Apollo 13 astronaut Ken Mattingly has died at the age of 87

Ken Mattingly, who orbited the moon and commanded a pair of NASA shuttle missions but was also remembered for the flight he didn’t make — the near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission — died Tuesday in Arlington, Virginia. 87.

His death was confirmed by Cheryl Warner, a NASA spokeswoman. She did not specify the cause or say whether he died at home in Arlington or at a hospital there.

Mr. Mattingly, a former Navy fighter pilot with a degree in aeronautical engineering, joined NASA in 1966. But his first space flight didn’t come until April 1972, when the space agency launched Apollo 16, the penultimate manned mission around the moon.

Piloting the spacecraft’s command module in orbit while holding the rank of lieutenant commander, he took extensive photographs of the moon’s terrain and conducted experiments while Cmdr. John W. Young of the Navy and Lt. Col. Charles M. Duke Jr. of the Air Force, after descending in the lunar lander, collected rock and soil samples from highlands near the crater known as Descartes.

As the three astronauts headed back to Earth, Commander Mattingly stepped outside the spacecraft – which he had named Casper because of the similarity, at least to a child, between an astronaut in a bulky space suit and the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost .

Maneuvering along handrails while tethered to the spacecraft, he retrieved two attached film canisters containing photographs of the moon taken from the capsule for analysis on Earth.

When the Apollo program ended, Commander Mattingly headed the astronaut support office for the shuttle program, designed to transport astronauts to and from an eventual orbiting International Space Station.

In the summer of 1982, he commanded the fourth and final orbit test flight of the shuttle Columbia, which completed 112 orbits. He also commanded the first space shuttle flight for the Department of Defense, a classified January 1985 mission aboard Discovery.

All these achievements came after he was scrubbed from the Apollo 13 flight in April 1970 at almost the last minute.

He would have been orbiting the moon in the command module while Cmdr. James A. Lovell Jr. of the Navy and Fred W. Haise Jr. explored the moon’s surface.

But NASA removed Commander Mattingly from the crew in the final days before launch, when blood tests revealed that he had recently been exposed to German measles while training with Colonel Duke, the lunar module backup pilot, who in turn had contracted the disease from his proximity to an infected child at a neighborhood party. Commander Mattingly was the only one of the Apollo 13 crew members who was found not to have antibodies against the disease.

His backup, John L. Swigert Jr., became the command module pilot, leaving Commander Mattingly to monitor the flight’s progress from mission control.

“Tall and thin, his brown cropped hair almost gone, Mattingly was perhaps the most private man in the Astronaut Office,” wrote Andrew Chaikin in “A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts” (1994).

He also found himself, Mr. Chaikin added, “in the depths of the worst depression of his life” after being taken off Apollo 13.

But he wouldn’t sit still.

On the third day of the flight, an explosion of the oxygen tank in the spacecraft’s service module, while it was some 200,000 miles (320,000 kilometers) from Earth, knocked out power and oxygen in the command module housing the three astronauts, causing the fears arose that they would be stranded in space.

Commander Mattingly did not, in fact, develop German measles, and he was instrumental in the plan developed by the astronauts and mission control in Houston to get them home safely.

The three astronauts crowded into the undamaged lunar module, although it was built for only two astronauts and designed solely to land on the moon and then return to the orbiting mother ship.

Commander Mattingly read a long and detailed list of instructions for the astronauts to follow as they used the lunar lander as a “lifeboat” to get them back to Earth while they were short of power and food.

As the spacecraft and its attached lunar lander approached Earth, the astronauts returned to the command module, which still had some battery power and oxygen and carried the heat shield needed for the descent through the atmosphere. The lunar module and the badly damaged service module were jettisoned and the astronauts landed in the Pacific Ocean. They were flown aboard a helicopter to the recovery ship, the aircraft carrier Iwo Jima.

The harrowing episode was told in the 1995 Hollywood film ‘Apollo 13’, in which Commander Mattingly was played by Gary Sinise.

Thomas Kenneth Mattingly II, known to his colleagues as Ken, was born in Chicago on March 17, 1936 and grew up in the Miami area, where his father worked for Eastern Airlines.

“I built every model airplane I could find, ate every cereal box with a paper airplane cut out on the back,” he told NASA in a 2001 oral history interview.

His father arranged passes for him to fly on Eastern between Miami and New York. As Mr. Mattingly recalled, “If you went north and back from Miami along the East Coast, it was a long day.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Auburn University in 1958, joined the Navy as an ensign and, after gaining his wings in 1960, flew off aircraft carriers. He joined the astronaut corps after attending test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

After his Apollo and Space Shuttle flights, Mr. Mattingly continued to work for NASA into the 1980s. He retired from the space agency and the Navy as a rear admiral and went to work for aerospace companies.

His survivors include his wife, Kathleen (Ruemmele) Mattingly, and a son, Thomas III.

When “Apollo 13” was released, Mr. Mattingly again raised questions about missing the flight.

“It was very painful to be told a few days before launch that you’re not going, but so much was invested in this mission that it was really the only choice,” he said in an interview with Auburn University.

He added that over the years he has wondered what would have happened if he had been on the run. “But from an emotional point of view, I can guarantee you that I would have rather been there, no matter what happened.”

Alex Traub reporting contributed.