>>16745345
>>16745363

F to a real one, one of the big dogs in the cohort. I am sure that he enjoyed every single solitary last day on Earth after Apollo 13.

I don't track early cosmonauts, except to keep track of the fact that Valentina Tereshkova is still alive, and has buried 'em all, well, most anyway Everybody else in Vostok, of course. She flew her mission when very young, and women tend to outlive men anyway.

What I keep track of is a well-defined group: every man selected for Astronaut Groups 1-5, a group of 55 men. Most, but not all of these guys actually flew Apollo-era missions (broadly defined to include Mercury, Gemini, Skylab etc), all American orbital flights before the Shuttle era. All the guys trained in these groups but who did not get Apollo-Era missions (upper right) have died. and more than one of these guys died in plane crashes. Occupational hazard, experimental pilots have to have a certain gallows humor.

Incidentally, Joe Engle was the last surviving X-15 pilot for several years, but he has since died recently. So if one wants to include the X-15 program in this analysis, there's no need anymore as they're all gone.

The last survivor will probably not be famous, in mouth-breathing normie space terms. Based upon ages, it's likely to be a Skylab crew member or one of the surviving J-mission LMPs, who were slightly younger (Harrison Schmitt is fairly well known I guess, otherwise-educated people who have done tangential Apollo research/watched a documentary or two are much more likely to be aware of him).