I just read that astronaut John Young has passed away today. Another hero of mine has gone on to his reward. He definitely fit the mold and description of a man with "The Right Stuff." Navy test pilot, Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle program veteran, six space flights with three separate programs, and looked on as our most experienced astronaut. He was 87 years old.
By far the most experienced and respected astronaut, and just missed flying in every manned US spacecraft with a tentative schedule for the very last Mercury flight before the program was terminated early after it was clear that long-duration flights were going to have a lot of problems with reliability. He also just missed flying back-to-back moon flights when Gene Cernan crashed a helicopter showing off before Apollo 17, they seriously considered replacing him with the backup - John Young, who had just gotten back from Apollo 16 and had taken the otherwise dead-end Apollo 17 backup slot that originally went to Dave Scott (who was removed after the stamp incident). As it happened, Cernan went anyway.
He got in trouble with NASA after the Challenger incident and the semi-whitewash they attempted - mostly unsuccessfully due to the efforts of several people, Richard Feynman and Roger Boisjoly in particular. In Boisjoly's case, Thiokol was ordered not to punish him for candor - so they "promoted" him to the head of Quality Assurance - which is the ultimate dead-end job in engineering, and gave him next to no power to do anything. Young was unofficially "grounded". There was nothing they could do to Feynman.
I was introduced once to John Young and rode in an elevator with him in Houston. He reminded me at the time of my dad - a tiny, wiry, old guy.
Not many of these guys left - the Gemini/Apollo groups were all my heros as a boy, Mercury being a little before my time.
Brett