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Fred Haise -Former NASA Astronaut #1

Fred Wallace Haise, Jr. (born November 14, 1933) is an engineer and former NASA astronaut. He is one of only 24 people to have flown to the Moon.

Haise was born in Biloxi, Mississippi. He attended Biloxi High School and Perkinston Junior College (now Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College). He graduated with honors in aeronautical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1959. He completed post-graduate courses at the USAF Aerospace Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1964 and the Harvard Business School PMD Program in 1972.

He completed naval aviator training in 1954 and served as a United States Marine Corps fighter pilot.

His NASA career began as an aeronautical research pilot at Lewis Research Center in 1959. Further assignments were held as a research pilot at the NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in 1963 and as an astronaut at the Johnson Space Center in 1966. Haise was the first of the 1966 group to be assigned to Apollo duties – ahead of some group 3 members. He served on the back-up crew for the Apollo 8, Apollo 11, and Apollo 16 moon missions.

Haise flew as the lunar module pilot on the aborted Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970. Due to the free return trajectory on this mission, Haise, and Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert, the other two astronauts on Apollo 13, likely hold the record for the furthest distance from the earth ever traveled by human beings.

Haise was also scheduled as commander for the cancelled Apollo 19 mission. He later flew five flights as the commander of the space shuttle Enterprise, in 1977, for the Approach and Landing Tests Program at Edwards Air Force Base, and was selected to command the original STS-2 mission to rescue the Skylab space station in 1979, but was cancelled due to the long delays in the Shuttle's development as well as the break-up of the Skylab in mid-1979.

Fred Haise is married to the former F. Patt Price of Rogers, Texas. He has four children from a previous marriage to the former Mary (Sissy) Grant of Biloxi, Mississippi: Mary M. (Margaret) born on January 25, 1956; Frederick T., born on May 13, 1958; Stephen W., born on June 30, 1961 and Thomas J., born on July 6, 1970.

Fred Haise was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1970 by President Richard Nixon.

Haise retired from NASA in June 1979, and became a manager with Grumman Aerospace, before retiring in 1996. In 1995, Haise was inducted into the Aerospace Walk of Honor.

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