 There are some astronauts whose names are just known to everybody, like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Then there are the names that are known to fewer, but still many, like Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan. Then there are people like Don Isley, who most people think is Don Izel. Well, he's actually a really fascinating character, who we're going to look at in brief, today, on Vintage Space. Don Isley is one of those astronauts who's not even very well known to rabid space fans, but not because he didn't do anything noteworthy. No, rather his mission, Apollo 7, just happens to be the flight that I would say gets some of the least love of all of the Apollo missions. And the command module pilot and rookie on the flight, well one of the two rookies on the flight. There's so much less known about him than the commander, Wally Shura, who was one of the original Mercury astronauts. In fact, people had such a hard time remembering details about him at the time of his flight that the crew members were listed as Wally, Walt for Walt Cunningham, and what's his name? In the morning Apollo 7 launched, Don Isley enjoyed his copy from a mug that said, what's his name on it? So what's the deal with what's his name? Don Isley joined NASA's astronaut corps as one of the group three astronauts in October of 1963. And you may recognize a lot of familiar and better known faces within this astronaut class. Isley came to NASA with a Bachelor of Science degree from the U.S. Naval Academy, a Master's of Science in Astronautics from the Air Force Institute of Technology, and Flight Experience at the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base. He was exactly the pedigree NASA needed at the time. Isley's first flight assignment was as the command module pilot of Apollo 1, but he was forced to change flights. During training in NASA's Vomit Comet, he twice dislocated his left shoulder and went in for surgery on January 27th of 1966. He was expected to make a full recovery, but he wouldn't be ready to fly by the time Apollo 1 launched in February of 1967. And so he was forced to switch places with Roger Chaffee, the command module pilot, then assigned to Apollo 2. After the Apollo 1 crew was killed in a prelaunch fire on January 27th of 1967, the Apollo 2 crew was reassigned to Apollo 7. Apollo 7 is a flight that gets almost no love, but it was a really fascinating mission because of its place in the overall Apollo program. The short version of the story was that there were initially two versions of the Apollo spacecraft, the Block 1 module that couldn't go to the moon, well, could, but couldn't dock with the lunar module, so couldn't support a lunar mission, and the Block 2 version that could support a lunar mission by docking with that lunar module. Initially, the first Apollo flights were designed to fly a Block 1, testing the basis of the spacecraft, and only the Block 2 version would go to the moon. But after the Apollo 1 fire, the Block 2 was significantly rebuilt to make it safer for crews, and NASA decided that it was useless to fly a Block 1 mission since Block 2 would be going to the moon. And so Apollo 7 was the first ever flight of a complete Block 2 spacecraft, and Don Isley, as the command module pilot, was the pilot of the first ever test of the lunar Apollo spacecraft. Now the Apollo 7 mission is perhaps best known because the crew didn't exactly have the best time in orbit. Commander Wally Sharaw had a head cold, and his mood trickled down through the rest of the crew, who sort of had to fall in under their commander. And once they landed, flight directors decided that none of the crew members would ever fly again, which was fine for Wally Sharaw, he was retiring, but while cutting him and Don Isley, were never to have a second mission in space, and would never get a chance to go to the moon. Don Isley is perhaps better known as the first astronaut to get a divorce while working for the agency. We know today that many of the Apollo-era astronauts enjoyed the rock star status afforded to them by being some of the first ever Americans to go into space, and that included girls. Well, Isley was more open with his affair than most. Isley divorced his first wife Harriet, not long after the Apollo 7 flight, and married his girlfriend Susie, whom he stayed married to for the rest of his life. In an era where astronauts were supposed to be upstanding family men who went to church and had white-picked fences around their yards, this was a serious blow to the image of the astronaut, and it started a whole new culture among the astronaut corps. The other reason we might not know too much about Don Isley is that he died very young. He was on a business trip in Japan when he died of a heart attack in his sleep. Now, an odd ending to this story is that Isley was traveling with Al Shepard, his former chief astronaut, and after Isley's death, Shepard didn't stick around to help Susie Isley get the body back. Instead, he left, leaving Susie to figure out how to get her husband's remains. Ultimately, he was cremated in Japan and sent back home to be buried at Arlington. Dying quite young also means that Isley never had a chance to publish his memoirs, but he was writing them. And my dear friend Francis French found the manuscript, cleaned them up, and published them in a brand new book called Apollo Pilot. So Isley's memoirs are actually quite interesting. They were written not too long after he left the agency, so the memories that he had of working for NASA are still quite fresh. He was also really frustrated with NASA over not letting him fly again and the backlash he had after the Apollo 7 flight and his divorce. And he's quite candid about all that in the memoirs. Francis did an amazing job at putting it all together and filling in gaps where Isley had left blank spots that he was likely intending to fill. And I also had a very small part in getting this book together. Francis asked me to write an historical contact section. The original was much larger than what ultimately ended up in the book, but nevertheless, I have been working on this book for about four years and I'm so excited that it is finally available because Isley's story really is phenomenal and also it's a voice of Apollo that we've never heard before. So because I had a hand in putting this together and I think it is a phenomenally fascinating memoir, I am going to be doing a giveaway of one signed copy. Of course, not signed by Isley, obviously, but signed by Francis French and myself. So you guys kind of know how my giveaways work by now. I will be asking you one trivia question because there's only one book and I will be awarding points for style and creativity. So write me a haiku, a very short story. Don't actually write me a novel. Make it something, picture with words, whatever you want. Get creative with it, but also have the right answer. I will be picking one winner at complete random based on getting the answer right exactly one week from today, so next Monday. So the question is this, and it should be a relatively easy one if you've been paying attention to vintage space. In other videos, I've talked about there being different types of Apollo missions. What mission type was Apollo 7? So I've got links in the description if you're curious, one to Amazon and one to farthestreaches.com, which is also selling copies signed by both Francis and myself. So do you guys have other questions about Apollo 7, about Don Isley, about the block one to block two transition, about anything recovery from the fire related, anything general Apollo era, or just space related? Leave me all of your questions and things you would like to see covered in future episodes in the comment section below. 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