In the space program, we prepared for such emergencies by “flying” simulators. Simulators are imitation spacecraft which are hooked up to computers. You sit inside the cockpit of the simulator, which looks exactly like the real spacecraft. The computer causes the dials and gauges to move just as they would if various things were happening to the real spacecraft. For example, if an oxygen tank sprang a leak, the oxygen pressure gauge in the simulator would decrease, giving you a clue as to what had gone wrong. The simulators came with instructors, who could direct the computer to imitate one problem after another until we got the hang of it. Frank, Jim, Ed, and I spent many long hours in the simulator during the fall of 1965, getting ready for the flight in December. By launch day, Frank and Jim were really good at “flying” the simulator, which meant they should be able to handle the real spacecraft with ease. Nothing would go wrong in flight, we hoped, but if it did, the simulator should have prepared them well to do the right thing in any emergency.
I was glad Jim Lovell stayed healthy and was able to fly Gemini 7, but at the same time I was sad that I was not able to fly it myself. It’s just too bad that there was only one seat for the two of us. Frank and Jim had a very nice flight, and stayed up the entire two weeks, just as planned. Fortunately, nothing serious broke, so all that practice in the simulator was not needed. The best part of it all was that the doctors couldn’t find anything seriously wrong with them after the flight, so it looked as if one big obstacle had been removed from the pathway to the moon. After the flight, Ed White was transferred to the Apollo program, but I was assigned as prime crew, with John Young, on Gemini 10. I was disappointed to part company with Ed, but I was pleased to be able to fly with John, whom I liked. Most of all, I was excited at the prospect of flying in space. I would gladly have flown with Ed, or John, or by myself, or with a kangaroo. I just wanted to fly.
7
The Gemini 10 flight was going to be a lot different from Gemini 7. It was only a three-day flight, but it was jam-packed with fascinating things to do. First of all, there would be two Agenas in orbit, waiting for us. An Agena is a slim fuel tank about thirty feet long, with a rocket engine sticking out of one end and a hole in the opposite end. John Young and I were to rendezvous and dock with the first Agena, fitting the Gemini’s nose into the hole, and locking the two vehicles together. Then we would use the Agena’s fuel and rocket power to boost us into a higher orbit, where we would find the second Agena, which had been in orbit for four months. We would fly alongside the second Agena, and I would space walk over to it, and bring back an experiment package from it. In the process of catching the second Agena, we were expected to set a world’s altitude record of 475 miles. There were also a dozen other experiments to keep us very busy for the remainder of the three days. I thought it was a neat flight plan, especially the space-walk part. I was really looking forward to stepping out of a spacecraft traveling 18,000 miles an hour.
John and I had six months (from January to July of 1966) to get ready for the flight. John had already flown once before, with Gus Grissom on Gemini 3, and was very familiar with the Gemini spacecraft. And, of course, I had just come from the Gemini 7 backup crew. But neither of us was prepared for rendezvous or space walks, and both tasks could be very complicated. First we had to find our own Agena, which would be launched into a circular orbit a couple of hours before John and I were scheduled to launch. Usually, the experts on the ground would tell a Gemini crew which way to steer to find their Agena, but on this night—as an experiment—we were supposed to figure it out ourselves. We were to do our own navigating by measuring the angle between various stars and the horizon. From this, and a lot of arithmetic, we could figure out how to change the size and shape of our orbit to reach our Agena. As usual, the simulator was our teacher, and we spent long hours “flying” around and around in orbit, trying to figure out where we were and what we needed to do to reach our imaginary Agena. I filled page after page with numbers. Sometimes the simulator said my numbers were correct, and we reached the Agena. At other times we either missed it altogether or used up too much fuel reaching it.
One thing the simulator couldn’t do was to teach me how to space walk. The only way to really learn that was to try it, although my old friend the zero G airplane was somewhat helpful. For twenty seconds at a time, I could practice opening the Gemini hatch, getting out, and “flying” or walking over to the side of a make-believe Agena built out of wood. On the wooden Agena was an exact copy of the experiment package I would find on the real Agena, and it was attached in the same way.
I wasn’t too worried about being able to remove the package. What did concern me was how I was going to get from the Gemini over to the Agena. If John could fly close enough to it, I supposed that I could stand up carefully in the hatch and give a little push with each hand and float over to it. But suppose I pushed a little harder with one hand than with the other? That would cause me to start turning sideways, and I might turn all the way around before I got to the Agena, and crash into it with my back. In my bulky pressurized space suit (remember all the problems with them?), I couldn’t do much to prevent that, or even to see where I would go if I bounced off. To add to the problem, I was connected to the Gemini by a fifty-foot-long cord, which contained oxygen to breathe and a couple of wires so that I could talk on the radio with John or with the people on the ground. What happened if the cord looped around the Agena? There was nothing to prevent me and the Gemini and the Agena from getting wrapped up like a Christmas package, with no way for me or John to untie the knot. Agenas have a system for keeping themselves pointed in one direction. It works off batteries. The Agena we were to visit, which had been in space four months, would have dead batteries by the time we got there. That meant that, instead of pointing steadily in one direction, it was free to wander off its heading. It might even begin to tumble or to spin. What were we supposed to do then? Was it safe to approach if it was moving rapidly? If moving slowly? No person, and no simulator, could give us exact answers to these questions. A lot would depend on what we thought once we got there.
I did have one device for helping me move over to the Agena. I called it the “gun,” although it had a fancier name: the hand-held maneuvering unit. It looked sort of like a gun, with a stubby handle that I held in my right hand. On the top of the handle there was a crossbar with a hole in each end. There was also a hole in the end of the handle. There were two triggers. The idea behind the gun was simple: if I held one trigger down, nitrogen gas would squirt out the two holes, or jets, in the crossbar. If I held the other trigger down, gas would squirt out through the jet in the handle, in a direction opposite that of the two jets. By pointing the gun in the right direction, and by squeezing the correct trigger, I could cause the nitrogen gas to exert a force that would move my body either forward or backward. In theory, then, if I stood up in the Gemini hatch, pointed the gun at the Agena, and squeezed the two-jet trigger, I should be able to propel myself toward the Agena. When I got going fast enough, I would let go of the trigger and coast. Then when I got close to the Agena I would squeeze the other trigger and slow down to avoid crashing into it. I practiced with the gun a lot, and found that it did work, but it was very difficult to use.
In addition, there was a training device in Houston built especially for the gun. It was a metal floor about thirty feet square, surrounded by a rope. It looked like a boxing ring, but I called it the “slippery table,” because the metal floor was built to be as slick as possible. On the floor was placed a machine which looked like a floor polisher with a circular base about a foot and a half in diameter. Tiny gas jets allowed compressed air to squirt out under this base, causing it to rise a fraction of an inch off the surface, so that the machine floated on a cushion of air. The astronaut would stand on the “floor polisher. If he pushed against the ropes, he would glide effortlessly across the thirty feet to the other side, since there was not enough friction to stop him (because of the air cushion). Now, instead of pushing, i
f he held the gun in his hand and squirted in the right direction, the same thing would happen. If he held the gun improperly, he would end up moving in the wrong direction, or would turn around and around and crash into the ropes. I used to practice during the week in the simulator and in the zero G airplane, but I saved Saturday morning for the “slippery table.” Dressed up in my pressure suit, and holding the gun awkwardly in my right hand, I would practice for hours, crossing and recrossing the table until I could propel myself to the exact spot I wanted, without going too fast and without twisting around. There was only one catch. The “slippery table” was only telling me part of the story. My body could twist only left or right, whereas in space I could not only twist, I could roll from side to side, and even tumble head over heels. Also, in my training I always stayed on the surface of the table, but in space I could rise up or sink down. The arm motions required to prevent twisting were complicated enough, but would mastering them enable me to prevent twisting, rolling, and tumbling all at once? I didn’t know, but I would find out soon enough. Our launch date was approaching rapidly.
Before we flew, however, our boss Deke Slayton gave John and me one extra job. We were to join him and a couple of other people for a week. Our job was to select a new group of astronauts. It seemed strange for me to be sitting on the other side of the table, and I felt sorry for the poor sweating candidates as we interviewed them. It hadn’t been very long ago, I reminded myself, that I had been in their shoes. We had about thirty-five people to interview, and we wanted to spend at least an hour deciding about each one, so that meant a full week’s work—one whole week of sitting in a chair, asking questions, listening to the answers, and then discussing this candidate in comparison with the others. Strangely enough, we had very few arguments. There seemed to be four things which were most important to us in considering a person.
1. How smart was he?
2. How well educated?
3. What jobs or experience had he had which would be helpful to him as an astronaut?
4. How badly did he want to become an astronaut? Notice that I have said “he,” because there were no women in the group, nor were there any blacks. In thinking about that, it seems to me that there were plenty of women and blacks who could get the highest marks in categories 1 and 4, but in 1966, categories 2 and 3 tended to rule them out. There simply did not seem to be aeronautical engineers and experienced test pilots who were black or women. I think, and hope, that will change in the future. Flying a modern jet aircraft does not require a great deal of strength, for one thing. Hydraulic flight controls, like power steering in a car, prefer a light touch, and women should do as good a job as men. Obviously, an airplane has no way of telling the skin color of the person flying it. But I only know that we were asked to choose among a group of thirty-five white males, and we did the best job we could. We ended up picking nineteen of them, and then John and I went back to preparing to fly Gemini 10.
As our July 18 deadline approached, John and I became busier and busier. When I was assigned to this crew, I had gotten into the habit of carrying a little black notebook around with me everywhere I went. The other thing I carried was a tennis ball. The tennis ball I used to strengthen my right hand, by squeezing it constantly. In this way I hoped that my right hand would not become tired during my space walk, when I would be required to squeeze the handle of the “gun” constantly, through the bulky pressure-suit glove. The black notebook was used to jot down each and every problem I found with the spacecraft or the flight plan. There was a total of 138 problems in my black book; as each one got solved, I drew a line through it. I hoped that before July 18 I could draw a line through the last one and go fly with a relaxed mind. In the meantime, if you come across a worried-looking fellow with a black notebook in one hand and a tennis ball in the other, chances are that he is an astronaut—a rookie astronaut, that is. As July 18 came closer and closer, I did cross off every item on my list of 138. I also moved from Houston to Cape Kennedy and visited my family only on weekends. Saturday I would practice on the “slippery table”; Sunday I saved for my family. Kate was seven years old, Ann was four, and Michael was three. Ann and Michael were really too young to understand what was about to happen, but Kate understood quite a bit about the flight. I think she liked the idea, and I don’t think she was worried. My wife was worried. I was sort of worried too, but I really wasn’t afraid. I get afraid when I see the gymnasts at a circus, sailing from bar to bar high above the ground, with no net to save them if they fall. I also get a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach when I peek over the edge of a very high building. But the idea of flying in space did not cause this kind of fear, only a vague uneasiness that something might go wrong. I was concerned not only about my safety but also that I might embarrass everyone by doing something wrong. There were so many things to do in those three days that surely I would do some of them wrong. I only hoped that they were little things, not the really important ones.
In the meantime, I tried to relax on Sundays. That was the day I would cook fancy dishes like lamb curry and mess up the whole kitchen. I would also play with our dog, Dubhe. I know that is a strange name for a dog, but it is the name of one of the stars in the Big Dipper, in the northern part of the sky. It is an Arabic name and is pronounced Dooby. He was a big black and gray German shepherd, and he loved to play with the garden hose. I would hold it, and squirt out a thin stream of water which I kept just in front of him as he ran around in circles. When he caught the stream, he would snap his jaws together with a loud click. No matter how many times he did this, he always seemed surprised that he ended up with nothing in his mouth, and the unharmed stream was still out in front of him. Then I would turn the hose on him and get him very wet, which he liked on hot summer days. After Sunday with my family, I was ready to get in my T-38 jet and fly down to the Cape, climb on board Gemini 10, and spend three days circling the earth.
8
Getting dressed for a space flight takes a long time. First, medical sensors have to be attached to your body. These are thin disks about the size of a quarter which are stuck on your chest with a special kind of glue and then covered by adhesive tape. There are four of them and they are connected by wires to little electronic boxes in pockets around your waist, from which one cord goes out through your pressure suit and hooks up to the spacecraft. These sensors tell the doctors on the ground about your heart. The information from the four sensors can be shown on a television screen in the form of a line that jumps upward every time your heart beats. From this, the doctors can tell not only whether you are dead or alive but whether you are resting or working hard, or whether there is something wrong with your heart. It’s called an electrocardiogram. Doctors, like scientists, love to give long names to things. If your chest is hairy, it takes even longer to get the electrocardiograph all hooked up, because first someone has to shave little bare patches for the medical sensors.
After the sensors are all attached, you put on long white cotton underwear and then crawl into your pressure suit, which is not an easy thing to do. You put your feet in first, through a zipper in the back of the suit, and then bend over double. Ducking your head, you put your arms through the same zipper opening, and out through the arms of the suit. Then your head pops up through the neck ring. If you have managed to push your arms and legs as far as they can go, then you will be able to stand up, just barely, and get someone to zip the back closed. By this time, you have begun to sweat, so you are hooked up through two hoses to an air-conditioning unit. Then you are ready to put on gloves and helmet, which are locked into place by metal rings that fit together. As soon as this happens, you are practically isolated from the rest of the world. You can hear only what is piped in over the radio; you can breathe only 100 percent oxygen, and it is usually odorless; you can’t feel much through the gloves. The only sense which is unimpaired is sight. You can see the world fine, even if, locked up inside your pressure suit, you really don’t feel you are part of it.
&n
bsp; On the afternoon of July 18, 1966, John Young and I had gone through all this bother of suiting up and we were ready to go fly Gemini 10. The reason for launching late in the day was that the old Agena, which had been in orbit for four months, would not pass overhead until then, and we wanted to launch when we were precisely underneath it, so it would be easier to catch. We rode out to the launch pad in a small van, and then took an elevator up the side of the gantry to the spacecraft, which was perched up on the nose of the Titan rocket. The elevator was not much more than a wire cage, and as it slowly ascended, I could see the beautiful blue Atlantic Ocean just a stone’s throw away. It was quite a contrast, to see a huge pile of complicated machinery on one side and nothing but blue water on the other. Then it was time to crawl aboard our Gemini, feet first, with people shoving us down far enough in our seats so that our heads would clear the hatches. Once the hatches were closed and locked, John and I were in our own little world, far far away from the blue ocean, and our friends and families. We were lying on our backs, with our feet up in the air, and in a few minutes we would be lying on our right sides, one hundred miles up, and going 18,000 miles per hour. I’m not sure I quite believed that, but I didn’t have long to wait to find out, because now the voice on the radio was counting backward from ten.
7-6-5-4-3-2-1! We were off, not with a huge bang but with a small bump, as we felt the rocket come alive and begin to fly. It was noisy inside, but we felt what was happening, rather than listening to it. Down below us, the two powerful Titan engines were churning away. They were also swiveling back and forth, keeping us pointed straight up, and it was this motion we felt, as we jiggled slightly in our seats. There was no feeling of speed until we reached a thin deck of clouds. I could see them approaching, and then all of a sudden—pow!—we were through them, and I could tell that we were really moving. As we approached the speed of sound, the noise and vibration increased briefly, then things smoothed down considerably as we became supersonic. As the first-stage fuel tanks emptied, the G forces increased and pushed us back into our contoured seats at five times our normal weight.
Flying to the Moon Page 6
