Thomas P. Stafford

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Stafford was born on the 17th of September 1930, in Weatherford, Oklahoma, a small town that would later name an airport and a museum after him. At 14, he climbed into a Piper Cub for his first flight. That single hour in the air planted something that would take him, decades later, to within nine miles of the lunar surface.

  His life spans almost the entire arc of American aerospace ambition: from the propeller-driven training planes of the early Air Force, through the improvised urgency of the Space Race, to the delicate diplomacy of a joint mission with the Soviet Union. He flew more than 120 types of aircraft and three types of spacecraft. He made six rendezvous in space, logged 507 hours in orbit, and set the record for the fastest speed ever traveled by a human being. Then he came home and helped design the F-117 Nighthawk and the B-2 stealth bomber.

  What holds all of it together? How does one man move from interceptor squadrons in West Germany to orbiting the Moon to sketching stealth aircraft specs on hotel stationery? The answers involve a mid-air collision over Texas, a misaligned switch that nearly killed him above the Sea of Tranquility, and a friendship with a Soviet cosmonaut who would one day deliver a eulogy in Russian.

• 2. From Weatherford to the Academy

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  Dr. Thomas Sabert Stafford, a dentist in Weatherford, was diagnosed with skin cancer in 1944 and died on the 22nd of June 1948, the summer his son graduated high school. Stafford carried that loss into the Naval Academy, where he had been accepted to the Class of 1952 on a Navy ROTC scholarship after being recruited to play football at the University of Oklahoma.

  Football ended fast. A career-ending knee injury in preseason practice closed that door before the first game. What the Academy gave him instead was more durable. After his freshman year, Stafford sailed aboard a battleship with a roommate named John Young, who would later fly with him to the Moon. After his second year, a summer at NAS Pensacola introduced him to naval aviation through the SNJ Trainer. After his third year, he served on a destroyer escorting USS Missouri.

  On a trip home to Weatherford during his fourth year, Stafford became engaged to Faye Shoemaker in December 1951. That spring, a lottery assigned him to the United States Air Force rather than the Navy upon graduation. He accepted the commission as a second lieutenant in 1952, holding a Bachelor of Science in engineering with honors. The Air Force, as it turned out, was exactly the right door.

• 3. The Making of a Test Pilot

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  Pilot training took Stafford through Greenville AFB in Mississippi, then San Marcos AFB in Texas, then Connally AFB in Texas, flying the T-6 Texan and the T-33 Shooting Star. At San Marcos, a training mission ended in a mid-air collision with another student pilot. Stafford and his instructor landed safely. The other student did not survive.

  He graduated from pilot training on the 1st of September 1953, and moved to Tyndall AFB, Florida, for F-86 Sabre training. By 1954 he was at Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota, flying Arctic defense missions. A year later he transferred to the 496th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Hahn Air Base in West Germany, still flying the F-86, and began working as an assistant maintenance officer. The technical dimension of the work sharpened his interest in test flight.

  In 1958, Stafford attended the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB and finished first in his class, earning the A. B. Honts Award. He stayed on as a flight instructor and used the assignment to reshape the school itself: he created the first civilian instructor position there to ensure continuity, and co-wrote both the Pilot's Handbook for Performance Flight Testing and the Aerodynamics Handbook for Performance Flight Testing. When NASA called in the summer of 1962, the handbooks he wrote were still in use.

• 4. Gemini: Rendezvous and Risk

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  On the 14th of September 1962, Stafford was selected for Astronaut Group 2 alongside eight other future astronauts. He had been accepted to Harvard Business School and moved to Boston three days before the NASA notification arrived. He chose NASA.

  His first flight was nearly his first failure. On the 25th of October 1965, Stafford and Wally Schirra were already inside Gemini 6 when the Agena target vehicle exploded on ascent. The mission was canceled, redesignated Gemini 6A, and repurposed as a rendezvous with the long-duration Gemini 7 mission. Then, on the 12th of December 1965, Gemini 6A's engines ignited and immediately shut down. Schirra and Stafford did not eject, a decision that required extraordinary composure: an unplanned shutdown on the pad was a potential catastrophe. The cause turned out to be an electrical issue and a cap left on a fuel line.

  Three days later, on the 15th of December 1965, Gemini 6A launched cleanly and rendezvoused with Gemini 7. The two spacecraft came within feet of each other and held station for about five hours. It was the first orbital rendezvous in spaceflight history. Gemini 9A added a second rendezvous and a brutal EVA that had to be aborted after two hours when Gene Cernan, testing the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit, encountered mobility, environmental regulation, and communication failures. The mission recovered after conducting simulated rescue maneuvers with a lunar module in a lower orbit, a rehearsal for something much larger to come.

• 5. Nine Miles Above the Moon

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  Charlie Bassett and Elliot See, the primary crew for Gemini 9, died on the 28th of February 1966, when their T-38 Talon crashed on landing at Lambert Field. Stafford and Cernan, their backups, inherited the mission. The pairing carried over into the Apollo program, with Stafford, Cernan, and John Young eventually assigned as the primary crew for Apollo 10.

  Apollo 10 lifted off on the 18th of May 1969. Stafford had helped design a color camera for the mission, believing that public outreach was essential; he wanted people on Earth to see the Moon as it actually looked. The command module was nicknamed Charlie Brown and the lunar module was nicknamed Snoopy. Once in lunar orbit, Stafford and Cernan undocked in Snoopy and descended to a periapsis of nine miles above the lunar surface, directly over the Sea of Tranquility, the intended landing site for Apollo 11. It was the first time anyone had flown a lunar module in lunar orbit.

  On the ascent back to the command module, a misaligned switch on the Abort Guidance System sent the lunar module into a rapid, uncontrolled spin. Stafford regained control and completed the rendezvous burn. The capsule later traveled at 24,791 mph during its return to Earth, setting the record for the fastest speed ever reached by a human being. Apollo 10 splashed down east of Samoa.

• 6. Cold War Handshake in Orbit

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  In July 1969, just weeks after Apollo 10, Stafford replaced Alan Shepard as Chief of the Astronaut Office. He oversaw crew assignments for Apollo and Skylab missions until Shepard resumed the position after Apollo 14 in July 1971. During that period, President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin agreed to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a joint mission that would require the two superpowers to dock their spacecraft in orbit.

  Stafford was promoted to brigadier general in late 1972 and named commander of the mission. Beginning in 1973, he and his crewmates trained extensively in both Russia and the United States. Soyuz 19, carrying Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov, launched on the 15th of July 1975, at 12:20 UTC. Apollo followed later the same day, at 19:50 UTC. Two days later, the spacecraft docked. The crews met, conducted joint experiments, and held press conferences. After 44 hours docked, they separated on July 19.

  The return was nearly fatal. As the Apollo command module descended, nitrogen tetroxide from the reaction control thrusters flooded the cabin. Crewmate Vance Brand lost consciousness. Stafford put on his oxygen mask and helped Brand before donning Brand's mask as well. All three were safely recovered and hospitalized in Hawaii for edema from fuel inhalation. As a brigadier general flying the mission, Stafford became the first general officer to fly in space.

• 7. Stealth and Strategy

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  On the 15th of November 1975, weeks after Apollo-Soyuz, Stafford assumed command of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB. He flew foreign aircraft including the MiG-17 and the Panavia Tornado, and was involved in the debriefing of Viktor Belenko after his defection. He also managed development of the XST program, which evolved into the F-117 Nighthawk.

  In March 1978, Stafford moved to Washington as Deputy Chief of Staff for Research, Development, and Acquisition. There he pushed for the mobile MX missile and began developing the Advanced Technology Bomber. In early 1979, before a speech at the Chicago chapter of the Air Force Association, he met with the chairman of Northrop, whose company was running a low-speed stealth reconnaissance program for DARPA. On a piece of hotel stationery, Stafford wrote out the specifications for range, payload, radar cross-section, and gross take-off weight for an advanced stealth bomber. That note became the foundation for what was eventually designated the B-2.

  For attack stealth, Stafford pushed for a larger aircraft he called Senior Trend. A contract with Lockheed was signed, and the F-117A flew just two years and eight months later. The aircraft became operational in under five years. On the opening night of Desert Storm in 1991, it was the only plane that secured airspace above Baghdad, flying less than two percent of air-to-ground combat missions while attacking 43 percent of Iraqi strategic targets. Stafford retired to Norman, Oklahoma, on the 1st of November 1979, just before that aircraft's first flight.

• 8. Legacy in Weatherford

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  After retirement, Stafford served on corporate boards including Omega SA, Gulfstream Aerospace, and Gibraltar Exploration. In July 1990, Vice President Quayle and NASA administrator Admiral Richard Truly asked him to chair what became known as the Synthesis Committee, a team of 42 full-time and 150 part-time members that produced a long-term plan for lunar missions in 2004 and a Mars mission in 2012. He later became a technical advisor for the Shuttle-Mir program, particularly STS-63 and STS-71, and served on the review committee for the Progress-Mir collision.

  Alexei Leonov, his Soviet counterpart from Apollo-Soyuz, became the godfather of Stafford's younger children. When Leonov died in October 2019, Stafford delivered the eulogy in Russian. In 2002, Stafford published his autobiography, We Have Capture: Tom Stafford and the Space Race, written with Michael Cassutt.

  The Stafford Air and Space Museum opened in Weatherford, Oklahoma, in 1993 in just two rooms. It has since grown to over 63,000 square feet of artifact space. It is a Smithsonian affiliate and the only museum in the world to house test-fired versions of both a U.S. F-1 engine and a Soviet NK-33 engine, the competing propulsion systems of the Space Race, sitting side by side in Oklahoma. The museum also holds the Gemini 6 spacecraft that Stafford and Schirra flew in 1965. Stafford died from liver cancer on the 18th of March 2024, at Satellite Beach, Florida, at 93.