"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today (14 page)

Astronaut Ed White on America’s first spacewalk.
(NASA)
.

“What does the flight director say?” asked a happy Ed White.

Flight director Chris Kraft moved to his microphone and barked, “THE FLIGHT DIRECTOR SAYS GET BACK IN!”

White laughed. “This is fun! I don’t want to come back in, but I’m coming.”

But the spacewalking astronaut discovered that maneuvering his body along the Gemini without the use of the jet gun was easier said than done. After seven minutes of tough going, he finally made it back inside.

He had been out twenty-one minutes instead of the planned twelve, and he told Mission Control, “There was very little sensation of speed. The view was something spectacular. I could see the outlines of cities, roads. I could see the wakes of ships at sea.” A smiling Ed White added one more thing. “It was fun.”

G
emini 5,
with Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad, stretched long-duration flight to eight days. After spending that much time together inside a spaceship a little larger than a phone booth they splashed down, and newspapers everywhere ran a cartoon of them holding hands on the recovery carrier’s deck with the caption:
“We’re engaged.”

Frank Borman and Jim Lovell bettered
5
’s record. They stayed inside
Gemini 7
’s cramped quarters for fourteen days, prompting Lovell to say, “It was like spending two weeks in a men’s room.”

The monotony of their marathon mission was broken on day eleven by visitors from Earth.

Gemini 6
’s astronauts, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, flew their spacecraft right up to
Gemini 7
, put on the brakes, and began station keeping. It was the first rendezvous in space.

“We’ve got company,” Lovell reported.

“There’s a lot of traffic up here,” Schirra told Mission Control.

“Call a traffic cop,” Borman laughed.

Finally, American astronauts had performed a meaningful space-flight feat ahead of the cosmonauts. The two Gemini ships orbited Earth together in formation, doing fly-arounds and circling each other in a
series of figure eights. Schirra reported he closed to a distance of six to eight inches, backed off, and flew in again.

As
Gemini 6
rendezvoused with
Gemini 7
in orbit,
6
’s naval commander Wally Schirra’s reputation for pranks was obvious. The
Gemini 7
crew read in
6
’s pilot window, “Beat Army.”
(NASA)
.

Gemini 6
returned to Earth the next day.

Gemini 7
came home two days later.

Rendezvous of the two ships was another milestone on the way to the moon, but docking two ships in space was still out there. That job would now fall to NASA’s only civilian astronaut, Neil Armstrong, who first raced to the edge of space in NASA’s X–15 rocket ship. He would command
Gemini 8
with West Point graduate Dave Scott.

The Agena target stage rode an Atlas rocket into orbit on March 16, 1966, and ninety minutes later Armstrong and Scott were off for the hunt.
Gemini 8
caught its quarry, and commander Armstrong circled and inspected the Agena rocket to confirm its stability. Then, with utmost care, Armstrong slowly nudged
Gemini 8
’s nose into Agena’s docking collar. Electric motors drove the docking clamps together. The two were now one.

“Flight, we are docked,” the all-business Armstrong reported to Mission Control. “It was a real smoothie.”

“Roger there,
8
,” came the reply. “Way to go!”

Docking done, they took a breath and Armstrong checked his flight plan. They were scheduled to fire the Agena rocket and let it boost
Gemini 8
to a higher orbit.

But it was not to be. In that very instant, the long Gemini/Agena combination—slowly at first—took off rolling like a log in water. Armstrong and Scott had just enough time to realize what was happening before they were thrown into a struggle to survive.

They were, in fact, in the first real emergency in spaceflight. They were 185 miles above China, out of touch with Mission Control, and they were terrifyingly alone. They were linked to a rocket loaded with deadly fuel that had become a twisting, turning, ticking bomb, looking for an opportunity to explode.

The only good news for NASA was that
Gemini 8
was in the hands of Neil Armstrong. He managed to reduce the roll to a point that he could undock the two craft. With a bang the ships let each other go, and Armstrong was astonished all over again.

“What the hell!” Dave Scott yelled.

Gemini 8
was spinning even faster. The astronauts now knew the problem had not been with Agena, but with their ship. One of
Gemini 8
’s sixteen maneuvering rocket thrusters had stuck open. It was spewing fuel at full throttle. Unless they regained control, the severe whirling of the astronauts meant they would soon pass out.

Suddenly, some good news. The tumbling and spinning
Gemini 8
had completed its crossing over China and was now heading out over the far Pacific.
Coastal Sentry Queen
, a Gemini tracking ship, was listening. “We have a serious problem here…We’re tumbling end over end up here. We’ve disengaged from the Agena.” The ship was hearing Neil Armstrong’s calm voice.

“It’s rolling and we can’t turn anything off,” Armstrong continued his report. Then he threw away the book. He decided to use
Gemini 8
’s nose rocket thrusters—a no-no. The nose thrusters were there for reentry only. But he had to regain control. One by one he shut down
the fifteen other maneuvering thrusters, and slowly, by switching to the reentry nose thrusters, he regained control. He would have to wait now until the thruster that was stuck open, the bastard causing all their pain, spewed all its fuel into space.

The runaway thruster kept spewing—for almost half an hour; then, and only then, did NASA’s top rocket man have full control of his ship.

“The X–15 was never anything like this,” said Armstrong, reaching for the book. With control, the rules were back, and the rules said that once reentry thrusters had been fired, for any reason, the astronauts were to bring their ship home.

Armstrong and Scott now had to land at the first opportunity, before they depleted the reentry thrusters’ fuel supply—before they would be left with no control of
Gemini 8
whatsoever.

There was only one problem: They were nowhere near a main recovery area. Flight controllers huddled. Then they said, “To hell with it,” and ordered Armstrong and Scott to set up for an emergency landing in the western Pacific.

High over the African Congo, in darkness, Neil Armstrong fired
Gemini 8
’s retro-rockets. The braking rockets started their half-hour ride through an atmosphere of total darkness—there was not even the suggestion of a light in the African jungle or on the ocean below, and there was not even a voice from a tracking station to give comfort.

Armstrong and Scott performed the reentry with great skill. They splashed down 480 miles east of Okinawa, their shortened mission lasting just under eleven hours. Soon an air force rescue plane roared overhead, dropping rescue teams. Three hours later the astronauts were safe, enjoying hot food and showers aboard a navy destroyer.

Flight director Chris Kraft handed out his own statement: “The spin rate was up as high as 550 degrees per second, about the rate where humans lose consciousness, or the capability to operate. That was truly a fantastic recovery, and really proved why we have test pilots in those ships. Had it not been for the good flying, we probably would have lost the crew.”

Deke Slayton took a few days for
Gemini 8
’s emergency to settle some obvious facts in his mind. He told himself Neil Armstrong’s
abilities to reason, to think, to handle emergencies, to fly the hell out of anything from the Wright brothers to rocket ships, made the civilian test pilot
the
leading candidate to land the first Apollo lunar module on the moon. He expected, and received, no objections from other department heads within NASA.

Deke also conceded that
Gemini 8
proved rendezvous and docking would work, but the shortened flight left the technique without a track record. The final three Gemini missions would give NASA that needed
history—not only in rendezvous and docking, but in using the Agena rockets to relaunch their Gemini ships into higher and different orbits.

The fan effect of the gantry being lowered and the Titan lifting off was achieved by eleven separate exposures on one sheet of film when
Gemini 10
was launched July 18, 1966.
(NASA)
.

But surprisingly to Deke, spacewalking proved to be the most difficult challenge for the Gemini crews. The problem had first raised its head when Ed White had so much trouble getting back in
Gemini 4
. In fact, Deke Slayton had talked to the Gemini commanders after that, telling them bluntly, “If your spacewalker becomes disabled, and he can’t make it back inside, cut him loose. Do not risk your life too.” It was a tough order, but they agreed.

Gemini 9
’s Gene Cernan was picked to be the second American to take a stroll in space. Once he and commander Tom Stafford were in orbit, Cernan stepped outside, attached to a twenty-five-foot tether, looking forward to the frolicking good time Ed White had had. He charged off to do the things he’d been told to do—to spend two hours outside having a ball. But he couldn’t make any headway. He wasn’t trying to move in broad steps; he was just trying to move his body a few feet to the rear of the Gemini, to the equipment storage unit where he would strap on an astronaut’s maneuve
ring pack and attached himself to a 125-foot tether. But he couldn’t float, he couldn’t pull himself, he couldn’t walk, and he told me after the flight he sure as hell wasn’t having a ball. Without handholds and footpads, it was a fight for every inch he moved.

A snail could have made better time, but finally he was there. “Whew!” he radioed Stafford with a breath of relief. “It’s a strange world out here!”

“Take a rest,” Stafford ordered him.

Gene was grateful for the order, and as he rested, he wondered. Could Ed White’s steering jet have made the difference?

He caught his breath and tackled getting the astronaut-maneuvering unit on his back. He couldn’t. He had failed at everything he’d tried, and Cernan quickly came to the conclusion he was useless. Nothing really worked, and when it was over, the second American to walk, or whatever, in space had been outside two hours and nine minutes. All of it had been a terrible nightmare.

Mike Collins on
Gemini 10
, and Dick Gordon on
Gemini 11
, wrestled with the same problems as Gene Cernan and Ed White did. Collins,
who used a steering jet to move from point to point, 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, sweated and his visor fogged. “I’m pooped,” he said simply after cutting his walk short.

Deke Slayton wasn’t pleased. “What the hell is the matter with these spacewalk planners?” he demanded. “We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, changing orbit, stopping and restarting rocket engines—all the things you need to do to get to the moon, but no one can function outside. What the hell is their problem? Can’t they figure this spacewalk thing out?”

There was one Gemini mission left and Deke Slayton, the director of flight crew operations, demanded a solution.

Veteran Jim Lovell would command
Gemini 12
. His spacewalking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, an MIT graduate, and Aldrin had been listening. He was not only smart; Buzz was a tinkerer.

For his mission Aldrin fashioned special devices like a wrist tether, the same type of tether that window washers use to keep from falling, and he made portable handrails and handholds he could mount onto the Gemini or the Agena rocket. These would keep his body under control, but he needed shoes. He crafted himself a pair of “golden slippers,” foot restraints resembling wooden Dutch shoes he could bolt to a workstation in the
Gemini 12
’s equipment bay, and he was bringing along tools—a whole bunch of them that he could grip with his thick space gloves. But more important, they were tools
that would function in weightlessness, in the extreme temperatures of space.