Charles Berry, an early NASA physician, dies at 96, Huston Chronicle
“Dr. Charles “Chuck” A. Berry, a NASA physician who helped select the country’s first astronauts and devised tests to see if they could survive the demands of space, died in his sleep Saturday night in his Houston home. He was 96 years old. Berry is considered a pioneer in aviation medicine, with a 68-year career in which he served as a flight surgeon for the U.S. Air Force, director of life sciences for NASA, an aviation medical examiner for the Federal Aviation Administration and an aerospace medicine consultant.”
NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Edited Oral History Transcript: Charles A. Berry
“I have a deep and abiding faith in the human capability to adapt to almost–the human body is set up in a way that it will adapt to most anything within reason, within some reason. It’s going to go through adaptive changes. Of course, then the big question, in my mind, is, is what we’re seeing an adaptive change and how far can it go and still be adaptive and not interfere with the performance of the individual involved. That was the real crux of everything that we were going to do. When we got the people to go for those time periods and saw that they could perform and things weren’t getting worse, we still didn’t know at the end of the Gemini Program, we didn’t know which way things were going to go. Had we reached a point where things weren’t going to get worse? We certainly didn’t know.”
Another giant that made the Apollo era possible is gone. My condolences to his friends and family.
I’m very sad to learn of Dr. Berry’s death. But it also reminds me of other deaths of key people from the Apollo program. If the next human landing on the Moon is in 2024 (which is quite optimistic), everyone involved in Apollo will be 47 years older than they were at the end of Apollo. Call it 67 years old for the junior people and around 80 for the more senior people. I think it would be a shame and a disgrace if we did not go back to the Moon before all of the Apollo team have died.