by Jay Barbree
Faster than the two men could believe, roll and yaw became even more extreme, an orbital equivalent of severe, uncontrolled turbulence in flight.
Armstrong, who’d flown the X-15 rocket plane, wrestled with the controls. Briefly he seemed to be regaining mastery of the ship. Then the Gemini/Agena went berserk. “The trouble uncovered itself again,” Armstrong said much later, reviewing the events, “and the rates of tumbling increased to a point where we felt the integrity of the combination . . . was in jeopardy.” The commander never let up fighting for control. He reduced the spin to a point that it was safe to break the Gemini free of the Agena. With a bang the ships disengaged, and the astronauts were astonished to find they were spinning even faster. The seven-thousand-pound Gemini 8 spacecraft was now whirling at better than a complete revolution every second.
They had thought the problem was with the Agena. But the fault lay with their Gemini. One of the craft’s sixteen maneuvering thrusters had stuck open, spewing fuel into space and imparting the wild spin. Unless they stopped it, regaining control would be impossible. The severe motions were on the edge of destroying the ship or whirling the men so swiftly they would soon be unconscious.
Far out in the Pacific, the Coastal Sentry Queen, a Gemini tracking ship, heard the electrifying message from Armstrong, “We have a serious problem here. . . . We’re tumbling end over end up here. We’ve disengaged from the Agena.” The calm in his voice could hardly be believed against the battering they were taking.
Mission Control now had the bad news. How far was the Agena from the Gemini? Could the two smash into each other and doom men and ships? Were the two pilots on the edge of nausea or vertigo or both, or were they only seconds away from being hammered physically to the point where they could no longer function?
“It’s rolling, and we can’t turn anything off,” Armstrong reported. Scott knew they were almost at the point that “we had to do something, or else it would be too late to do anything.”
Armstrong threw away the book and decided to use the nose rocket thrusters normally used for reentry control. One by one he shut down the fifteen other maneuvering thrusters, immediately switched on the reentry rockets, and kept blasting away until slowly he regained control. He raced against time, hoping the reentry thrusters would function until the stuck thruster spewed all its fuel.
It took a half hour, but Armstrong brought the Gemini 8 under control. The old rules came back into effect, and the rules dictated that once reentry thrusters had been fired, for any reason, the astronauts were to return to earth as soon as possible. This was because continued use would deplete the fuel supply of the only system available for controlling the craft during the critical reentry.
But the Gemini 8 was now far from any main recovery area. Mission Control said to hell with standard procedure and ordered Armstrong and Scott to set up reentry. They were to head for an emergency-landing zone in the western Pacific. High over the African Congo, in darkness, retros fired. For the next thirty-two-minutes they plunged through the atmosphere alone.
During their darkened reentry, there were no tracking stations to aid them in position reports. Incredibly, the astronauts performed the reentry maneuver skillfully and on the mark. They splashed down 480 miles east of Okinawa after a mission lasting just under eleven hours. Soon an Air Force rescue plane roared overhead with parachute rescue teams. Three hours more and the spacemen were safe aboard a Navy destroyer.
Examination of the spacecraft determined that the gremlin that had sent them spinning had been an unexplained flash of electricity that had jammed open the Number 8 thruster at full power.
Chris Kraft turned in a hair-raising report: “The spin rate was up as high as 550 degrees per second. That’s about the rate at which you begin to lose consciousness or the capability to operate. Neil Armstrong realized they were in very serious trouble, and he took all the power off the Gemini to try to stop the spin, and then he figured the only way to recover was to activate the reentry altitude-control system. That was truly a fantastic recovery by a human being under such circumstances and really proved why we have test pilots in those ships. Had it not been for that good flying, we probably would have lost that crew.”
Rendezvous and docking had now been demonstrated but not yet perfected. That was done on the final three Gemini missions—10, 11, and 12—when the crews chased down and linked up with Agena satellites, using their engines to maneuver through the skies. During the track-downs they rehearsed all the critical moves Apollo moonwalkers would have to make when they fired off the lunar surface to fly to a reunion with the mother ship in lunar orbit.
Spacewalking, surprisingly, became the hardest Gemini nut to crack. NASA should have been alerted when Ed White had trouble reentering his capsule after his pioneering stroll. But because of the earlier ease he had had cavorting jubilantly from Gemini 4, mission planners were fully confident that spacewalking was a piece of cake.
A year had passed since White had taken his walk, and Gemini’s Gene Cernan was tapped to be the second American to step into the void of space. So confident were the planners that they installed in the back of the Gemini 9’s equipment module an AMU—Astronaut Maneuvering Unit—in which Cernan would don as if it were some bejeweled Buck Rogers jet pack and use its thrusters for some fancy maneuvers in space. The Air Force, which developed the jet pack, trusted its reliability and told NASA: “Just send him out with the backpack. He won’t need that damn tether. All it will do is tangle him up.”
NASA brushed off the Air Force, cited safety reasons, and said Cernan would test the gear using a tether 125 feet in length.
For his initial step outside the Gemini 9, once he and Tom Stafford were in space, Cernan remained attached to a twenty-five-foot lifeline. He looked forward to the freedom experienced by Ed White. He didn’t find it. White had gone outside just to skip and flit about for a few minutes. Cernan was charged with specific duties, and he was to remain outside his ship for more than two hours. He discovered the two missions were vastly different, and he learned quickly he was as clumsy as a sloth climbing a greased pole.
To don the AMU, Cernan had to work his way to the equipment storage at the rear of his spacecraft. The AMU and the long tether awaited him there. He started back gingerly. He didn’t fly and he didn’t float, and he didn’t have anything that faintly resembled a glorious experience. He did everything he could to clamp his gloved hands on something that would secure him to his ship. Without proper handholds, he kept slipping off the sleek hull of the vehicle and had to fight his way back. He could very much have used a jet gun like the one that propelled White about. A fifteen-foot traverse he had planned to last a few minutes took him nearly an hour of exhausting, frustrating, clumsy struggle.
But he made it. “It’s a strange world out here! Whew!” he radioed Stafford. “Take a rest,” Tom told him. Cernan didn’t need that advice. He was grateful just to hang onto some equipment in the rear of the Gemini. After a brief rest he began to try to maneuver his suited body into the AMU, which resembled a hiker’s backpack that would have fit comfortably on the frame of a grizzly bear.
Trouble remained his constant companion. The job demanded more than just slipping into simple straps. He needed to make electrical connections, and he found that every move was more time-consuming than he had counted on. When he seemed to have a job under control, he floated helplessly from the spacecraft. There was no way he could maintain a solid body position. There were a few footholds and handholds there, but they were woefully inadequate. He needed positions that would allow him to use leverage. Soon he was severely overworking his own chest pack, which circulated oxygen through his suit and also removed excessive moisture from his body. He perspired. Fog collected inside his helmet visor and froze, and he endured excessive heat, perspiration, and ice all at the same time. He was barely able to see through the visor, a potentially lethal situation for a man turning like a bloated rag doll in vacuum several feet from the security of his spaces
hip cabin.
Stafford called Mission Control. “We’ve got problems. Gene is fogging up real bad.” Then he spoke directly to Cernan to check on his progress.
“I’m really fogged up, Tom,” Gene told him. Stafford didn’t like the sound of Cernan’s voice, and he again called the team on the ground. “The pilot’s visor is fogged over. Communications are very poor. He sounds like a large gargle. If the situation doesn’t improve—” Stafford suddenly went quiet, then came back on line with his voice strained. “It’s no go on the AMU! The pilot is fogged up completely!”
“We confirm, no go,” Mission Control responded. Cernan’s only interest now was to get the hell back inside the ship somehow. He began his return carefully, hand over hand, slipping, fighting every inch of the way, able to see only through small sections of his visor where his breath had melted away the frost. Ground-control doctors measured his heartbeat at 180 per minute. “He’s in trouble,” one said quietly, unnecessarily.
Tom Stafford suddenly felt an icy chill as he recalled a very private conversation he had had with Deke Slayton before launch. “Look, Tom, what Gene’s going to do out there is pretty risky. If he’s outside and he’s in trouble and, if for some reason the spacecraft is in trouble, short of fuel, or something, and well, if there’s no chance of getting him back in . . . ” Deke’s voice faltered, then picked up. “There’s nothing written on this. No mission rule, but, well, I think you understand. If that kind of thing happens, you’ve got to cut him loose.”
Stafford could hardly believe what he was hearing. But Deke was dead serious. “If it’s a hopeless situation, you’ve got to save at least one crew member and the spacecraft.”
Tom never did learn what he would have done at such a moment. Cast off a fellow pilot to certain death? He couldn’t—
But there was Cernan struggling back into the cabin, and he finally made it. The third man to walk in space, the second American, had been outside a record two hours and nine minutes, and all of it had been pure hell.
After the Gemini 9 returned, NASA leaders ordered future AMU missions scrubbed until spacewalking could be accomplished with a level of reliability and non-exhaustion. But problems persisted. Both Mike Collins on the Gemini 10 and Dick Gordon on the Gemini 11 experienced troubles maneuvering away from their craft. Collins, who used a jet gun to move over to a nearby Agena satellite, reported: “I found that the lack of a handhold is a big impediment. I could hang onto the Agena, but I could not get around to the other side where I wanted to go. That is indeed a problem.” Gordon, like Cernan, became hot and sweaty and his visor fogged. “I’m pooped,” he said simply after cutting his walk short.
All the many successes and extraordinary accomplishments of the Gemini still left NASA’s leadership in a quandary. The question voiced in various expressions cut to the heart of the problem: “How can we send men to the moon, no matter how well they fly their ships, if they’re pretty helpless when they get there? We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, double-teaming the spacecraft, starting, stopping, and restarting engines; we’ve done all that. But these guys simply cannot work outside their ships without exhausting themselves and risking both their lives and their mission. We’ve got to come up with a solution, and quick!”
One manned Gemini mission remained on the flight schedule. Veteran Jim Lovell would command the Gemini 12, and his space-walking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, who built on the experience of the others to address all problems with incredible depth and finesse. He took along with him on his mission special devices like a wrist tether and a tether constructed in the same fashion as one that window washers use to keep from falling off ledges. The ruby slippers of Dorothy of Oz couldn’t compare with the “golden slippers” Aldrin wore in space—foot restraints, resembling wooden Dutch shoes, that he could bolt to a work station in the Gemini equipment bay. One of his neatest tricks was to bring along portable handholds he could slap onto either the Gemini or the Agena to keep his body under control. A variety of space tools went into his pressure suit to go along with him once he exited the cabin.
On November 11, 1966, the Gemini 12, the last of its breed, left earth and captured its Agena quarry. Then Buzz Aldrin, once and for all, banished the gremlins of spacewalking. He proved so much a master at it that he seemed more to be taking a leisurely stroll through space than attacking the problems that had frustrated, endangered, and maddened three previous astronauts and brought grave doubts to NASA leadership about the possible success of the manned lunar program.
Aldrin moved down the nose of the Gemini to the Agena like a weightless swimmer, working his way almost effortlessly along a six-foot rail he had locked into place once he was outside. Next came looping the end of a hundred-foot line from the Agena to the Gemini for a later experiment, the job that had left Dick Gordon in a sweatbox of exhaustion. Aldrin didn’t show even a hint of heavy breathing, perspiration, or an increased heartbeat. When he spoke, his voice was crisp, sharp, clear. What he did seemed incredibly easy, but it was the direct result of his incisive study of the problems and the equipment he’d brought from earth. He also made sure to move in carefully timed periods, resting between major tasks, and keeping his physical exertion to a minimum. When he reached the workstation in the rear of the Gemini, he mounted his feet and secured his body to the ship with the waist tether.
He hooked different equipment to the ship, dismounted other equipment, shifted them about, and reattached them. He used a unique “space wrench” to loosen and tighten bolts with effortless skill. He snipped wires, reconnected wires, and connected a series of tubes.
Mission Control hung on every word exchanged between the two astronauts high above earth. “Buzz, how do those slippers work?”
Aldrin’s enthusiastic voice came back like music. “They’re great. Great! I don’t have any trouble positioning my body at all.”
And so it went, a monumental achievement right at the end of the Gemini program. Project planners had reached all the way to the last inch with one crucial problem still unsolved, and the man named Aldrin had whipped it in spectacular fashion on the final flight.
Project Gemini was history.
It had taken the next giant step forward with ten manned flights in twenty months. It had demonstrated every critical procedure the moonbound astronauts would need to make it all the way to their destination, quarter million miles distant, and back.
And Gemini had come from behind in the increasingly fierce competition with the Soviets and had given America the lead. The best of the Russians to this point had been clumsy plodding in orbit compared with the freewheeling antics of the Gemini crews and their spacecraft.
No Russian had yet mastered rendezvous. They had never docked one ship to another. They had conducted one space walk, but were far from even approaching the mastery and skills Aldrin had given the American program.
Apollo was next. This was the program. It would send man to another world.
It would enfold the future and wrap it like a flag to be placed in the hands of the nation and the world. But America would pay a price.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We’ve Got a Fire in the Cockpit
GUS GRISSOM SEETHED WITH ANGER. He had been selected to command the first Apollo test flight but nothing about the assignment was going well. The Apollo 1 launch had been scheduled for February 21, 1967. It was early December 1966 and Gus was still wrestling with an extraordinarily complex machine that was revealing new problems at every turn. He and his crewmembers, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, had been kicked from one scheduled launch date to another. Tempers were raw.
All involved realized there would be no flight for Apollo 1 until its endless glitches and failures had been addressed and remedied, and Gus was fast becoming convinced Apollo 1 was a lemon. It was an expensive, heavy, complicated spacecraft with thousands of systems large and small that needed to function and intermesh perfectly if it was to fly.
To train Grissom and his crew, a nonflying mockup of t
he Apollo 1, a flight simulator, had been faithfully reproduced down to every knob, dial, handle, and control button. Gus’s wrath this day was focused on the flight simulator and on the man in charge of bringing the simulator up to safety and performance standards. That man, Riley McCafferty, squirmed uncomfortably when the crew arrived.
The astronauts had just completed an inspection of the actual Apollo 1 at its manufacturers, North American Aviation of Downey, California. Engineers there were working 24/7 to rid the spacecraft of its bugs. This morning the Apollo 1 astronauts were strapping themselves into a simulator. The simulator and Apollo 1 now differed in so many significant ways that Grissom felt he and his crew were wasting their time.
Only minutes had past in the simulation run when he summoned McCafferty.
“Damn it, Riley, this simulator is worthless,” Gus yelled. “Too many things don’t match!”
“But—”
“Training on a simulator that doesn’t simulate doesn’t work, Riley,” Grissom said flatly as he and his crew left.
Simulator problems and preparing for a flight that had been repeatedly postponed weren’t the only sources of pressure on Grissom. As Apollo 1’s commander, he became the lightning rod for complaints and caustic remarks that the Apollo program was complacent and moving too slowly toward its stated goal of sending an American to the moon.
In the final days of 1966, barely weeks after the spectacularly successful conclusion of the Gemini project, NASA’s future adventures in space had never looked so promising. There were those in the agency who stated flatly that a man would be on the moon as early as 1968, a full year before the deadline set by the late President John F. Kennedy. In moving quickly to get Apollo off the ground, there were those who said NASA was responding to intense political pressure. Lyndon Johnson was a president besieged from all sides. Racial unrest scourged American cities from coast to coast. Massive protests against the unpopular war in Vietnam were fueled by rising death tolls, and Johnson was coming under additional fire for cooperating with a corrupt South Vietnamese government.
