In any case he had already had his own extra-vehicular adventure on the Gemini 10 mission,going out to retrieve a meteorite-collector from a dead Agena rocket, gliding across the night sky with perfect and stately grace, like a god.It didn’t matter that, after Apollo 11, people struggled to remember his name.To be third man then was fine. Together they had done what President John Kennedy had told them in 1961:put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, and (implied) before those Russians did.He was at Edwards Air Force Base in California when that challenge came down, testing fighter planes over the Mojave desert.Though some at Edwards scorned the thought of being locked in a can and fired around the world like ammunition, he burned to get into the astronaut programme.He dreamed of circling Earth in 90 neat minutes, like John Glenn;he hungered to explore the realm where his childhood hero Buck Rogers had roared around in his space rocket, tackling the Tiger Men from Mars.All he needed was a lot of luck. By his own lights he was nothing special, though ok if you were looking for a handball game.As a student he was easily bored, especially when he had to process reams of flight data by hand into reports, or when,during astronaut training, he had to endure mind-numbing lectures on geology.Mathematical calculations destroyed the wonder of things; he would rather read “Paradise Lost”.