Richard Gordon obituary
Of the 24 astronauts Nasa sent to the moon, only a dozen actually landed there. Richard Gordon, who has died aged 88, was one of the 12 who did not, and in some ways the one whose frustration might have been the highest. Gordon piloted the space module Yankee Clipper on the Apollo 12 mission, orbiting above the moon while his fellow astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed the lunar module. He was the backup command pilot for Apollo 17, and was scheduled to command Apollo 18 and finally land on the moon; but that mission was cancelled due to lack of funding, and there have been no further lunar landings.
If Gordon was disappointed at how things turned out, he took it in his stride: "The name of the game, as far as I was concerned, was to walk on the moon ... but I had a job and a function to perform." Bean described Gordon as "a happy guy" and the "best possible crew mate", recalling that Gordon made him and Conrad remove their spacesuits covered with moon dust before re-entering the space module. Once, when asked if he had regrets, Gordon quipped "Hell no. If you knew those guys you'd be happy to be left alone." But the view from 60 miles above the lunar surface inspired him. "It makes you think about the fragility of our Earth, and the things we do to it," he said.
Continue reading...