Thomas Stafford, one of the few surviving moon men, died today at 93 on The Sunshine State's so-called Space Coast.

Though Stafford wasn't one of the four surviving moon walkers--that would be Buzz Aldrin, Charles Duke, David Scott and Harrison Schmitt--Stafford was Commander of Apollo 10 during late May 1969, one of the two test-runs of the lunar excursion module.

The earlier Apollo 9 also tested the LEM, but solely in Earth orbit--while Apollo 10 was one of the nine NASA missions (starting with the bold Apollo 8 moonshot at Christmastime 1968) that flew the quarter-million mile distance to be inserted into lunar orbit. Stafford (along with late future-moonwalkers John Young and Eugene Cernan) tested the LEM [nowadays foreshortened to LM], though never landed, as would Apollo 11-17 (with the Apollo 13 landing aborted by...well, you know).

But Stafford and Cernan (with Young remaining in the mothership) DID take the LEM within nine miles of the lunar surface, a lot closer than any of us are likely to ever get. Remarkably, NASA brass even considered the possibility that that alpha-male pair* might bootleg their way into the history books (and thus sneak ahead of the pioneering Neil Armstrong and Aldrin in late July 1969) by attempting their own, non-authorized landing...so mission control actually short-fueled the LEM! (Read all about it in the linked Wiki bio.)

The late Stafford also orbited earth in July 1975 aboard the Apollo/Soyuz joint US/Soviet mission...which one NASA engineer--and wag, clearly--quoted by Newsweek at the time ridiculed as "That Great Wheat Deal in the Sky", the imbalance between the respective NASA and Russian technologies being so stark so as to remind him** of Nixon's oft-maligned 1973 subsidized crop fiasco.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
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* EVERY man in NASA's astronaut program was by no accident an alpha male, as Tom Wolfe made clear in his landmark "The Right Stuff".
** Not many female NASA engineers in those days...notwithstanding Hollywood's woke effort to, er, whitewash the question with the fact-fudging "Hidden Figures".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_P._Stafford