Yesterday the former astronaut C. Gordon Fullerton died. He had a career that lasted 50 years as an Air Force pilot and test pilot.

Charles Gordon Fullerton was born in Rochester, New York, on October 11, 1936. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1957 and a Master of Science degree in 1958, both in mechanical engineering at Caltech. In 1958 he entered the U.S. Air Force.

C. Gordon Fullerton worked as a test pilot accumulating a lot of experience until 1969, when he was assigned to NASA’s astronaut corps. At the Johnson Space Center he worked on the support crew for the Apollo missions 14, 15, 16, and 17.

In 1977, C. Gordon Fullerton became part of one of two crews who had the task of testing the Space Shuttle prototype, the Enterprise. In 1982, he was the pilot in a “real” Space Shuttle mission, the STS-3, on the Columbia, the only one that ended with the landing at White Sands because the track at Edwards was too wet because of the rain. In 1985 he was the commander on the STS-51-F mission on the Space Shuttle Challenger, the first to use the Spacelab for various scientific experiments in orbit.

C. Gordon Fullerton officially left the Air Force in 1988 with the rank of colonel, but that didn’t stop his activity. In the following years he worked as a pilot of the B-52 was originally used for the launch of the then new Pegasus rocket but also for many other tests on many types of aircraft, including the Russian Tupolev Tu-144 used by NASA in a high speed research.

In 2009, C. Gordon Fullerton suffered a stroke that forced him to stay in a long-term facility. There he remained until his death on August 21, 2013. He’s survived by his wife Marie and their two children.

C. Gordon Fullerton has received many honors in the course of his life, both military and civilian. In 1982 he was induced into the International Space Hall of Fame and in 2005 was induced in the Astronaut Hall of Fame.

C. Gordon Fullerton wasn’t as famous as some of his colleagues who participated in the most historic moments of space missions. However, for the incredible amount of work done with great professionalism over decades for NASA, he definitely gave a huge contribution to the progress made in the field of aeronautics and astronautics.