NASA lost another family member. Thomas Stafford, an astronaut on the 1969 moon mission, passed away.
Astronaut Thomas Stafford Dead
Thomas Stafford, who commanded the Apollo 10 mission, passed away on Monday, Daily Mail reported. He was 93.
He reportedly died in a hospital near Space Coastal Florida, said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma.
The retired three-star general of the Air Force participated in four space missions. He was part of two Gemini flights prior to Apollo 10, one of which involved the first-ever orbital meeting of two American capsules.
Stafford did not make a moon landing despite being one of the 24 NASA astronauts to fly there. Two months later, the historic mission of Apollo 11 was made possible by the May 1969 Apollo 10 mission.
Following his space retirement, Stafford emerged as a crucial figure for NASA. He was a go-to source for impartial guidance on various topics, including human Mars missions, safety concerns, and the shuttle Columbia catastrophe 2003.
He received a NASA public service award for chairing an oversight committee investigating how to repair the then-defective Hubble Space Telescope.
Acknowledged as the "Father of Stealth," Stafford oversaw the renowned Area 51 desert base, which served as the backdrop for numerous UFO claims and the testing ground for Air Force stealth technologies.
During their Apollo 10 mission, Stanford and fellow American astronaut Gene Cernan brought the Snoopy lunar lander within nine miles of the lunar surface.
Bill Nelson, NASA Administrator, reacted to Stafford's passing on X, formerly Twitter. According to him, the late astronaut was a "peacemaker in Apollo Soyuz," and those who were "privileged" to know him were "very sad but grateful we knew a giant."
@twitter|https://twitter.com/SenBillNelson/status/1769713866345267338?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw@
Who Was Thomas Stafford?
Thomas Stafford graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland 1952. On Dec. 15, 1965, Stafford flew as Walter M. Schirra's copilot on the Gemini 6 mission. When they reunited with the previously launched Gemini 7, it was the first successful space rendezvous in history.
Stafford was the commander of an Apollo spacecraft in the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, including astronauts Vance Brand and Deke Slayton. On July 17, 1975, Apollo docked with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft, and Stafford shook hands with cosmonaut Alexey Leonov in space. The mission was regarded as a significant symbol of détente, the lowering of Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the USSR, during the two days the two spacecraft were docked together.
Stafford left the space program in 1975 to take over as head of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. In 1978, he was promoted to lieutenant general and assigned to the position of Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Research and Development based in Washington, D.C. He retired from the Air Force in 1979 and started working as an executive for an Oklahoman transportation company. Stafford acted as a consultant on several space-related projects.
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