Thomas P. Stafford est né le 17 septembre 1930 dans l'Oklahoma, États-Unis. Il était marié à Linda Ann Dishman, Faye L. Shoemaker et Linda Ann Dishman. Il est mort le 18 mars 2024 en Floride, États-Unis.
One of the most experienced of the Apollo era astronauts, he flew two
Gemini and two Apollo missions. On Gemini 6 he flew with Wally Schirra
conducting the first rendezvous of two separate spacecrafts and on
Gemini 9 he was the commander with Eugene Cernan rendezvousing with an
Agena target vehicle. On Apollo 10 he went to the moon with John Young
and Eugene Cernan without landing and flew the Apollo Soyuz Test
Project as the commander with Vance Brand and Deke Slayton in 1975 on
the last Apollo mission. The lunar module on the Apollo 10 mission was called Snoopy while the command module was called Charlie Brown.
Houston, this is Apollo 10. You can tell the world we have arrived.
[on reaching a lunar orbit that brought the spacecraft within nine
miles of the Moon's surface, quoted in the New York Times, 22 May
1969]