“Go,” said Armstrong, and as Scott hit the undocking switch, he quickly pulled them away from the Agena before the two spacecraft whirligigged into each other.
The Gemini rolled even more rapidly and began to tumble end over end, resembling more than anything a brutal MASTIF training session 160 miles above the Earth. Armstrong and Scott hadn’t battled that machine—it had been discontinued after the Mercury Seven had undergone its tortures—but they had logged plenty of time on the human centrifuge, a study in sadism itself. That experience proved invaluable to them now. Brilliant sunlight glinted off the spaceship’s black nose, and then darkness, and then sunlight—soon it was spinning at a rate estimated to be close to two full revolutions per second. As Armstrong put it later, “Physiological limits were being approached.”
Test pilots had a phrase for flights that went bad: go to worms. The mission had swiftly gone to worms.
“Buddy, we’ve got troubles,” Scott said.
“I gotta cage my eyeballs,” Armstrong said drily. The two went to work trying to stabilize their craft.
About then, they came in range of another tracking station, Coastal Sentry Quebec, a ship in the western Pacific south of Japan with limited ability to communicate with Mission Control. The station crew could tell something was amiss. Their telemetry told them the Gemini had undocked, but they had no idea why. They would have only a few minutes to communicate before the spacecraft sped over them and out of range again.
“Gemini 8, CSQ CapCom. How do you read?”
“We’ve got serious problems here,” Scott said. “We’re tumbling end over end up here. We’re disengaged from the Agena.”
The CSQ CapCom could hear Scott, though the violent spinning distorted his speech, and scrambling antenna patterns fragmented the transmission. Voices faded in and out. The station could do nothing but acknowledge and ask what the problem was.
“We’re rolling up and we can’t turn anything off,” Armstrong said, “continuously increasing in a left roll.”
They were still spinning in roll, pitch, and yaw at more than a revolution per second. Everything that had been loose in the cabin—charts, checklists, flight plan—was bouncing against the walls. Both men were being thrown around, and they were becoming dizzy. They had trouble seeing the overhead dials and switches. Nausea was soon to come, from the contents of their stomachs sloshing around, as was vestibular nystagmus, a sickening, dizzying sensation that caused an uncontrollable movement of the eyeballs and blurred vision. Both were seconds away from passing out, and if they did, the chances of recovery would be remote. They could hear Flight Control cutting in from Houston and asking CSQ what was going on, then CSQ trying to explain, and then they were out of range again for another fifteen minutes.
They both knew there was only one option: the reentry control system and its two separate rings of thrusters in the nose of the spacecraft.
“All we have left is the reentry system,” Armstrong said, his voice strained.
“Do it,” said Scott.
There were half a dozen control panels around the interior of the spacecraft. The reentry control switch was in an awkward spot, right above Armstrong’s head. After countless hours in the simulator, each man knew the position of every control by feel; as fighter pilots, they’d always gone through blindfolded cockpit checks, and they carried that over into their Gemini training. There were a dozen switches on the plate with the reentry control switch. Somehow Armstrong reached up and found the right one. He flicked it on, then threw the switches to activate the engines that would control the Gemini’s reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
But when Armstrong tried the hand controller, he got no response. He asked Scott to give it a try—Scott got no response either. Without a hand controller, they wouldn’t make it home. Still whirling and tumbling—the craft’s thrusters were turned off, but there was no air to slow the capsule’s movements—they started throwing switches again in case one was in the wrong position. Just then, the hand controllers began working. With a delicate pulsing of the thrusters, Armstrong managed to slow down the violent spinning and then, finally, stop it. He turned off the reentry control system to save fuel—they’d need it, and they had used about 75 percent of it just to stop the spinning. He reactivated his maneuvering thrusters one by one until he found the culprit: number eight, a yaw thruster, was stuck in the on position, probably due to an electrical short. They hadn’t heard the thruster popping because it had been on the entire time. The Gemini, not the Agena, had been at fault.
A Gemini mission rule dictated that using the reentry system meant that the mission must be aborted; if these thrusters developed a leak, the crew would not be able to get the craft into position for the critical retrofire that would stabilize it and return them to Earth at the proper angle. Attitude control was essential to reenter the atmosphere safely. Flight director John Hodge knew he had to call an end to the mission. But where? And when? As soon as it was possible, of course, but could they find a prime or secondary recovery site?
After their twenty-six-minute ordeal, Armstrong said, “Sorry, partner”—he had planned to let Scott take the Gemini’s controls later, and the EVA Scott had trained so long and hard for wouldn’t happen. But Scott knew they had no choice.
Over the next twenty minutes, several groups of flight controllers—the calamity had occurred during a shift change—ran through the options. If they didn’t bring Gemini 8 down very soon, they wouldn’t have another opportunity for a full day—fifteen more revolutions. Too long, and too risky. Reentry in the seventh orbit, less than three hours away, was recommended. Hodge gave the go-ahead. If retrofire was nominal, the recovery point would be about 620 miles southeast of Japan. A navy destroyer, the USS Leonard F. Mason, began moving at flank speed toward the position.
As Gemini 8 passed over Africa, Armstrong was concerned that they’d land in a remote area far from civilization—and possibly on hard ground. The spacecraft was designed to handle that, but the impact would be excessive, even with their shock-absorbing contour couches, and since they had no control over the landing, it would be impossible to avoid ground obstacles or a steep hill or even a mountain. Scott worried when he saw the Himalayas getting larger below them as they reentered the atmosphere. But retrofire was nominal, and as the craft plummeted to Earth, the two astronauts were relieved to see the blue of water below them. Twenty minutes after they made a hard splashdown in rough seas, three frogmen dropped from an air force transport plane and secured the spacecraft. Three hours later, the destroyer winched Gemini 8 on deck. The crew was healthy but worn out after their ten-hour-and-forty-one-minute flight.
During the brief mission, camera crews had been camped out as usual in the front yards of the Armstrong and Scott houses near the Manned Spacecraft Center outside Houston, and more personnel were rushed there when news of the ordeal broke. The major TV networks interrupted their regular programs with emergency news bulletins, to the annoyance of some irate Batman viewers—more than a thousand called ABC to complain. The next day, the New York Daily News ran the headline “A Nightmare in Space!,” and Life magazine ran stories about the mission in its next two issues, one of them under the title “Wild Spin in a Sky Gone Berserk.” Neither Armstrong nor Scott appreciated the melodramatic approach, regardless of its accuracy. Armstrong downplayed the danger, as was his habit; a few years later, he would use the math/physics/engineering term trivial, meaning “easy to work out,” to describe the crisis: “It was a non-trivial situation,” he said.
Both Armstrong and Scott were commended for their calmness and professional performance under extreme conditions. There was whispering among some of the newer astronauts that the two had panicked, but no experienced astronaut thought that; they had followed the book and done what they’d had to do to survive—and done it well. Years later, Kraft would have the last word: “If we had heard about the problem when they were still docked, we would have told them to do exactly what they did, ‘Get off that
thing!’” Far from blaming the two astronauts, the NASA brass were impressed, especially with the commander. The flight only confirmed what they already knew: Armstrong was one cool customer in a crisis.
The failure rattled NASA and caused some newspapers and at least one congressman to demand a space-rescue system. Max Faget initiated plans for a study—one idea called for an extra seat to somehow be squeezed into the already cramped cabin of a Gemini spacecraft, which could be launched with a single astronaut to rescue two comrades—but due to red tape and a lack of funding, nothing came of it. If a spacecraft became stranded in orbit, there was still no way to save its occupants.
The same day as the Gemini 8 flight, halfway around the globe, two other space travelers made a safe landing in Central Asia. They had spent twenty-two days in space, much longer than anyone ever had, and had endured heavy doses of radiation from traversing the Van Allen radiation belts repeatedly. But they were fairly healthy, though weary, dehydrated, and suffering from bedsores. The two Soviets were retrieved from their capsule and whisked away to Moscow for a triumphant TV appearance. Later they both gave birth to healthy puppies.
The flight of the two female dogs, Veterok and Ugolyok, appeared, at least to observers in the West, to be a practice run for a Soviet shot at the moon. There was no other reason to send mammals into space.
Despite Gemini 8’s near disaster and the other successful Gemini missions, the American public was uninterested. They began calling in to the TV networks broadcasting news about the flights to complain about interrupted football games and missed shows—even when the interruptions concerned troubled missions like Gemini 8. To the average American, the space program didn’t seem to have much of a point. The early days of Mercury had been unprecedented—blasting a man into space in a capsule atop a rocket was dangerous and exciting. Ed White’s space walk had been a refreshing change, and so was the rendezvous between Gemini 6 and Gemini 7. But after that, the flights just didn’t seem important, and worse, they became routine. “Americans no longer half-expected the whole thing to blow up,” wrote Life space correspondent Loudon Wainwright in an article entitled “All Systems Are Ho-Hum.” Besides, everyone knew that Apollo was the big one, the program that would put a man on the moon.
But the missions continued, launching with almost metronomic precision every two months. Launches became so “businesslike,” remembered Paul Haney, the NASA public affairs officer at the time, that it was “almost like working an airline terminal.” The last four involved perfecting rendezvous, docking, and EVA skills. The rendezvous and docking went well, but none of the first three EVAs did. Each spacewalker had a difficult time, especially when he ran into Newton’s pesky third law of motion (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction) and its peculiar effect in the microgravity environment of low Earth orbit. Every astronaut found that working for an extended time in a twenty-one-layer spacesuit, inflexible when pressurized, was much more difficult in space than it had been in the ground simulation.
None of them had a harder time than Eugene Cernan on Gemini 9. He spent two hours and eight minutes on an EVA, during which he exhausted himself trying to maneuver in a spacesuit that had, in his words, “all the flexibility of a rusty suit of armor.” His heart rate zoomed to 180 beats a minute, and his visor fogged up so badly he could hardly see. Down in Mission Control, the controllers thought he might lose consciousness. Cernan barely made it back to the hatch, where his crewmate, Tom Stafford, had to help drag him inside. By the end of the three-day flight, he had lost thirteen and a half pounds.
Two handrails were added to the outside of the Gemini, and the astronauts were given a maneuvering gun, so Michael Collins’s Gemini 10 EVA in July 1966 was an improvement on Cernan’s. He was able to perform a few assigned tasks, but when he tried to spacewalk over to an inert Agena target vehicle on an extra-long tether, he cartwheeled and spun out of control between the two spacecraft. At one point he started sliding around the Agena and had to reach into it and grab a bunch of wires to stop himself. Later, he got so entangled in his fifty-foot umbilical that he needed help from crewmate John Young to unwind and get into his seat. His ramble was cut short after only thirty-nine minutes. Two months later, Gemini 11 offered little advance in that area. After a perfect docking with the target vehicle just eighty-five minutes after launch, Dick Gordon sallied through his hatch for a planned two-hour EVA. Forty-four minutes later, blinded by sweat and utterly exhausted, he was ordered inside by command pilot Pete Conrad. Gordon had discussed the EVA issues at length with his spacewalking predecessors, and he’d prepared obsessively for it, but no one had managed to make a completely successful EVA.
Gemini 11 did, however, score a first. Viewers in seventeen foreign countries watched a live TV broadcast of a space launch via AT&T’s Telstar, the first active communications satellite. It wouldn’t be long before low Earth orbit would be filled with hundreds of satellites of all kinds—communications, weather, research, and defense.
As Gemini neared the end of its scheduled run of missions, the Soviet manned spaceflight program became suspiciously quiet. When CIA intel reports indicated the Soviets were constructing a giant rocket, it was thought that they might attempt a voyage to the moon sometime in 1967 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their revolution.
NASA’s confidence in Gemini was at its peak. Plans were made for an ambitious Gemini lunar mission: a capsule would dock with a large, fully fueled Agena—or possibly with one or more of the powerful Centaur upper-stage rockets—which would boost the spacecraft to an escape velocity of twenty-five thousand miles per hour and propel it to the moon. After a lunar flyby, the Gemini would slingshot back to Earth. It was even suggested that a small, lightweight “bug,” an open-cockpit lander attached to the Gemini, could carry a single astronaut and drop him down to the lunar surface. Astronaut Pete Conrad supported the idea—naturally, he hoped to be one of the two men selected for the mission.
But Apollo, despite some setbacks, was also proceeding apace, and there was no need for competing moon-landing programs. Besides, NASA wasn’t quite prepared to send humans 240,000 miles into space and return them to terra firma, especially if the journey involved an excursion to the little-known luna firma.
An earlier idea for Gemini was again proposed: as a rescue vehicle. If an Apollo craft became stranded in lunar orbit, an enlarged Gemini reentry module, beefed up with rockets for the return to Earth and life-support systems for the extra passengers, would rendezvous with it, and the Apollo crew could EVA to the rescue craft. Another suggestion was a version of Gemini, perhaps manned, perhaps unmanned, that could rescue an Apollo crew at any point during its mission, even on the lunar surface. These ideas were feasible but expensive, and NASA’s budget had already reached its height; cost cutting would begin after 1966. Only Apollo would go to the moon, and there would be no rescue available if the astronauts ran into trouble far from home.
Gemini’s final flight provided one last opportunity to solve the problems of EVA. If something went wrong on an Apollo moon mission during docking and two astronauts were stuck in the LM, they’d have to make their way over to the command module and climb in through its exterior hatch, so EVA expertise was essential.
Buzz Aldrin—who had indeed scored one of Gemini 12’s prime crew seats—was determined to approach the space walk scientifically. A host of handholds, rails, foot restraints, and tethers were added to both the Gemini and the Agena, and Aldrin trained underwater in a spacesuit, using weights to achieve neutral buoyancy and approximate the microgravity conditions of Earth orbit. On November 11, 1966, he and Lovell lifted off in Gemini 12 and headed toward their Agena target vehicle. Then another Gemini first, an onboard radar, failed. Aldrin, who had written his MIT doctoral dissertation on manned orbital rendezvous, used a sextant, slide rule, charts he had largely prepared himself, and their small onboard computer to get them to the Agena. (Some in NASA joked that the radar failure was no accident.) They docked three hours
and forty-five minutes later, then separated and docked again several times, approaching from different angles. Rendezvous and docking, clearly, had been mastered.
The next day, Aldrin opened his hatch and floated out on an umbilical for a space walk of two hours and twenty minutes. With the help of waist tethers, the hand- and footholds, and several rest periods, he performed a variety of complicated chores without difficulty. Everyone in NASA breathed a sigh of relief. The problems of EVA had finally been solved. For good measure, the astronauts used their onboard computer to handle both the guidance and firing of the attitude-adjusting rockets, another first.
The ten manned Gemini missions—each far more complicated than any Mercury flight—provided an opportunity for NASA to increase its knowledge and experience in manned spaceflight and to introduce and perfect techniques and equipment necessary to reach the moon. The Gemini program had garnered a total of 1,993 hours in space, valuable experience not only for the men in the spacecraft but also for the personnel on the ground, from the launch operations at Cape Kennedy to flight control and tracking operations. Apollo would not be possible without it.
The Mission Control Center especially had come into its own. Despite Gemini’s smashing success, each mission had had its share of problems large and small—fickle fuel cells, cranky electrical systems, temperamental thrusters, patchy rendezvous radars, corrupted computer programs, and unreliable Agenas. Indeed, it seemed one of the few unfailing systems throughout the program was the human one, both in the void of space and on the ground. The pilots had excelled, and Kraft’s resourceful teams of flight controllers and their backroom support groups had tackled multiple complications, and solved or found work-arounds for almost every one that mattered. Except for Gemini 8, every mission had continued to its end. More important, every astronaut returned to Earth safely. Spaceflight, it seemed to many Americans, wasn’t so dangerous after all.
Shoot for the Moon Page 19
