Iconic Astronaut and Commander of Apollo 10 Dies at 93

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 5 or 6 years old seeing those airplanes,” he told NASA historians.

Stafford went to the U.S. Naval Academy where he graduated in the top 1 percent 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.

Stafford was assigned along with Wally Schirra to Gemini 6. Their original mission was to rendezvous with an empty spaceship. But their 1965 launch was scrubbed when the spaceship exploded soon after liftoff. NASA improvised and in December, Gemini 6 rendezvoused with but didn’t dock with two astronauts aboard Gemini 7.

Stafford’s next flight in 1966 was with Cernan on Gemini 9. Cernan’s spacewalk, connected to a jetpack like device, didn’t go well. Cernan complained that the sun and machine made him extra hot and hurt his back. Then his visor fogged up and he couldn’t see.

“Call it quits, Gene. Get out of there,” Stafford, the commander, told Cernan. Stafford talked him back in, saying “move your hand over, start to float up … stick your hand up … just walk hand over hand.”

In all, Stafford logged 507 hours in space and flew four different types of spacecraft and 127 types of aircraft and helicopters.

After the Apollo-Soyuz mission, Stafford returned to the Air Force and worked in research and commanded the Air Force Flight Test Center before retiring in 1979 as a three-star general.

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, that while Stafford was in charge of Area 51 and later as the development and acquisition chief at the Pentagon 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.”

Stafford became an executive for an Oklahoma-based transportation company and later moved to Florida, near Cape Canaveral.

He is survived by his wife Linda, two sons, two daughters and two stepchildren, according to the museum.