From: skunk-works-digest-owner@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu To: skunk-works-digest@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu Subject: Skunk Works Digest V3 #62 Reply-To: skunk-works-digest@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu Errors-To: skunk-works-digest-owner@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu Precedence: bulk Skunk Works Digest Thursday, 17 June 1993 Volume 03 : Number 062 In this issue: Deke Slayton Obituary See the end of the digest for information on subscribing to the skunk-works or skunk-works-digest mailing lists and on how to retrieve back issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Rick Pavek Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1993 11:39:24 -0700 Subject: Deke Slayton Obituary Obituary: Donald Kent 'Deke' Slayton (1924-1993) D. K. 'Deke' Slayton was born on 1 Mar 1924 in Wisconsin. A US Air Force pilot, he joined the Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB in 1955, and in 1959 became one of NASA's 'Original Seven' Mercury astronauts. In November 1961 he was selected as the pilot of the second U.S. orbital spaceflight, Mercury-Atlas 7, which was to follow John Glenn's flight. However, in March 1962 he was grounded by a heart problem. When MA-7 did fly later that year, Scott Carpenter was the pilot. In Nov 1963 Slayton resigned from the USAF with the rank of Major and became a civilian NASA employee. He was appointed DFCO (Director of Flight Crew Operations), a post he held for more than 10 years. This was a very powerful position, as Slayton was responsible for picking which astronauts would get to fly each mission. In 1972 Slayton was reinstated on flight service when he managed to persuade the doctors that his heart problem was not significant. He was given the next available flight (the last one for 6 years!) as Docking Module Pilot on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission. In July 1975 ASTP was launched, and he became the 84th person in space, clocking up 217 hr 28 min on the mission. In 1981 Slayton resigned from NASA and joined Space Services, Inc., a private company which hoped to provide a commercial launch service. The company's Starfire sounding rockets have flown payloads, but the Conestoga orbital launcher has yet to make it off the pad. Deke Slayton died of cancer in Houston, Texas on Jun 13, 1993, aged 69. Five of the Original Seven remain (Grissom was killed in 1967); Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), age 71; Walter Schirra, age 70; Rear Adm. Alan Shepard, USN (ret), age 69; Scott Carpenter, age 68; and Gordon Cooper, age 66. As someone on the net observed, it won't be too long before there will be no one living that has walked on an extraterrestrial surface... Rick kuryakin@halcyon.com ------------------------------ End of Skunk Works Digest V3 #62 ******************************** To subscribe to skunk-works-digest, send the command: subscribe skunk-works-digest in the body of a message to "listserv@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu". If you want to subscribe something other than the account the mail is coming from, such as a local redistribution list, then append that address to the "subscribe" command; for example, to subscribe "local-skunk-works": subscribe skunk-works-digest local-skunk-works@your.domain.net To unsubscribe, send mail to the same address, with the command: unsubscribe skunk-works-digest in the body. Administrative requests, problems, and other non-list mail can be sent to either "skunk-works-digest-owner@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu" or, if you don't like to type a lot, "prm@ecn.purdue.edu". A non-digest (direct mail) version of this list is also available; to subscribe to that instead, replace all instances of "skunk-works-digest" in the commands above with "skunk-works". Back issues are available for anonymous FTP from harbor.ecn.purdue.edu, in /pub/skunk-works/digest/vNN.nMMM (where "NN" is the volume number, and "MMM" is the issue number).