John Young began his career in the US Navy and like many early Astronauts was a Test Pilot. Unless you are a space nerd you may never have heard of him. Young was born in San Francisco at the beginning of the great depression in 1930. He attended Georgia Tech on a naval scholarship joining the navy on graduation and then being selected for naval aviator training in 1953. Service in the US Navy followed, becoming a Test Pilot in 1959 and then being selected for Astronaut training in 1962.
His career in spaceflight began on the Gemini programme, flying on Gemini 3 with Virgil “Gus” Grissom in March 1963, the first manned Gemini mission. Grissom would ultimately die tragically in the Apollo 1 fire, a reminder of the dangers all astronauts faced and indeed continue to face. He subsequently commanded Gemini X, before like Grissom graduating to the Apollo programme. He flew on Apollo 10, the dress rehearsal for Apollo 11. With crew mates Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan, they blasted off on the 18th of May 1969 returning 8 days later. While Stafford and Cernan flew the Lunar Landing Module nicknamed Snoopy to within 8 miles of the Moon’s surface testing hardware, procedures and technology for the subsequent landing in July 1969, Young remained alone in the CSM in Lunar orbit, the most isolated human being alive. As an aside Cernan currently holds the title of Last Man on the Moon, something that he may lose soon with the Artemis Mission scheduled to return to the Lunar surface at some stage over the next two years.
Young subsequently commanded Apollo 16, the second last moon landing mission, spending an hour shy of three days on the Moon’s surface from the 20th of April 1972. While there he also got to drive the Lunar Rover. In the Apollo program the Mission Commander drove and the LLM Pilot was the passenger. Young drove over 26 KM on the moon during 3 EVA’s. How cool must it have been to be able to say you are one of three people ever who drove a car on the Moon’s surface. At the time of writing the 92-year-old David Scott, the commander of Apollo 15, is the only man alive who can say he drove a car on the Moon.
After the cancellation of the Apollo Programme Young became Chief of the Astronaut Office in 1974 and was a driving force behind the Space Shuttle Programme. He did an Ed Baldwin (Apple+ For All Mankind if you don’t get the reference) and selected himself to command the inaugural Space Shuttle flight STS-1 in 1981 flying again on STS-9 in 1983. After the Challenger disaster in 1985 he was publicly critical of NASA safety standards which would up in his being replaced as Chief of the Astronaut Office after testifying to that effect in public to a congressional committee. He spent the remainder of his NASA career working on improving safety standards and overseeing the redesign of Space Shuttle components. He retired from NASA after 42 years in 2004.
When Young retired among his other interests was campaigning for greater public awareness around potential Asteroid impacts and help drive the foundation of systematic near-Earth object observation and tracking. There are now roughly 34,000 known Near Earth Objects, of which about 2300 are known as Potentially Hazardous Objects or PHOs. PHOs are comets or asteroids bigger than 140 meters in diameter that could cause regional devastation if they struck the Earth. As things stand the closest current risk from a known PHO is 99942 Apophis, a rock of about 350m diameter, which will graze past us at a distance of 38,017 km on the 13th of April 2029 – that’s about the height of Geostationary satellites. Given the Earth orbits the Sun travelling at roughly 30km a second, we’re missing a direct impact by about 21 minutes. We have been hit before by much bigger asteroids, we will be again. Fittingly Asteroid 5362 Johnyoung was named after him, that is a 22km wide chunk of rock that we think has zero chance of ever intersecting with the Earth. The issue with NEO’s is not the ones we know about, it’s the ones that we don’t know about. The certainty is that are objects out there which are on a collision course with the Earth as you read this, but we don’t when or how big they are, just look at the Chelyabinsk meteor. It hit the Earth without any prior observation on the morning the astronomical community was looking at a close approach by asteroid 367943 Duende. Young was right to be seriously worried about them.
In total John Young spent 835 hours in space on 6 separate missions. The incredible thing is that he spent nearly 200 hours in training / simulations for each actual hour spent in space. He is the only astronaut ever who has flown on four different classes of spacecraft, Gemini, Apollo CSM, Lunar LM and the Space Shuttle. He is the only person to have flow twice on the Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle crafts. He held the record for most trips into space with 6 separate missions until he lost that record to Jerry Ross in 2002 when Ross participated in his 7th Space Shuttle mission. He became the 9th man to set foot on the Moon as commander of Apollo 16 and some people allow him a 5th class of spacecraft for driving the Lunar Rover. He is only person ever to have commanded missions on three different types of Spacecraft, Gemini, Apollo and the Space Shuttle – four commands if you give him the Lunar Rover. John Young died in 2018 aged 87, leaving behind none too shabby a list of achievements! He definitely had the right stuff.