Deke Slayton

Deke Slayton
Country:	United States
Organization:	NASA
selected on	April 2, 1959 (1st NASA Group)
Calls:	1 space flight
Begin:	15th July 1975
Landing:	July 24, 1975
Time in space:	9 d 1 h 28 min
EVA inserts:	No
retired on	February 1982
Space flights
ASTP (1975)

Donald Kent "Deke" Slayton (* 1. March 1924 in Sparta , Wisconsin ; † 13. June 1993 in League City , Texas ) was a US -American astronaut . He was part of the first astronaut group selected in 1959. However, he did his first and only space flight in 1975 as part of the Apollo Soyuz Test Project .

Start of career

Slayton during World War II

On Slayton's 18th birthday, March 1, 1942, he joined the US Air Force . After his training as a pilot he was transferred to Europe , where he flew bombing missions in 1943 and 1944 . In mid-1944 he returned to the United States and served as a flight instructor for bomber pilots. In April 1945 he returned to the front as a pilot, this time for missions against Japan .

From 1946 he studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Minnesota and in 1949 was employed by the Boeing Aircraft Corporation in Seattle , where he worked on electrical systems and wing shapes.

In 1951 Slayton served in the Air National Guard , first in Minneapolis , Minnesota, and later in Bitburg , Germany . There he met Marjorie Lunney, whom he married on May 15, 1955.

Slayton returned to the United States in June 1955 and enrolled in the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base . From January 1956 to April 1959 he was a test pilot there .

Mercury astronaut without flight

Slayton was one of 110 test pilots shortlisted for NASA's future astronaut group . He passed all tests and belonged to the group of Mercury Seven , the seven astronauts who were introduced to the public on April 9, 1959.

Each of the seven astronauts was assigned a specialty to ensure that the experience of the test pilots was incorporated into the development. Slayton would be particularly concerned with the Atlas rocket , which would put the Mercury spacecraft into orbit .

It was planned that some of the astronauts would first make a ballistic flight powered by a Redstone rocket . Slayton's flight MR-6 (Mercury-Redstone), the fourth launch of a Mercury spaceship, was scheduled for the fall of 1961.

After the successful orbits of the earth by the Soviet cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and German Titov , the number of suborbital Redstone flights was reduced to three, which would have made Slayton the first American in orbit. When Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom's Redstone flights were successful, however, the third manned Mercury flight with an Atlas rocket was supposed to go into orbit. On November 29, 1961, John Glenn and Slayton were announced as crews for the MA-6 in December and MA-7 in April 1962.

Slayton would have named his flight Delta 7 , but he never got around to going into space. Due to a heart problem that NASA had known since 1959, Slayton was denied airworthiness on March 15, 1962. Instead of his substitute Walter Schirra , Scott Carpenter then flew the MA-7 mission, which he named Aurora 7 , on May 24 , and Schirra, MA-8 on October 30.

Desk career

Slayton initially took part in astronaut training and medical examinations, but took on more and more administrative tasks within NASA. He was appointed coordinator of astronaut activities and headed the newly established astronaut office for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects . In 1963 he became Deputy Director of Flight Crew Operations during a restructuring of NASA, from 1966 its Director.

In November 1963, Slayton resigned from the US Air Force, but remained an inactive NASA astronaut.

Slayton was thus responsible for assigning the astronauts to certain missions of Gemini and Apollo. It was he who decided who steered which spaceship and who was allowed to step onto the moon.

Slayton was portrayed by actor Scott Paulin in the 1983 film The Stuff the Heroes Are Made of , Chris Ellis played him in the 1995 film Apollo 13 about the eponymous mission , and in the 2018 film Aufbruch zum Mond (Dawn of the Moon) about Neil Armstrongs He was portrayed by Kyle Chandler in his life path up to the first moon landing .

The late flight into space

Slayton on the Apollo Soyuz Test Project (1975)

Slayton and Leonow in Soyuz (1975)

In the meantime, Slayton did everything to perhaps return to active astronaut status: he did daily exercises, gave up smoking and drinking coffee, and reduced alcohol consumption. His heart problem disappeared in the summer of 1970, and so, after extensive examinations, in March 1972 he was certified again as fully airworthy for manned space travel. Without further ado, he nominated himself for this, in the foreseeable future, the last manned mission of NASA, as the commander with Jack Swigert as the pilot and the then actually deployed Vance Brand as the operator for the coupling module. The leadership of NASA did not follow his suggestion in this form. On February 9, 1973, Slayton was assigned to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project , along with Tom Stafford and Vance Brand , the first American-Soviet rendezvous in space .

This was followed by two years of intensive training, which included learning the Russian language and numerous trips to the USSR . Slayton had to leave his work as director of flight operations to rest from February 1974.

The flight took place from July 15 to July 24, 1975, Slayton took over the task of the docking module pilot. At 51, he was the oldest newcomer to space to date. The Apollo spacecraft docked with Soyuz 19 in Earth orbit , and the astronauts and cosmonauts were able to transfer from one spacecraft to the other via the docking module. Slayton spent an hour and 35 minutes on board the Soyuz. The return of the Apollo spaceship was almost a catastrophe. After the parachutes were manually deployed, the attitude control nozzles fired and toxic gases flowed through an equalizing valve into the landing capsule. Fortunately, the three astronauts were left with no damage.

The shuttle

The ASTP was the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft, and NASA was focused on the new space shuttle, Space Shuttle . From December 1975 Slayton was head of the approach and landing test program ( Approach and Landing Tests , short: ALT) of the Shuttle Enterprise in California .

After the end of this project in November 1977 he was manager of the orbital flight training program until February 1982 and prepared the first six flights of the space shuttle. Slayton was also responsible for the transfer of the shuttle with a converted Boeing 747 .

According to NASA

Slayton resigned from NASA on February 27, 1982 and became President of Space Services Inc., a private aerospace company that successfully launched the Conestoga rocket in 1983 . He also took on tasks and positions at other companies and organizations. In 1983 he married a second time.

Deke Slayton died of a brain tumor on June 13, 1993 in League City at the age of 69.

The transport spaceship Cygnus Orb-3 , which crashed during take-off on October 28, 2014, and its successor Cygnus OA-4 were named after him.

See also

• List of spacemen

Web links

Commons : Deke Slayton  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Short biography of Deke Slayton at spacefacts.de
• NASA biography of Deke Slayton (English; PDF)
• Biography of Deke Slayton in the Encyclopedia Astronautica (English)