Richard F. Gordon, Jr.

Richard F. Gordon, Jr., born in 1929, American astronaut, chosen in 1963 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as one of the third group of astronauts. As part of the Gemini 11 mission, Gordon set a spacecraft altitude record, and as part of the Apollo 12 mission, he later orbited the moon.

Gordon was born in Seattle, Washington. He graduated from the University of Washington with a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1951 and immediately entered the United States Navy. Between 1951 and 1961 he spent four years as a fighter pilot; three more as a test pilot, including a stint testing the Phantom F-4H jet; and three years as a flight instructor. In 1961 he won the Bendix Trophy for flying from Los Angeles, California, to New York City at a record 1400 km/h (870 mph).

Gordon's first space flight was on the Gemini 11 mission (September 12-15, 1966). He and command pilot Pete Conrad successfully rendezvoused with an Agena rocket in less than a single orbit. They attached the Gemini capsule to the Agena by a tether as an exercise in station keeping—that is, keeping the relative positions between the two craft unchanged. The mission also set a new altitude record of 1368 km (850 mi) and achieved the first fully automatically controlled reentry of the earth's atmosphere from space.

Between November 14 and November 24, 1969, Gordon and Conrad, joined by their long-time friend and navy pilot Alan LaVern Bean, flew to the moon on Apollo 12, the second lunar landing mission. Gordon was the command pilot, remaining in lunar orbit in the command module Yankee Clipper, obtaining detailed photographs of future landing sites.

Gordon was also part of the backup crew for the Apollo 15 mission in 1971 and would have flown on Apollo 18 had the flight not been canceled in a congressional budget cut. After working in NASA's Astronaut Office on space shuttle matters, Gordon resigned from NASA and the navy in 1972.

Following his NASA experience, Gordon became an executive vice president of the New Orleans Saints football team. He went on to become general manager of a chemical-research company and president of an oil-well fire-fighting firm and worked in several aerospace and technology companies. In 1984 he made his acting debut as capcom (capsule communicator) in the CBS television miniseries “Space” in 1984.