Young, John Watts (1930-2018), a United States astronaut, made six space flights from Earth and one liftoff from the surface of the moon. On March 23, 1965, Young and Virgil I. Grissom made the first flight in the Gemini program. They circled Earth three times and became the first space pilots to change their orbit.
Young and Michael Collins flew the Gemini 10 space mission from July 18 to 21, 1966. They performed two rendezvous (meetings) with unoccupied spacecraft.
Young, Eugene A. Cernan, and Thomas P. Stafford went into orbit around the moon during the Apollo 10 space flight of May 18 to 26, 1969. Young remained in orbit in the command module while Cernan and Stafford flew to within 10 miles (16 kilometers) of the moon in the lunar module. This mission was the final preparation for the first moon landing two months later.
From April 16 to 27, 1972, Young commanded the Apollo 16 flight to the moon. He and Charles M. Duke, Jr., explored in the Descartes region of the moon’s central highlands.
Young commanded the first space shuttle flight from April 12 to 14, 1981. He and Robert L. Crippen orbited Earth more than 36 times in the shuttle Columbia and then piloted the vehicle to a landing. He also commanded the ninth space shuttle flight from Nov. 28 to Dec. 8, 1983. During this flight, the astronauts aboard Columbia conducted scientific experiments in Spacelab, a European-built space laboratory.
Young was born in San Francisco on Sept. 24, 1930. He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952. He joined the Navy that year and became a test pilot. He became an astronaut in 1962 and retired in 2004, serving longer than any other astronaut. Young died on Jan. 5, 2018.
See also Astronaut .
