Weatherford, Oklahoma, The General Who Flew to the Moon

Weatherford, Oklahoma, is a small city on the Southern Plains, population around twelve thousand, best known outside the state for one thing: it produced one of the most accomplished astronauts in American history.

Thomas Patten Stafford was born here on September seventeenth, nineteen thirty, the son of a dentist. He grew up interested in aviation, graduated from Weatherford High School, then earned his degree from the United States Naval Academy in nineteen fifty-two with honors, whereupon the Air Force, not the Navy, claimed him. He trained as a fighter pilot and test pilot before NASA selected him for the second group of astronauts in nineteen sixty-two.

What followed was four missions that traced the entire arc of the American space program's most consequential decade. On Gemini Six in December nineteen sixty-five, Stafford and Wally Schirra performed the world's first successful space rendezvous, maneuvering to within one foot of Gemini Seven while all four astronauts waved at each other through the capsule windows. On Gemini Nine in nineteen sixty-six, Stafford tested spacewalking procedures under difficult conditions.

Then came Apollo Ten in May of nineteen sixty-nine, the mission that flew the complete lunar landing sequence except the landing itself. Stafford and Gene Cernan flew the lunar module to within nine miles of the Moon's surface, confirmed the landing site for Apollo Eleven, and returned to orbit. The command module on reentry hit twenty-four thousand seven hundred ninety-one miles per hour, a world record for the highest speed ever attained by a human being, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. That record still stands.

Stafford's final mission was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July nineteen seventy-five, when he commanded the American crew that docked with a Soviet spacecraft in orbit, the first international crewed spaceflight. He shook hands with Soviet cosmonauts one hundred forty miles above the Earth as the Cold War continued below.

The Stafford Air and Space Museum in Weatherford holds sixty-three thousand square feet of exhibits, including Stafford's actual flown Gemini Six spacecraft. The town that produced him is justifiably proud.