Ken Mattingly, Astronaut Scrubbed From Apollo 13, Is Dead At 87

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Ken Mattingly, who orbited the moon and commanded a pair of NASA shuttle missions, but who was remembered as well for the flight he didn't make -- the near-disastrous mission of Apollo 13 -- died on Tuesday in Arlington, Va. He was 87. His death was confirmed by Cheryl Warner, a NASA spokeswoman. She did not specify the cause or say whether he died at home in Arlington or in a hospital there. Mr. Mattingly, a former Navy jet pilot with a degree in aeronautical engineering, joined NASA in 1966. But his first spaceflight didn't come until April 1972, when the space agency launched Apollo 16, the next-to-last manned mission to the moon. Piloting the spacecraft's command module in orbit while holding the rank of lieutenant commander, he took extensive photos of the moon's terrain and conducted experiments while Cmdr.John W. Young of the Navy and Lt. Col. Charles M. Duke Jr. of the Air Force, having descended in the lunar lander, collected rock and soil samples from highlands near the crater known as Descartes.

While the three astronauts were en route back to Earth, Commander Mattingly stepped outside the spacecraft -- which he had named Casper for the resemblance, as least in a child's eye, between an astronaut in a bulky spacesuit and the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost. Maneuvering along handrails while connected to the spacecraft by a tether, he retrieved two attached canisters of film with photos of the moon that he had taken from inside the capsule for analysis back on Earth. When the Apollo program ended, Commander Mattingly headed the astronaut support office for the shuttle program, designed to ferry astronauts to and from an eventual Earth-orbiting International Space Station. In the summer of 1982, he commanded the fourth and final Earth-orbiting test flight of the shuttle Columbia, which completed 112 orbits. He was also the commander of the first space shuttle flight conducted for the Department of Defense, a classified January 1985 mission aboard Discovery.

All those achievements came after he had been scrubbed at virtually the last moment from the flight of Apollo 13 in April 1970. He was to have orbited the moon in the command module while Cmdr.James A. LovellJr. of the Navy and Fred W. Haise Jr. explored the lunar surface. But NASA removed Commander Mattingly from the crew in the final days before launching, when blood tests determined that he had recently been exposed to German measles from training with Colonel Duke, the backup lunar module pilot, who in turn had contracted it from his proximity to an infected child at a neighborhood party. Commander Mattingly was the only one of the Apollo 13 crewmen who were found to lack antibodies against the illness. His backup, John L. Swigert Jr., became the command module pilot, leaving Commander Mattingly to watch the progress ofthe flight from mission control. After his Apollo and space shuttle flights, Mr. Mattingly continued to work for NASA in the 1980s. He retired from the space agency and the Navy as a rear admiral and went on to work for aerospace companies.

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