Frank Frederick Borman II is a retired United States Air Force colonel, aeronautical engineer, test pilot, businessman, rancher, and NASA astronaut. He was the commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the Moon, and together with crewmates Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, became the first of 24 humans to do so. As of 2020, he is the oldest living former American astronaut.
About Frank Borman in brief
Frank Frederick Borman II is a retired United States Air Force colonel, aeronautical engineer, test pilot, businessman, rancher, and NASA astronaut. He was the commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the Moon, and together with crewmates Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, became the first of 24 humans to do so. As of 2020, he is the oldest living former American astronaut, eleven days older than Lovell. Borman was born on March 14, 1928, at 2162 West 11th Avenue in Gary, Indiana, the only child of Edwin Otto Borman and his wife Marjorie Ann née Pearce, who named him after his paternal grandfather. He is of German descent. After retiring from NASA and the USAF in 1970, he became senior vice president for operations at Eastern Air Lines. He moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he ran a Ford dealership with his son, Fred. In 1998, they bought a cattle ranch in Bighorn, Montana. He learned to fly an airplane at the age of 15 with a female instructor at Gilpin Field in Tucson, Arizona. He obtained his student pilot’s license in 1960, and joined a local flying club. He also built model airplanes out of wood and balsa wood. His parents did not have the money to send him to an top-of-state university, so he went to high school in Tucson. He played quarterback on the junior varsity team, and then became the second-string quarterback for the varsityteam. He earned a Master of Science degree at the California Institute of Technology in 1957.
He then became an assistant professor of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at West Point. In 1960, he was selected for Class 60-C at the USAF Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California and qualified as a test pilot. In 1962, he set a fourteen-day spaceflight endurance record as commander of Gemini 7. In 1966, he served on the NASA review board which investigated the Apollo 1 fire and then flew to the Moon with Apollo 8 in December 1968. The mission is known for the Earthrise photograph taken by Anders of the Earth rising above the lunar horizon as the CommandService Module orbited the Moon and for the reading from Genesis, which was televised to Earth from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. During the Apollo 11 Moon landing mission, he viewed the launch on television with President Richard Nixon. He became chief executive officer of Eastern in 1975, and chairman of the board in 1976. In 1986, he resigned from Eastern after the airline deregulation and additional debt that he took on to purchase new aircraft led to pay cuts and layoffs, and ultimately to conflict with unions, resulting in his resignation in 1986. His father bought a lease on a Mobil service station in Tucson; his mother worked at a new Consolidated Vultee aircraft factory in 1941. His first airplane had been been when he was five years old. After the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, his parents found work at anew ConsolidatedVultee factory.
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This page is based on the article Frank Borman published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
