Deke Slayton was one of the original NASA Mercury Seven astronauts. He served as NASA's Director of Flight Crew Operations for nine years and as the docking module pilot of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975, which was also the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft.
On December 12, 1951, Slayton had an extraordinary aerial experience while testing out a P-51 Mustang in the skies over Minnesota. He described it in his 1995 autobiography, Deke!:
