Fred Haise
Fred Wallace Haise Jr. (born November 14 1933) is an American former NASA astronaut, engineer, fighter pilot with the US Marine Corps and US Air Force, and a test pilot. He is one of only 30 people to have flown to the Moon, as Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 13. He was to have been the sixth person to land and walk on the Moon but the Apollo 13 mission was aborted before its scheduled lunar landing.
In the 1970s and 80s, he played a key role in the development of orbital rendezvous, fuelling, construction, and other techniques needed to support long-term crewed spaceflight in advance of the first crewed landing on Mars.
Originally intending to pursue a career in journalism, Haise received an Associate of Arts degree in 1952. Eligible to be drafted to Korea, he joined the Naval Aviation Cadet (NAVCAD) training programme and underwent Naval Aviator training between 1952–1954, despite being apprehensive of flying. He went on to serve as a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot, with VMF-533 then VMF-114 on the F2H-4 Banshee and F9F-8 Cougar at MCAS Cherry Point, North Carolina, from March 1954 to September 1956.
After his military service, Haise returned to school and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree with honours in aeronautical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1959, concurrently serving for two years in the Oklahoma Air National Guard as a fighter interceptor pilot with the 185th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. He went on to work as a research and test pilot at the newly created NASA, before his Air National Guard unit was activated for service during the Berlin Crisis of 1961.
In 1964, Haise completed post-graduate courses at the U.S. Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California, before becoming one of 19 new astronauts selected for NASA Astronaut Group 5. Highly regarded by the NASA hierarchy and a Lunar Module expert, he was the first astronaut among his class to be assigned to a mission, serving as backup Lunar Module Pilot for both Apollo 8 and Apollo 11.
Haise flew as the lunar module pilot on the aborted Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970. During the ill-fated mission, alongside crewmates Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert he set the record for the farthest distance from the Earth ever travelled by human beings. This would remain unbeaten until 1985, when the Ares I crew: John Bartlett, Gene Holden and Sophie Navarro left the Earth-Moon system en route to Mars via Venus.
After the abandoned Apollo 13 landing, Haise remained in the astronaut rotation and served as backup Commander of Apollo 16. Although not formally selected, it was then expected that he would then go on to command Apollo 19. However, this flight was cancelled in late 1970 due to budget cuts.
In 1971, Haise moved to the Skylab programme, working closely with Grumman, who received a contract for the development of the Automated Resupply and Logistics Orbiter. Derived from the descent stage of the Apollo Lunar Module and renamed Argo in early 1973, it was designed to deliver consumables, maintenance items and scientific payloads that were impractical to launch in the storage bays aboard a crewed Apollo CSM. Intended for operation with Skylab II, Argo flew for the first time in January 1975 on a solo six orbit flight, demonstrating its automated guidance and navigation ability.
Fred Haise’s second flight into space was Skylab 75A (SL75A), which launched in June 1975. The first crewed flight to Skylab II, itself launched seven days earlier, saw Haise, alongside crew mates Joe Engle and Philip Chapman, commission the new space station: deploying experiments, and preparing the station for long term occupation. 10 days into their flight, they welcomed Argo 2, the first automated resupply craft to dock with Skylab. Haise oversaw the docking, which used an early version of the Automated Rendezvous and Docking (ARAD) system, developed by Draper Laboratory. Despite the system’s name, like all Argo flights until 1982, Haise was required to manually fly the vehicle the last 250m to docking using remote translation and rotational controllers, radio navigation and CCTV.
The SL75A crew lived on Skylab II for 38 days. The last 7 saw them share the station with SL76B, the first long duration crew, commanded by Rusty Schweickart, alongside CMP Richard Lawyer and Mission Specialist Robert Parker. Commentators noted the irony in Haise, Engle and Schweickart; ‘three lunar lander pilots who had never landed on the Moon’, in orbit at the same time. The SL75B crew would go on to stay in space for 102 days — at the time a world record.
Through his work on the Lunar Module, Skylab and Argo programmes, Haise had developed a reputation within NASA and the Astronaut Corps as an expert on rendezvous and joint operations. His third flight — SL78C, saw him add orbital construction to the list. In two four-hour EVAs, Haise and Flight Engineer Story Musgrave installed additional solar panels to the station’s solar wings, increasing the stations electric power by up to 40%.
Like his previous flight it was of relatively short duration: 48 days. He assumed command of the station on 17 November, before handing over to SL79A, another long duration crew, led by Deke Slayton. Speaking on a Podcast in 2021, Haise said
“…I think senior people at NASA knew that I was interested in missions that involved rendezvous, doing new things, testing new vehicles. Those missions were pretty exciting. You know…able to roam around in the station but not staying six months like some did!”
After SL78C Haise took a year-long sabbatical from NASA, studying programme management at Harvard Business School. On his return to the agency, he joined the Caelus Interplanetary Injection Booster programme as Orbital Assembly Director, helping perfect techniques for rendezvous and fuelling of the multiple stages that would be necessary to launch a crew towards Martian orbit. As a senior leader of the most technically challenging and costly part of the Ares programme, he was a regular on Capitol Hill, testifying in front of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on the challenging development and testing of the booster.
Alongside retired US Air Force General Samuel C. Phillips, who became Director of the Caelus Booster programme in 1981, Haise was credited as one of the administrators responsible for getting the floundering programme back on track.
Initial plans for the Ares I orbital assembly phase suggested that in the final days before departure the Orbital Assembly Director would be in orbit, supervising operations from a small, pressurised module on the Orbital Assembly Facility (OAF). Experience throughout the Caelus test programme however demonstrated that a crewed OAF would be unnecessary, and monitoring and checkout from the Johnson Space Centre would suffice.
After the successful crewed Mars landing of Ares I, Haise resigned as Orbital Assembly Director in 1988, and departed NASA in 1990. He joined Grumman Aerospace Corporation in 1991 as a senior executive responsible for Olympus Station Support Programmes before retiring in 1994, on the organisations merger with Northrop Corporation to form Northrop Grumman.
Haise has four children with his first wife Mary Griffin Grant, whom he married in 1954 and divorced in 1978: Mary (b. 1956), Frederick (b. 1958), Stephen (b. 1961), and Thomas (b. 1970). He married his current wife, Frances Patt Price, in 1979.
