Fred Haise

• 1. Introduction

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  Fred Wallace Haise Jr. came within days of becoming the sixth person to walk on the Moon. Born on the 14th of November 1933, in Biloxi, Mississippi, he trained as a fighter pilot, earned an engineering degree with honors, and worked his way into NASA's elite astronaut corps. Then, in April 1970, an oxygen tank ruptured aboard Apollo 13, and everything changed. The Moon landing was scrubbed. Three men had to survive in a crippled spacecraft hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth. During those desperate days, Haise, Jim Lovell, and Jack Swigert traveled farther from the Earth than any human beings ever had. That record stood for more than five decades. What drove a kid from Biloxi to the edge of the Moon, and how did he carry on after the mission that almost killed him?

• 2. From Biloxi to the Cockpit

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  Biloxi High School graduated Fred Haise in 1950, and his path from that Gulf Coast town to the upper atmosphere was neither straight nor obvious. He started at Perkinston Junior College on a journalism scholarship, playing baseball on the side. By 1952 he had graduated and signed up for the Naval Aviation Cadet Program, trading typewriters for cockpits at NAS Pensacola and then NAS Whiting Field. He trained on the SNJ and the F6F Hellcat before completing his flight training in 1954.

  From March 1954 to September 1956, Haise flew with the U.S. Marine Corps, first with VMF-533 and then VMF-114 at MCAS Cherry Point, North Carolina, piloting the F2H-4 Banshee and the F9F-8 Cougar. He also served as a tactics and all-weather flight instructor in the U.S. Navy Advanced Training Command at NAS Kingsville, Texas. Military service pulled him in multiple directions over the following years. His Oklahoma Air National Guard unit was called up during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, and Haise served ten months as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, flying the F-84F as a tactical fighter pilot and chief of the 164th Standardization-Evaluation Flight at Mansfield Lahm Air National Guard Base, Ohio.

  Between those tours, Haise returned to school and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in aeronautical engineering, with honors, from the University of Oklahoma in 1959. He completed post-graduate work at the U.S. Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1964, earning the A. B. Honts Trophy as the outstanding graduate of Class 64A. By that point he had accumulated thousands of hours in the air, and NASA had already taken notice.

• 3. Into the Astronaut Corps

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  In 1966, NASA selected Haise as one of 19 astronauts in Astronaut Group 5. He was not a stranger to the agency by then; he had already spent years as a civilian research pilot at the Lewis Research Center near Cleveland. That background gave him a head start, and he became the first astronaut in his group to be assigned to a mission.

  His early assignments were as backup Lunar Module Pilot for both Apollo 8 and Apollo 11, two of the most consequential flights in the history of human spaceflight. Apollo 8 carried the first humans to lunar orbit; Apollo 11 put men on the Moon for the first time. Haise was positioned as an understudy for those missions, watching closely and waiting. The crew rotation system used during the Apollo program meant he was next in line for a prime assignment, and it came through. He was originally slated for Apollo 14, but his crew was switched to Apollo 13 so that Alan Shepard could have additional training time before his own flight.

• 4. Apollo 13 and the Record No One Wanted

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  The Apollo 13 mission in 1970 never reached the Moon. What it produced instead was one of the most harrowing survival stories in the history of spaceflight. Haise flew as Lunar Module Pilot alongside commander Jim Lovell and Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert. When the mission was aborted en route, the three men were already deep in cislunar space. Because of the distance between the Earth and the Moon at that precise moment in the mission, Haise, Lovell, and Swigert traveled farther from the Earth than any human beings before them. That record stood until the Artemis II lunar flyby in 2026.

  Haise endured the mission while sick. He developed a urinary tract infection during the flight, which led to kidney infections, leaving him in pain for most of the journey. He and Swigert were also the first members of Astronaut Group 5 to fly in space. Back on Earth, the three crew members received a string of honors. Haise was awarded the American Astronautical Society Flight Achievement Award for 1970, the City of New York Gold Medal, the City of Houston Medal for Valor, the Jeff Davis Award, and the Mississippi Distinguished Civilian Service Medal, all in 1970. He also received NASA's Exceptional Service Medal and, eventually, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

  Haise was slated to become the sixth human to walk on the Moon, behind Lovell, who was to have been fifth. That distinction ultimately went to Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell on Apollo 14, which completed the Fra Mauro landing that Apollo 13's crew never reached. After serving as backup commander for Apollo 16, Haise was prospectively lined up to command Apollo 19, with William R. Pogue as Command Module Pilot and Gerald P. Carr as Lunar Module Pilot. The mission was canceled in 1970 due to budget cuts.

• 5. The Enterprise and a Near-Fatal Crash

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  In 1977, Haise moved to the Space Shuttle program and commanded the Approach and Landing Tests at Edwards Air Force Base. Flying alongside pilot C. Gordon Fullerton, he piloted the Space Shuttle Enterprise in free flight to three landings after the orbiter was released from the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. He flew five approach and landing tests in total. The program verified the shuttle's flight characteristics, a necessary step before the first orbital mission.

  Haise was subsequently assigned to command STS-2A, with Jack R. Lousma as pilot, which would have delivered the Teleoperator Retrieval System to boost Skylab to a higher orbit. Delays in the shuttle's development, combined with an unexpectedly fast increase in Skylab's orbital decay, made the mission impossible to execute. Skylab fell back into the Earth's atmosphere and was destroyed in July 1979. The Space Shuttle did not fly until April 1981. Haise left NASA in June 1979, before the shuttle ever reached orbit, making him the only one of the four astronauts who flew the Enterprise tests who never flew on the shuttle itself.

  Four years before leaving NASA, Haise had survived a crash that nearly killed him. On the 22nd of August 1973, he was piloting a Convair BT-13 that had been modified to resemble an Aichi D3A "Val" torpedo bomber for the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!, which was owned by the Commemorative Air Force. Attempting a landing go-around at Scholes Field in Galveston, Texas, an undetermined power plant failure caused a crash landing and post-crash fire. Haise suffered second-degree burns over 50 percent of his body. He recovered, and in June 1979 he joined Grumman Aerospace Corporation as a test pilot and executive, remaining there until he retired in 1996.

• 6. Legacy and Later Life

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  Fred Haise is the last surviving crew member of Apollo 13 and the last surviving Apollo astronaut who reached the vicinity of the Moon without landing on it. He was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1983, and the Aerospace Walk of Honor in 1995. On the 4th of October 1997, he was among 24 Apollo astronauts inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame. In September 2023, he was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio.

  His personal life included two marriages. He married Mary Griffin Grant on the 4th of June 1954, and they had four children before divorcing on the 21st of July 1978. He married Frances Patt Price on the 9th of January 1979. Frances died on the 7th of February 2022. Weeks later, on the 13th of February 2022, the City of Biloxi unveiled a statue of Haise in the parking lot of the historic Biloxi Lighthouse. Haise attended the ceremony and pressed his handprints into concrete at the statue's base before it was revealed. The statue was created by Mississippi artist Mary Ott Tremel Davidson.

  In 2022, Haise published his autobiography, Never Panic Early, recounting his life and his experiences in the Apollo program. Bill Paxton played him in the 1995 film Apollo 13, and Adam Baldwin portrayed him in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. His accumulated flying time reached 9,300 hours total, including 6,200 hours in jet aircraft.