Dick Gordon

Richard Francis "Dick" Gordon Jr. was born on October 5, 1929, and after graduating from the University of Washington in 1951 joined the U.S. Navy to train as an aviator. He became an accomplished test pilot at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland, where he served as the first project test pilot for the F-4 Phantom II. His flying earned wide attention in 1961 when he won the Bendix Trophy air race, streaking from Los Angeles to New York in the Phantom in about two hours and 47 minutes and setting a transcontinental speed record in the process. That elite test-flying pedigree led NASA to select him among its third group of astronauts in 1963, and he was assigned to fly across both the Gemini and Apollo programs.

Gordon flew twice. His first mission was Gemini 11 in September 1966, on which he served as pilot alongside commander Pete Conrad. The flight achieved the first first-orbit rendezvous and docking with an Agena target vehicle, then used the Agena's engine to boost the crew to a record high apogee of roughly 1,370 kilometers — the highest Earth orbit ever reached by a crewed spacecraft, a mark that still stands. During the mission Gordon performed two spacewalks, including a strenuous effort to fasten a tether between the two docked vehicles for an artificial-gravity experiment; the work proved far more exhausting than ground simulations had suggested and had to be cut short. Three years later, in November 1969, he flew as Command Module Pilot of Apollo 12, the second crewed lunar landing, orbiting the Moon alone aboard the Yankee Clipper — circling it dozens of times — while crewmates Conrad and Alan Bean explored the Ocean of Storms below. Across his two missions he logged 316 hours in space.

Gordon was assigned to command Apollo 18 and trained toward walking on the Moon himself, but the flight was cancelled amid Apollo-era budget cuts, leaving him among the small group of astronauts who orbited the Moon without ever landing on it. After retiring from NASA and the Navy in 1972, he served as executive vice president of the NFL's New Orleans Saints from 1972 to 1976, a tenure that spanned the franchise's move into the Superdome, and later worked as an executive in the energy and science industries. He was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1993. Gordon died on November 6, 2017, at the age of 88, remembered as a gifted aviator whose career spanned record-setting air races, pioneering orbital flights, and a solitary vigil in lunar orbit.