Ken Mattingly, an astronaut best remembered for his efforts on the ground that helped bring the damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft safely back to Earth, has died, NASA announced.
He is 87 years old.
“We lost one of our national heroes on October 31,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Thursday.
Thomas Kenneth Mattingly II “was key to the success of our Apollo Program, and his shining personality will ensure that he is remembered throughout history,” Nelson said.
NASA did not say where or how Mattingly died.
However, The New York Times reported that Mattingly died in Arlington, Virginia.
A former Navy pilot, Mattingly joined NASA in 1966.
He helped with the development of spacesuits and backpacks for the Apollo moon missions, NASA said.
Mattingly celebrates the successful rescue of the Apollo 13 spacecraft and crew with a box of cigars at the Manned Spacecraft Center’s Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, following the aborted moon landing mission, on April 17, 1970. Getty Images Mattingly makes final notes on his flight checklist while undergoing a spacesuit pressure check before participating in a countdown demonstration test at the Kennedy Space Center for the Apollo 16 mission in Florida in March 1972. Popperphoto via Getty Images
However, his first space flight only came in 1972 when he orbited the moon as the pilot of the Apollo 16 command module, while two other crew members landed on the lunar surface.
On his way back to Earth, Mattingly walked into space to collect a canister of film with pictures he had taken of the lunar surface.
In later years, Mattingly commanded two shuttle missions and retired from the agency and the Navy as a rear admiral.
Mattingly attends the Greater Talent Network’s 30th anniversary party at the United Nations on May 2, 2012, in New York City. FilmMagic The three crew members of the Apollo 13 mission (left to right), Fred Haise, Jim Lovell and Mattingly.Bettmann Archive
But his most dramatic missions were the ones he never flew.
In 1970, Mattingly was supposed to join the Apollo 13 crew, piloting the command module. But he was pulled from the mission days before launch after being exposed to German measles.
He did not contract the disease but was replaced on the mission by John Swigert Jr.
A few days into the mission, an oxygen tank on the spacecraft’s service module exploded, knocking out most of the power and oxygen to the command module. The moon landing was aborted and NASA began a frantic effort to rescue Swigert, James Lovell and Fred Haise.
Mattingly II learns to put on and take off his space suit aboard a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker zero-gravity simulator (known as the ‘Vomit Comet’), July 22, 1981.Getty Images
Mattingly, who knew the spacecraft intimately, worked with engineers and others as they analyzed the situation and scrambled to find solutions and deliver instructions to the crew.
The three astronauts eventually flocked to the lander, which was designed for just two people, and used it as a lifeboat for four days as Apollo 13 swung around the moon and then landed safely on Earth.
Mattingly “stayed behind and provided real-time decisions critical to the successful repatriation of the injured spacecraft and crew,” NASA’s Nelson said.
“One of the many lessons from all of this is start on day one it’s from the first moment, assume you’re going to make it and don’t do anything to get in the way,” Mattingly recalled in an oral history interview for NASA in 2001.
The story of Apollo 13 was told in the 1994 book “Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13,” co-authored by Lovell, and in the 1995 film “Apollo 13,” in which Gary Sinise played Mattingly.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
