Apollo 16 astronaut Ken Mattingly dies at 87

Apollo astronaut Ken “TK” Mattingly, known for orbiting the moon and helping the crew of Apollo 13 return to Earth in the 1970s, died Tuesday, NASA announced. He was 87.

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“We lost one of our country’s heroes on Oct. 31,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Thursday in a statement. “NASA astronaut TK Mattingly was key to the success of our Apollo Program, and his shining personality will ensure he is remembered throughout history.”

No cause of death was given.

Born in Chicago on March 17, 1936, Mattingly began his career with the U.S. Navy, earning his wings in 1960. Six years later, NASA selected him as an astronaut, and he went on to participate in some of the most consequential Apollo missions, NPR reported.

He was part of the astronaut support crews for the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, the first crewed spaceflight to reach the moon, and the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the first spaceflight to land humans on the Moon.

“Perhaps his most dramatic role at NASA was after exposure to rubella just before the launch of Apollo 13,” Nelson said. “He stayed behind and provided key real-time decisions to successfully bring home the wounded spacecraft and the crew of Apollo 13 — NASA astronauts James Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise.”

He was portrayed by actor Gary Sinise in the 1995 film about the mission, “Apollo 13.” Earlier this year, Sinise said in a social media post that it was “an honor” to portray the astronaut on the silver screen.

In an interview with NPR, Mattingly downplayed his role in the mission, saying he “didn’t play any role.”

“I was the observer,” he said. “The people that played roles and in bringing that stuff together deserve a lot of credit.”

Mattingly got another chance to see space for himself in 1972, when he served as the command module pilot for Apollo 16. He took extensive photos of the moon and ran experiments while Navy Cmdr. John W. Young and Air Force Lt. Col. Charles M. Duke Jr. took rock and soil samples from the surface, according to The New York Times.

In a 2001 NASA oral history interview, Mattingly described his time in space, saying that he “had this terrible sensation that I was seeing so many things that were out of this world, unbelievable.”

“I’m afraid to look (out the window) again, because I feel like I have an erasable memory and if I see one more thing, it’s going to write over something I just saw and I’ll forget it. I know that’s preposterous, but I had this very palpable fear that if I saw too much, I couldn’t remember. It was just so impressive.”

He went on to serve as spacecraft commander for space shuttle missions STS-4, in 1982, and STS 51-C, in 1985. He logged 504 hours in space before resigning from his position at NASA in 1985.

“He viewed the universe’s vastness as an unending forum of possibilities,” Nelson said. “As a leader in exploratory missions, TK will be remembered for braving the unknown for the sake of our country’s future.”

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Photos: Remembering Apollo 13 50 years later In this photo provided by NASA, a view of the Apollo 13 Lunar Module (LM) was photographed from the Command Module (CM) just after the LM had been jettisoned, April 17, 1970. The jettisoning occurred a few minutes before 11 a.m. (CST), just over an hour prior to splashdown of the CM in the south Pacific Ocean. The apparent explosion of oxygen tank number two in the Apollo 13 Service Module (SM) caused the Apollo 13 crew members to rely on the LM as a "lifeboat". (AP Photo/NASA)