McDivitt remained at the controls keeping the spacecraft steady. White moved around while they both took photographs and discussed the view.
Capcom: “Take some pictures.”
McDivitt: “Get out in front where I can see you again.”
In Houston, Flight Director Christopher Kraft was becoming anxious because White had stayed out longer than the Flight Plan allowed (12 minutes). Nor was he showing any sign of returning.
McDivitt: “They want you to get back in now.”
White: “I’m not coming in – this is fun.”
Gus Grissom, the Capcom at Mission Control ordered: “Gemini IV – get back in!”
White replied happily: “But I’m just fine.”
McDivitt snapped back, “Get back in. Come on. We’ve got three and half more days to go, buddy.”
“I’m coming.” White’s boots thumped on the spacecraft as he reluctantly worked himself to the top of the capsule, handed back the camera, and again stood on the seat. Savouring the moment he stood briefly on the seat, looked at the stunning view, and sighed, “It’s the saddest moment of my life.”
Grissom queried what was happening, and McDivitt replied, “He’s standing in the seat now, and his legs are down below the instrument panel. He’s coming in.”
White’s EVA had lasted 21 minutes. Aldrin:
Ed had not only become an astronaut – his ambition since our days together in Germany – but he had also been the first American to float free in space. Like Leonov, he had a hard time jamming the legs of his bulky pressure suit into the narrow hatch, and it was even more difficult to work the hatch’s torque handle to reseal the spacecraft. But with Jim McDivitt’s help, Gemini IV was repressurized and they began the nasty task of putting away the awkward EVA equipment.
One of the photographs of Ed’s EVA shows him floating freely, the thruster gun in his right hand, the sun reflecting brightly from his visor with the distant ocean cloudscape far below. It’s eerie and futuristic. You can clearly see the American flag sewn to his left shoulder – a proud swatch of color. This flight was the first time that the shoulder patch flags were worn. There was certainly no practical reason to slap Old Glory on an astronaut’s shoulder. After all, there were no customs posts out there. But showing the flag in space – for both the Soviet Union and the United States – was now increasingly important. That picture of Ed became one of the most famous images of the space age.
Gemini IV’s attempt at a rendezvous in space had failed. The unmanned Agena target vehicle was not ready for the next mission, so Gemini V had to find the position of a phantom Agena, by flying to its calculated position in orbit. The next mission was cancelled when the target vehicle’s engine broke up. Gemini VI became Gemini VIA and the revised plan was for it to rendezvous with Gemini VII which would be on a 14-day mission. Aldrin:
On December 12, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford’s countdown reached T-0 at 9:54 am. Schirra’s mission, renamed Gemini VI-A, would rendezvous with Borman’s, which was acting as a passive target in lieu of the Agena. The huge Titan’s engines spewed flame, but shut down 1.2 seconds after ignition. Schirra showed his cool fighter pilot’s nerve by not pulling the abort ring, which would have blasted both of them in their ejection seats to safety. A small electrical plug had shaken loose in the tail of the Titan, causing premature engine shutdown. That was real discipline sitting there waiting for the launch crew to reattach the gantry while a fully fueled and armed Titan booster smoked below them.
Three days later the Gemini VI-A mission was finally launched. After six hours of maneuvering, the last three in the automatic, computer-controlled mode, Wally Schirra accomplished America’s first true orbital rendezvous. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was doing when he fired his thrusters on the computer’s orders. About an hour before actual rendezvous, Wally exclaimed, “My gosh, there’s a real bright star out there. That must be Sirius.” The bright object was Gemini VII.
NASA had two spacecraft and four astronauts in orbit, and the news media made the most of the mission. The press was ecstatic when Tom Stafford gleefully said he’d just seen “a satellite going from north to south, probably in a polar orbit.” Then Wally Schirra – ever the prankster – played “Jingle Bells” on his harmonica.
By 18 December, when Frank Borman and Jim Lovell splashed down in the Atlantic, America had more than quadrupled the “space hours” racked up by the Soviet Union.
In 1966 Soviet efforts were hampered by the illness and death of chief designer, Korolev, and by competition between his successor, Michin and the ICBM design bureau led by military designer General Vladimir N. Chelomei. The Soviets also needed to develop a large rocket like the Saturn V, but had not yet managed to build the more complex upper stages. The lower stages of their “Proton” project were still similar to Korolev’s original Vostok: a clustered engine with strap-on boosters.
Buzz Aldrin was one of the back-up team for Gemini X. When the primary crew of Gemini IX, Charlie Bassett and Elliott See were killed in a flying accident the new crew would be Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan. Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin became their backup crew.
Gemini VIII has to abort
On 16 March 1966 Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott in Gemini VIII achieved a successful docking. Buzz Aldrin was in Mission Control:
I was in the Mission Control room in Houston on March 16, 1966, when Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott accomplished one of Project Gemini 5 main goals, orbital rendezvous and docking with an Agena target vehicle, during the Gemini VIII flight. I didn’t know Neil Armstrong that well – he was a civilian astronaut from the second group but he was highly thought of from his days as a NASA test pilot on the X-15 rocket plane out at Edwards. For almost five hours, Arm-strong and Scott maneuvered their spacecraft to match orbits with the Agena and finally rendezvoused above the Caribbean, as Dave Scott called out radar ranges and Neil slowed the spacecraft by “eyeball” judgment.
After about an hour of floating near the Agena (“station keeping”) Mission Control told them, “Go ahead and dock.” The spacecraft’s cylindrical neck eased into the open throat of the Agena’s docking adapter. Mechanical latches sprang out to connect the two vehicles.
“Flight,” Neil called to flight director Gene Kranz in Houston, “we are docked! It’s really a smoothie.”
The Mission Control room was loud with cheers and whistles among the usually quiet flight directors. Gemini had just passed a milestone. Orbital docking brought us one step closer to an LOR mission and a landing on the moon. Because the Agena was built to accept engine commands directly from the Gemini spacecraft, the mission plan next called for Neil and Dave to fire the Agena engine to change their orbit. But the docked Gemini-Agena began rolling, slowly at first, and then with increasingly wilder gyrations.
“Neil,” Dave Scott said, “we’re in a bank.”
Armstrong didn’t have to be reminded. He struggled with his hand controllers to keep the cumbersome composite vehicle stable. He had to break away or the roll would become violent enough to damage the neck of the spacecraft where their parachute was stored. Neil fired the thrusters to undock, but the roll increased. The Gemini’s antennas would not stay in alignment, cutting off communication with the Earth station below, the tracking ship Coastal Sentry Quebec.
Finally, Scott got through. “We have serious problems here,” he announced. “We’re tumbling end over end up here.”
One of their RCS thrusters was stuck open, tossing the Gemini in an accelerating spin, which was now one revolution per second. Dave and Neil were having their vision blurred and they became dizzy.
Finally Armstrong broke the spin by completely shutting down the spacecraft’s orbital attitude and maneuver system and activating the separate reentry control thrusters. But this meant they would have to descend from orbit quickly because this thruster system could develop leaks once it had been fired.
The Mission Control room was on full alert. Around the country, NASA managers quickly consulte
d with each other then told Armstrong to go for an emergency retrofire with a descent trajectory into the western Pacific. Gemini VIII was above the Congo River when Gene Kranz and his flight controllers ordered the burn. The combined flame of the solid-rocket retros and the control thrusters dazzled the two pilots as they slid through the starry night. For the next 15 minutes they stared anxiously out their windows hoping to see the Pacific Ocean through the bright orbital dawn ahead. They still didn’t know if their retrofire had been accurate and whether they would land in the ocean or in some remote jungle – or maybe in enemy territory in Indochina.
As the sun climbed above the Pacific, Gemini VIII descended by parachute several hundred miles southeast of Japan. A search aircraft from Okinawa spotted their parachute and dropped rescue frogmen, who struggled to attach a flotation collar to the spacecraft as it rolled in the nasty 15foot swells. Several hours later Neil and Dave were aboard the destroyer Mason, seasick but otherwise okay. Their flight had lasted less than 12 hours.
Docking meant nothing if the composite vehicle could not be controlled. Lunar Orbit Rendezvous during an Apollo mission would depend on a perfectly controlled flight of the composite command and service module and the lunar module. But our first attempt at this had failed dangerously. No one was cheering in Mission Control.
After intensive investigations engineers at McDonnell, the manufacturers of the Gemini spacecraft, decided that a control thruster had stuck in its firing position due to an electrical short circuit. They modified the circuit to prevent any possibility of the thruster firing with the switch off.
Gemini IX and the angry alligator
Aldrin:
On the next Gemini mission, number nine, Jim Lovell and I were backup crew to Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan. Their job was to rendezvous and dock with a stand-in spacecraft, the Augmented Target Docking Adapter (ATDA), because they’d lost their Agena target when its Atlas booster had malfunctioned on the first launch attempt.
Launch morning, June 3, 1966, Jim and I checked out the spacecraft before the astronauts were sealed inside. It was great being at the Cape and working on an actual mission with real flight hardware – which had an oily, ozone-tainted smell – rather than with the simulators. The flight lifted off beautifully at 8:39 am, and once the orbital insertion was accomplished, Jim and I headed back to Houston in our T-38 to support the mission from there.
While we were in the air, however, Tom and Gene ran into the first of several problems. The rendezvous itself went smoothly, with the spacecraft radar coupled perfectly to the onboard computer. But as Tom fired his thrusters to ease up alongside the slowly tumbling ATDA, he exclaimed, “Look at that moose!” The target spacecraft presented a weird spectacle; instead of the circular docking throat at one end, the crew saw the conical white fiberglass launch shroud half open, gaping at them like the jaws of an “angry alligator.”
This launch shroud was held in place by a wire that had been improperly stowed before the target vehicle lifted off. It was hard to believe, but a multimillion-dollar mission was now jeopardized by a stainless steel wire worth 50 cents. As soon as Jim and I landed in Houston, we were ordered to an emergency planning meeting with all the flight directors and senior project officials. As backup pilot, I’d spent months training with Gene Cernan for his planned EVA. Gene had told me one day that he thought the way to overcome the problems of space walks was “brute force.” He was underestimating the difficulty of an EVA, but I knew he was a resourceful astronaut. I piped up at the meeting and suggested that he begin his EVA early, take along a pair of wire cutters from the spacecraft tool kit, and cut the damned shroud free.
Bob Gilruth and Chris Kraft looked at me like I was crazy. They said Gene could puncture his EVA suit while cutting the wires. No attempt was made to rescue the ATDA, and Gemini IX drifted free of its target vehicle. Another opportunity lost. (Deke Slayton later told me that I almost got jerked from my Gemini XII assignment for that suggestion. But in my own defense, these impromptu EVA repairs became commonplace on NASA’s Skylab and the Soviets’ Salyut space station in the 1970s.)
Two days later Gene Cernan began his scheduled EVA. The flight plan called for him to leave the cabin, clamber back to the adapter section, and don the bulky AMU backpack, becoming the world’s first true human satellite. Unfortunately, none of this worked out. After some tentative grappling around the edge of the hatch, he moved forward to conduct simple hand-tool experiments. But as Gene later said, he “really had no idea how to work in slow motion at orbital speeds.”
Any small movement of his fingers sent him tumbling to the limits of the umbilical that kept him attached to the spacecraft. The handholds and Velcro patches on the spacecraft he needed for leverage were either totally inadequate or too clumsy to use; his umbilical “snake” whipped around him, blocking his progress. Everything was harder than he’d thought it would be. He was unable to keep his movements under control. When the spacecraft crossed the terminator line into darkness, all his exertions finally caused his faceplate visor to fog. He was blinded as well as exhausted.
Gene and Tom Stafford decided to cancel the rest of the EVA. Now the mission’s other main objective had also ended in failure.
Around the middle of 1965 there had been talk of flying a Gemini spacecraft around the Moon in a mission called a LEO, or Large Earth Orbit. There had been sporadic interest from Congress down, but the top hierarchy of NASA felt it was more suitable for the Apollo missions. Charles Conrad and Dick Gordon were the crew of Gemini XI. Charles Conrad was very keen on the idea of going around the Moon. Eventually he persuaded management to try a very high orbit in his Gemini XI mission instead.
Buzz Aldrin served as a Capcom for the next Gemini mission. John Young and Michael Collins launched in Gemini X on 18 July 1966 and achieved the primary objective which was to rendezvous and dock with an Agena target vehicle. They also conducted a 1 hour, 29 minute EVA.
Gemini XI: asleep in a vacuum
Gemini XI also tried something new – to meet a target in space in the first orbit. Conrad explained:
The big thing about this was there was no way we were going to get any help from the ground. Previously all the solutions and the phasing burns and all of that stuff were computed on the ground. We had to get ourselves into a matching orbit that was 15 miles (24 kilometres) smaller than the Agena target was in and phased the proper distance behind so that a while later we would begin the Terminal Phase Initiate (TPI) burn and go ahead and rendezvous with the target. The most important thing was that we knew the exact time of our lift off down to quarters of a second. The ground had to pass up our corrected lift off time during powered flight just after launch, but before we disappeared over the horizon. We had this nice little handwritten chart which gave us the burn we had to do right smack at insertion.
As we went over Madagascar the ground was going to try and pass up what they thought the TPI solution was, but we already had a good solution and caught up and rendezvoused shortly after Australia, and were flying some exercises around the target when we passed over Hawaii. There was a big dead period in the communications after Australia, so the ground were all very nervous waiting to find out what had happened when we reached Hawaii. The whole rendezvous was done either with our on board computer or the handy-dandy chart.
Lindsay:
After liftoff, the astronauts steered Gemini XI to a safe dock over the Hawaiian Islands after only 80 minutes. “Mr Kraft – would you believe M equals one?” Conrad drawled with satisfaction, informing Houston they had successfully docked on the first orbit.
During the third day in the twenty-sixth orbit the Agena rocket belched fire to boost them to a new record height of 1,368 kilometres above the Earth, a height that clearly showed them the sphere of the Earth. “Whoop-de-doo, the biggest thrill of my life!” a gleeful Conrad called out as the acceleration shoved them into their straps – though they did wonder if the vehicle was ever going to come back as they blasted out into space!
1,368 kilometres under the spacecraft Carnarvon called, “Hello up there!” and Conrad burst out, “I tell you it’s go up here, and the world is round . . . you can’t believe it . . . we’re on top of the world, we’re looking straight down over Australia now the whole southern part of the world at one window . . . utterly fantastic!”
Conrad remembers, “Australia was half in night on the ground and what we were seeing was the western coastline, there was a piece of beach there in the north west that was very prominent – Eighty Mile Beach, I think it was.”
Returning to around 290 kilometres they were supposed to get ready for their next space walk, but Conrad told Al Bean at Houston, “We’re trying to grab a quick bite. We haven’t had anything to eat yet today.”
“Be our guest,” offered Bean.
Over Madagascar, Gordon opened the hatch. “Here come the garbage bags,” said Conrad as everything in the spacecraft not fastened down floated out, including Gordon, before Conrad grabbed a strap on his leg. Gordon watched the sunset standing on the spacecraft floor, before photographing selected star fields. Then, deciding to keep the hatch open, the two astronauts simply fell asleep where they were! Conrad said, “We had worked three twenty-hour days; it got to be a nice quiet time in the day and we were waiting to get into a night pass.” He called Houston after they woke up, “There we were – he was asleep hanging out the hatch on his tether, and I was asleep sitting inside the spacecraft!”
“That’s a first,” answered Capcom John Young. “First time sleepin’ in a vacuum.”
Gordon climbed out of the hatch and set up a 30-metre cable between the Gemini capsule and the Agena and they flew in formation. Instead of staying apart, the two vehicles tended to drift together.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 19
