Deke Slayton was one of the original seven NASA astronauts selected for Project Mercury in 1959. A heart arrhythmia discovered before his scheduled Mercury flight grounded him from spaceflight for more than a decade, during which he served as NASAs director of flight crew operations, responsible for selecting and training astronauts for missions including Gemini and Apollo. After years of medical review cleared him to fly again, Slayton finally reached space in 1975 as a crew member on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first joint American-Soviet spaceflight.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.