If ever the title “Mr. Astronaut” was given out, it would not go to John Glenn, despite his being the posterboy of Mercury; it wouldn’t even go to Neil Armstrong, who fifty-four years ago today became the first human to step foot onto another world; it would have to go John Young, who served in NASA for four decades. There, the poor but promising young son of a merchant would become an accomplished astronaut and administrator, developing close friendships with men like George H.W. Bush whose path he would have never otherwise crossed. Young began his career in the Gemini program, which saw the United States developing spacecraft rendezvous techniques and spacewalking, and would grow to maturity within it, commanding one of the last Apollo missions and then switching into a managerial role as head of the Astronaut Office. In that office, he oversaw the creation of the Shuttle Program, arguing for a fully-reusable approach but having to settle for the partially reusable system of disposable boosters and reusable space-planes. He piloted the first shuttle mission himself, and would bear the weight of responsibility as NASA attempted to find out what went wrong with Challenger. As an astronaut memoir, Forever Young is unmatched in its 40 year scope, and Young’s administrative position gives him an unusual top-down, analytical view on NASA’s history and technical issues. This makes for thorough but sometimes dry reading, except when he gets a little more fun with critiques of the Apollo 13 movie and the like. Unfortunately for Forever Young, I was reading this in tandem with Mike Collins’ Carrying the Fire, and Collins is such a ball to read that Forever Young (despite its substance) felt more like homework at times. Still, reading about the Gemini 10 mission from the view of both men made its already unprecedented task (reclaiming a payload Neil Armstrong was forced to abandon) even more interesting.

54 years ago today!