Fearless: A Recollection

This is something I'm working on about my mom and dad--a memoir in one sense, a sort of cultural history in another...

From Chapter 11--NASA

At the age of 28, my dad was selected as the youngest member of NASA Astronaut Group 5 (sardonically labeled the "Original Nineteen," by John Young, in a reference to the “Original Seven”) in April 1966, along with, among others, Fred Haise, Vance Brand, and Stuart Roosa. According to space historian Matthew Hersch, my dad and his Group 5 colleague Don Lind were "effectively treated ... as scientist-astronauts" (akin to those selected in the fourth and sixth groups) by NASA due to their substantial scientific experience, an implicit reflection of their shared lack of the test pilot experience highly valued by Deke Slayton and other NASA managers at the time; this would ultimately delay their progression in the flight rotation.” I have a photograph of him in 1969, standing with Jim Irwin and Charlie Duke outside a Ramada Inn, lean and beautiful, an advertisement for adrenaline and aviator glasses. He wanted the world, and the world wanted him. He was five nine, slender, with dark hair and blue eyes, an aviator and an astronaut, brilliant and dashing. In that bad, frenetic era, at a time when the world seemed to be coming apart, torn by the hatreds engendered by Vietnam and racial inequality, the astronauts were establishment eye candy, rock-jawed and streamlined and unafraid. Americans were learning about the crimes committed and inspired by a down-on-his luck musician and would-be prophet named Charles Manson. Jimi Hendrix was playing Woodstock. Almost twelve thousand American servicemen would be killed that year in southeast Asia. But NASA forged ahead. In July of that year Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins visited the Moon, as John F. Kennedy had promised they would, and the country had something to celebrate again.