Today General Tom Stafford went to the eternal heavens which he so courageously explored as a Gemini and Apollo astronaut as well as a peacemaker in Apollo Soyuz. Those of us privileged to know him are very sad but grateful we knew a giant.
May he rest in symbolic immortality. Heroic mission photo from my dining room: flic.kr/p/NNgcPW “There would have been no 11 had 10 not succeeded, and in a few critical moments on the fifth day of the mission, that was very much in doubt, as astronauts Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan found themselves in a near-fatal barrel roll just 50,000 feet above the lunar surface, in a tin can of a spacecraft that had no business surviving such a crisis." — TIME After a few expletives on the live network broadcast, they regained control just a few rolls away from a crash landing on the lunar surface. This is also the only flown Lunar Module ascent stage that is still in orbit; the rest crashed into the moon, or in the case of Apollo 13, Earth.
@SenBillNelson @EstelCooper He certainly lived to be a long ripe age..✔️💙
@SenBillNelson @NASASpaceflight God bless that man. Absolute legend
@SenBillNelson Yes, I hope he can bring us more surprises