John Young Retiring

Space.com reports that John Young, who walked on the moon and commanded the first space shuttle mission, is retiring from NASA this month at 74 years old.

Young's first space flight was in 1965 on a Gemini mission with the late Gus Grissom. He visited the moon twice, landing on Apollo 16 in April, 1972 the next to last Apollo mission. Young also flew on Apollo 10, which didn't land. Apollo 10 tested the lunar lander module getting within 8.4 nautical miles of the lunar surface. Almost a decade later, Young and pilot Bob Crippen flew Shuttle Columbia on its maiden voyage.

After the moon mission, Young became chief of NASA's astronaut corps, a job he kept until 1987. Young's final space flight was the ninth shuttle flight, also aboard Columbia, in 1983.

In 1987, after speaking out about safety problems in the wake of the Challenger disaster, Young was re-assigned to a job as a special assistant at NASA's Johnson Space Center where he specialized in shuttle safety issues.

Young became an associate director at JSC responsible for technical and safety oversight of all programs assigned to that center. Throughout that time frame, he was still an astronaut and could have been assigned another shuttle flight.

America is truly blessed to have such men.