Astronaut Thomas Stafford Dies At 93

Gen. Tom Stafford, who helped bring Cold War enemies together in cooperation 140 miles above the Earth, died in a retirement home near Cape Canaveral on Monday at the age of 93. Stafford was the commander of an American capsule that docked with a Soviet Soyuz ship in July of 1975, heralding decades of future cooperation in space between the two earthly rivals. “I’m sure we have opened up a new era in the history of man,” he told the two Soviet astronauts, Lt. Col. Aleksei A. Leonov and Valery N. Kubasov. Deke Slayton and Vance Brand were also on the American ship.

Stafford would have joined the Mercury 7 as one of the first group of NASA astronauts but he was an inch too tall for the tiny capsule. He was headed to Harvard Business School in 1962 when NASA came calling again, offering him a slot in the Gemini program with its more capacious capsule. He flew two Gemini flights and became a docking expert as NASA prepared to send astronauts to the moon. He orbited the moon on Apollo 10 but never went to the surface. He flew in space four times.