Frank Borman

Frank Frederick Borman II was born on March 14, 1928, in Gary, Indiana, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona, building model airplanes and taking flying lessons as a boy. He graduated eighth in his 1950 West Point class of 670 and was commissioned in the U.S. Air Force, serving as a fighter pilot in the Philippines. He went on to earn a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from Caltech and returned to West Point to teach thermodynamics and fluid mechanics before training as an experimental test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base. In 1962 NASA selected him for its second astronaut group, the 'Next Nine,' who would fly the Gemini and Apollo missions that carried America toward the Moon.

Borman flew two missions, both milestones. In December 1965 he commanded Gemini 7, a grueling fourteen-day marathon that set an endurance record and proved the human body could withstand the time required for a round trip to the Moon; his spacecraft also served as the rendezvous target that Wally Schirra's Gemini 6A approached to within a foot. After the January 1967 Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts, Borman served on the accident review board and helped drive the spacecraft's redesign. He then commanded Apollo 8, which launched on December 21, 1968, and became the first crewed mission to leave Earth orbit, travel to the Moon, and circle it — ten lunar orbits by Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders. On Christmas Eve the crew read from the Book of Genesis to one of the largest television audiences in history to that point, and Borman was later awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

Borman retired from NASA and the Air Force as a colonel in 1970 without seeking a lunar landing, having achieved what he considered his goal of beating the Soviet Union to the Moon. He built a formidable second career in business, joining Eastern Air Lines and rising to chief executive officer in 1975 and chairman in 1976, steering the carrier through the turbulent early years of airline deregulation. A dedicated rancher and vintage-aircraft restorer in his later years, he died on November 7, 2023, in Billings, Montana, at the age of 95, honored as the commander who led humanity on its first voyage to another world.