“Heroes Are Hard to Find” is the title of the last Fleetwood Mac album before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the band and helped propel it from cult favorite to mega-super-duper-stardom. Perhaps it was a prescient look two generations into the future.
Oh, heroes haven’t disappeared, mind you. The concept has just become as balkanized as everything else in today’s society. People will vocally or through social media memes praise their own particular heroes who accomplish the things they value or reflect their own particular mindsets and belief structures. Some folks also make it their mission — and it’s not an altogether unjustified one, given the bad things human beings are capable of doing — to expose the flaws of or tear down anyone placed on a pedestal.
Once upon a time, however, there was relative unanimity in the U.S. that there were no bigger heroes on or off this planet than astronauts — case closed.
Hundreds of men and, ultimately and rightfully, women eventually carried that label, but we’re talking in particular about the first three groups of astronauts chosen by NASA in 1959, 1962 and 1963.
They were the ones racing the Russians into outer space; the ones trying to carry out President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to send Americans to the moon before the 1960s ended; the ones who crammed their bodies into tiny tin cans (there were just 210 cubic feet of inhabitable space for three occupants inside an Apollo command module) mounted atop massive, fire-belching rockets for a ride into the heavens in the days when the smallest computers literally filled rooms.
The best of them all may have been a folksy Southerner (his roots were in Georgia and Florida even though his birth certificate says San Francisco) named John Young.
Young, a Navy officer and test pilot, was on the crew for the first Project Gemini mission in 1965, and immediately caused a stir by, once in orbit, handing mission commander Gus Grissom a corned beef sandwich. (He drew an official reprimand, but the incident was still drawing smiles a half-century later.)
Young later commanded his own Gemini mission (10) and flew twice in Project Apollo, becoming one of only three Americans to travel twice to the moon (he orbited it in 1969 as command module pilot of Apollo 10, and in 1971 became the ninth astronaut to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 16).
He became the boss of the astronaut corps, but remained on flight status and in 1981, at age 50, he piloted the first space shuttle mission. He flew again on the shuttle in 1983, and was in line for another flight until the Challenger disaster in 1986 disrupted and delayed the program.
Young continued to work for NASA until 2004 — 42 years, the longest career by far of any astronaut.
He was a favorite of space buffs because he was approachable, and because his folksy manner was only a covering on the real package. He had a brilliant intellect and was renowned and revered for his troubleshooting abilities and his willingness to buck NASA bureaucracy when he believed something vital was being ignored or a point needed reinforcing.
Young died Friday at 87 at his home in Houston. We salute him and offer a Godspeed on his final journey.
We’ll note that only 11 of the 30 astronauts from those first three groups remain with us. The youngest, Russell Schweickart, is 82; the oldest, Jim Lovell, is 89. Two died in 2017, Eugene Cernan and Dick Gordon.
The reality is these tributes will become more frequent, a lot sooner than anyone would like — and it will become even harder to find true heroes.