He Took 'Snoopy' to Within 9 Miles of the Moon

Astronaut Thomas P. Stafford, who commanded a dress rehearsal flight for the 1969 moon landing and the first US-Soviet space linkup, died Monday. He was 93. Stafford, a retired Air Force three-star general, took part in four space missions. Before Apollo 10, he flew on two Gemini flights, including the first rendezvous of two US capsules in orbit, the AP reports. He died in a hospital near his Space Coast Florida home, said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma. Stafford was one of 24 people who flew to the moon, but he did not land on it. Only seven of them are still alive.

• "Today General Tom Stafford went to the eternal heavens which he so courageously explored as a Gemini and Apollo astronaut as well as a peacemaker in Apollo Soyuz," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a post on X. "Those of us privileged to know him are very sad but grateful we knew a giant."

• Growing up in Weatherford, Stafford said he would look up and see giant DC-3 airplanes fly overhead on early transcontinental routes."I wanted to fly since I was 5 or 6 years old seeing those airplanes," he told NASA historians. Stafford went to the US Naval Academy where he graduated in the top 1% of his class. In 1962, NASA selected Stafford for its second set of astronauts, which included Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, and Pete Conrad.
• The Apollo 10 mission in May 1969 set the stage for Apollo 11's historic mission two months later. Stafford and Gene Cernan took the lunar lander nicknamed Snoopy within 9 miles of the moon's surface. Astronaut John Young stayed behind in the main spaceship, dubbed Charlie Brown.
• After the moon landings ended, NASA and the Soviet Union decided on a joint docking mission and Stafford was chosen to command the American side. It meant intensive language training, being followed by the KGB while in the Soviet Union, and lifelong friendships with cosmonauts. "We have capture," Stafford radioed in Russian as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft hooked up. His Russian counterpart, Alexei Leonov, responded in English: "Well done, Tom, it was a good show. I vote for you." Later, Stafford was a central part of discussions in the 1990s that brought Russia into the partnership building and operating the International Space Station.

• After he put away his flight suit, Stafford was the go-to guy for NASA when it sought independent advice on everything from human Mars missions to safety issues to returning to flight after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident. He chaired an oversight group that looked into how to fix the then-flawed Hubble Space Telescope, earning a NASA public service award.
• "Tom was involved in so many things that most people were not aware of, such as being known as the 'Father of Stealth'," Ary said in an email. Stafford was in charge of the famous "Area 51" desert base that was the site of many UFO theories—and the home of testing of Air Force stealth technologies.

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