Pilot

Robert Lee Gibson was born near the National Baseball Hall of Fame and his flying has made him a nominee for the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America. A son of pilots, the Cooperstown, NY native has flown over 100 types of aircraft and served as commander on five Space Shuttle missions. He began as a Navy aviator during the Vietnam War, then graduated to NASA. In 1984, he began air racing, an activity NASA frowned on. (It grounded him for a year after a racing accident.) He also engaged in record-setting, posting FAI world records for "Altitude in Horizontal Flight" in Airplane Class C1A in 1991, "Time to Climb to 9000 Meters" in 1994 and "Speed Over a Closed Course" in 2004. In 2015, he won Unlimited Gold at the famed Reno Air Races in the Strega P-51D Mustang at 488.983 mph, dramatically beating Steven Hinton, who had won Unlimited Gold the previous six years. Gibson was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2003 and the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2012.