Astronaut Jon McBride, early NASA space shuttle pilot, dies at 80

A man in a blue jacket works with a large black camera on board nasa's space shuttle.

Former NASA astronaut Jon McBride, who was the pilot on the first mission to launch seven people into space, has died at the age of 80.

McBride's death on Wednesday (Aug. 7) was confirmed to collectSPACE.com by NASA after the space agency heard from his family.

A member of the "TFNG" ("Thirty-Five New Guys"), NASA's first group of space shuttle astronauts selected in 1978, McBride's first and only spaceflight was as pilot of the space shuttle Challenger's sixth flight into space on Oct. 5, 1984.

"We lifted off, started accelerating, and it was just — wow," said McBride in a NASA oral history interview in 2012. "Simulators are good, but this is just something else, and you get up to 3Gs [three times the force of gravity] and then it's a whole different place in your life. Not that I hadn't had 3Gs before; I'd [just] never had them through my chest for three minutes."

STS-41G pilot Jon McBride (at right) joins his six crew members for a photo on the space shuttle Challenger's flight deck: Paul Sculley-Power, Sally Ride, Bob Crippen, Kathy Sullivan, Marc Garneau and David Leestma. Thy were the first seven-person crew to fly. (Image credit: NASA)