Astronaut. He graduated from Annapolis in 1966, received flight training as a Naval aviator and served as a fighter pilot in Vietnam. In the 1970s, he was engineering test pilot in the flight test division at the Naval Air Test Center and became an NASA Astronaut in August 1979. He was a veteran of four space flights, having logged over 724 hours in space. He was the pilot on the space shuttle Discovery STS 51-A in 1984, was the mission commander on Atlantis STS-30 in 1989, Discovery STS-53 in 1992 and Endeavor STS-69 in 1995. (bio by: John “J-Cat” Griffith) Cause of death: Cancer