 10 mission in May 1969 set the stage for Apollo 11's historic mission two months later. Stafford and Gene Cernan took the lunar lander nicknamed Snoopy within 14km of the moon's surface. Astronaut John Young stayed behind in the main spaceship dubbed Charlie Brown.
"The most impressive sight, I think, that really changed your view of things is when you first see Earth," Stafford recalled in a 1997 oral history, talking about the view from lunar orbit.
Then came the moon's far side: "The Earth disappears. There's this big black void."
Growing up in Weatherford, Oklahoma, Stafford said he would look up and see giant DC-3 airplanes fly overhead on early transcontinental routes.
"I wanted to fly since I was five or six years old seeing those airplanes," he told NASA historians.
Stafford went to the US Naval Academy where he graduated in the top one per cent of his class and flew in the backseat of some airplanes and loved it.
He volunteered for the Air Force and had hoped to fly combat in the Korean War. But by the time he got his wings, the war ended.
He went to the Air Force's experimental test pilot school, graduated first in his class there and stayed on as an instructor.
In 1962, NASA selected Stafford for its second set of astronauts, which included Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman and Pete Conrad.
In all, Stafford would log 507 hours in space and flew four different types of spacecraft and 127 types of aircraft and helicopters.
Stafford's Air Force duties not only had him run the military's top flight school and experimental plane testing base, but he was commanding general of Area 51.
A biography from his museum said he "wrote the specs and established the program that led to the development of the F-117 Stealth Fighter, and later, the B-2 Stealth Bomber."
Australian Associated Press
