page_title: Rusty Schweickart
section_title: Military and NASA service
hierarchical_section_title: Rusty Schweickart / Military and NASA service
caption_attribution_description: U.S. Air Force Captain en:Russell Schweickart, of the en:101st Fighter Squadron, en:Massachusetts Air National Guard, standing in front of his North American en:F-86H Sabre (decorated with the squadron's "Lucky Shamrock" symbol) on the day he left for astronauts training in 1963.
context_page_description: Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart is an American aeronautical engineer, and a former NASA astronaut, research scientist, U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, as well as a former business executive and government executive.
  Schweickart was selected in 1963 for NASA's third astronaut group. He was the Lunar Module Pilot on the 1969 Apollo 9 mission, the first crewed flight test of the lunar module, on which he performed the first in-space test of the portable life support system used by the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon. As backup Commander of the first crewed Skylab mission in 1973, he was responsible for developing the hardware and procedures used by the first crew to perform critical in-flight repairs of the Skylab station. After Skylab, he served for a time as Director of User Affairs in NASA's Office of Applications.
  Schweickart left NASA in 1977 to serve for two years as California Governor Jerry Brown's assistant for science and technology, then was appointed by Brown to California's Energy Commission for five and a half years, serving as chairman for three.
context_section_description: Schweickart served in the U.S. Air Force and Massachusetts Air National Guard (101st Tactical Fighter Squadron) from 1956 to 1963, with over 4,000 hours of flight time, including 3,500 hours in high performance jet aircraft.
  Prior to joining NASA, Schweickart was a research scientist at the Experimental Astronomy Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his work there involved research upper atmospheric physics, star tracking and stabilization of stellar images. His thesis for a master's degree at MIT concerned stratospheric radiance.
  Schweickart was chosen as part of NASA Astronaut Group 3 in October 1963. He was the youngest in the group. The third group of astronauts performed jungle training. Schweickart partnered with Clifton Williams. On March 21, 1966, he was named as the backup Pilot for Roger B. Chaffee on Apollo 1—which was to have been the first crewed Apollo flight but was destroyed during a ground test accident. His fellow crewmen were backup Command Pilot James McDivitt and Senior Pilot David Scott, both veterans of  Project Gemini.  In December 1966, this crew was promoted to fly the first crewed Earth orbital test of the Apollo Lunar Module (LM), with Schweickart as Lunar Module Pilot.
caption: Schweickart standing in front of his North American F-86 Sabre in 1963
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