John Young, an astronaut who walked through the moon, passed away

US astronaut John Young, who walked in 1972 and who smuggled a beet sandwich into orbit during a career that made him the only person who flew into three NASA space programs, died at the age of 87, they said Saturday officials.

Young, who flew into space six times, died Friday night at his home in Houston after complications from pneumonia, National Air and Space Administration (NASA) spokesman Allard Beutel said.

The former pilot of the US Navy was the ninth person to enter the moon, which had reached three more after the Younga. In the end, he became one of the most accomplished astronauts in the history of the American space program.

He flew into space twice during NASA's Gemini program in the mid-1960s, twice in the Apollo missions and twice in space shuttles in the 1980s. He was the only one to fly into all three programs.

Young retired in 2004 after 42 years of work in the US space agency.

The Apollo 16 mission in April 1972, its fourth space flight, led it to the surface of the Moon. As commander of the mission, he and his teammate Charles Duke explored the Descartes area of the Moonlight Mountain, collected 90 kg of rocks and soil samples and drove more than 26 km in the moon rover.

Youngov's first flight into space was in 1965 in the Gemini 3 mission that took him and the astronaut Gus Grissom into orbit of the Earth in the first US space flight with two people. His mission Apollo 10 in May 1969 served as a general rehearsal for the historic mission of Apollo 11 two months later in which Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk the moon. Young and his crew carried out all aspects of that mission except that they did not land on the Moon.

Young's fifth space mission, in which he was the commander, was the first NASA of Space Shuttle Columbia 1981.

He was the first person to fly into six space missions in 1983 when he commanded Columbia on her first flight as a Space Laboratory, with a crew of more than 70 scientific experiments. After that, he never flying into space anymore.

Young was born on September 24, 1930 in San Francisco, and grew up in Orlando, Florida. After graduating from aeronautical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952, he entered the Navy and graduated from a school for pilot pilots.

NASA selected it in 1962 for its astronaut program.

• 7 Jan, 2018
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