Gordon

Personal data:

Birthdate:  05.10.1929 Birthplace:  Seattle / Washington Marital status:  married Children:  six Selection date:  17.10.1963 Selection group:  NASA-3 Job:  CMP Status:  Ret. 01.01.1972 Date of death:  06 Nov 2017 Age:   Place of death:  San Marcos / California

Spaceflights:

EVA's:

Additional information

• Born in Seattle, Washington, on 5 October 1929, Dick Gordon, as he liked to be known, was an archetypical product of the early groups of astronauts selected for NASA′s manned space flight programme: a first-born of five children to parents Richard and Angela, a test pilot, flight instructor, speed record holder and a recruit to the third group of astronauts.
• Bachelor of science in chemistry from the University of Washington, 1951; Captain, USN.
• Selected by NASA in October 1963, from the outset Gordon was clearly suitable for demanding assignments. Astronauts went one of three ways. Gordon was placed under Gordon Cooper with the Apollo group working out of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston; Grissom had the Gemini astronauts and Armstrong had operations and training. But crew selections for flight assignments could cross the divídes. Within a few months Gordon was teamed with Pete Conrad as back-up to Scott and Armstrong for Gemini V111. Then Gordon and Conrad got the Gemini XI flight and suddenly that programme seemed a good bet on which to gain experience. While the two were in orbit a formal announcement was made that approval had been given for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory - heavily reliant on Gemini as its ferry vehicle.
  But that was not to be, although Gordon got to do a spacewalk on Gemini XI lasting 33 minutes when he attached a tether to the docked Agena target vehicle, cut short when was overcome with exhaustion, perspiration blinding him in his right eye. After firing up the Agena engine to boost the docked configuration to a record 1,369 km above Earth, Gordon got to conduct a stand-up EVA of 2 hrs 8 min. With a list of photographic tasks he took pictures of celestial phenomena with an ultraviolet camera.
  During this long period of activity, comfortably restrained by tethers and a harness, Gordon got to experience arguably the most tranquil and relaxed EVA experience of any astronaut or cosmonaut. lt was so calming that while waiting for his next task in an allotted timeline, he drifted to sleep, as did Conrad in the left seat, both waking with a start minutes later.
• Gordon was assigned as back-up Command Module pilot to what was known before the fire as Apollo 3 (then scheduled as the first Saturn V manned flight); Conrad was Commander with Williams as Lunar Module Pilot and all three would have logically rotated to a lunar-orbit mission then designated Apollo 6. During reshuffles in the aftermath of the fire, the Conrad/Gordon/Williams crew became back~up to the first manned Lunar Module flight. When Williams died in an aircraft accident in October 1967, the Conrad/ Gordon team got Alan Bean.
• After Apollo 9 flew in March 1969, the Conrad crew were assigned to Apollo 12, which, after survivíng a near catastrophic lightning strike during launch, achieved the first pin-point landing on the Moon, effected in November 1969. For more than 37 hours Gordon minded the Command Module in Moon orbit alone, tending a wide range of science tasks including lunar surface photography to aid in future missions design.
• His performance credited him with the unusual promotion to back-up Commander of Apollo 15, in that this job usually went to a Lunar Module pilot, which threw him, and fellow astronauts Brand and Schmitt on to prime crew for Apollo 18. But along with Apollo 19 that mission got cancelled on 2 September 1970 and Schmitt was moved up to Apollo 17 so that NASA could say it had placed a scientist-astronaut, and geologist to boot, on the lunar surface.
• Dick Gordon had desperately wanted to land on the Moon but it was not to be, one of nine astronauts who would have flown three Apollo lunar landing flights had not Apollos 18-20 been cancelled, Apollo 20 so as to assign the last Saturn V to the launch of Skylab. After his assignment as back-up to Apollo 15, Dick Gordon told Deke Slayton that he would retire after his next flight. But he was not done with space.
• In 1971 Gordon became Chief of Advanced Programs in the Astronaut Office and was heavily involved in working the final Phase B Shuttle plans through to approval in January 1972 and the selection of North American Rockwell to build the orbiter. He resigned from NASA later that year and became executive president of the New Orleans Saints professional football team. ln March 1993, Dick Gordon was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame. Remarried after a divorce, Dick Gordon died on 6 November 2017, predeceased by his wife, Linda Saunders who died earlier in the year.