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Fred Wallace Haise Jr. — pilot, astronaut, scholar and businessman — spent more than five decades serving his country in public and private life. He is best known as one of the three astronauts of Apollo 13, the troubled 1970 lunar mission that became a lasting example of ingenuity, teamwork and courage. A NASA tribute film traces his career.
Pilot and engineer
| 1954 | earns his Naval Aviator wings |
| a native of Biloxi, Mississippi, he flies for the Marine Corps while earning an engineering degree at the University of Oklahoma, then flies for NASA while serving as an Air Force fighter pilot | |
| 1963 | moves to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, flying high-performance and experimental aircraft, including the M2-F1 lifting body — research that shaped the design of the Space Shuttle orbiter |
| 1966 | selected as one of NASA's first 19 Apollo astronauts |
He served as a backup crew member on Apollo 8, 11 and 16.
Apollo 13
"Houston, we've had a problem," radioed commander Jim Lovell. An oxygen tank explosion put the lives of Haise, Lovell and Jack Swigert at risk from almost the start of the mission to the end. For three days in 1970, working with Houston's ground controllers, the crew turned their lunar module into a lifeboat, saving precious power and oxygen — and their lives — before returning safely to Earth.
The shuttle's first landings
After Harvard Business School in 1972, Haise returned to Dryden to work on NASA's new, reusable Space Shuttle orbiter. In 1977, he and fellow astronaut Gordon Fullerton flew the risky Approach and Landing Tests: separating the orbiter from its 747 carrier and gliding it, engineless, to a runway landing to test its controls and handling. The tests were critical to the program, which launched Columbia in 1981 — the first mission of a 30-year shuttle era.
By the numbers
Over a 20-year NASA career, Haise logged more than 9,000 flight hours in more than 80 types of aircraft and spacecraft, including more than 142 hours in space.
After NASA
Haise retired from NASA in 1979 and joined Grumman Aerospace Corporation as vice president of space programs, later becoming president of Grumman Technical Services until retiring in 1996. In retirement he has been a public speaker, a counselor to child burn victims, and a board member of the Infinity Science Center, a nonprofit NASA partner raising money for a learning center at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
Sources
Based on "Fred Haise - An American Hero," a film from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA Image and Video Library), and its narration; a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licenza: CC0 1.0 (pubblico dominio) · Tratto da images.nasa.gov
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