v1.0.2 / chapter 16 of 24 / 01 may 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* The US hoped to move ahead of the USSR in the space race with the Gemini missions, but the Soviets managed to stay one step in the lead with their Voskhod missions. However, Voskhod was little more than a modification of the Vostok space capsule, while the Gemini was a next-generation spacecraft, and by the end of the Gemini program the US had demonstrated manned spaceflight capabilities well in advance of those of the Soviet Union.
* The first successful aerial drop test of a Voskhod sharik was on 5 October 1964, and the Soviets wasted not the slightest amount of time putting the spacecraft into orbit. The initial unmanned test flight of a Voskhod, unannounced and assigned the name "Cosmos 47" in the West, was on 6 October 1964, successfully returning to Earth the next day. A crew of dogs had been considered for the flight, but Ivan Ivanovich manikins were used instead.
Cosmos 47 was rapidly followed by the launch of manned "Voskhod 1" by a Voskhod booster on 13 October. The spacecraft carried Konstantin Feoktistov, Vladimir Komarov, and Boris Yegorov, the first doctor to fly in space. They landed successfully in snow flurries after a day in space, with the landing system functioning perfectly.
The mission was proclaimed a success, which given its goal of simply putting three men into space and recovering them, was unarguably true. One naive American journalist praised the spacecraft, saying that Soviet engineering had been able to fly a space capsule that provided a "shirt-sleeve environment", though had its riders been free to publicly say what they thought they might have not praised this "feature" at all.
Kruschev, the supposed author of the scheme, chatted with the cosmonauts while he was on vacation on the Black Sea. He hopefully enjoyed his triumph, since on 14 October he was called back to Moscow, raked over the coals by a committee, and summarily sacked, to be replaced by Leonid Brezhnev and his associate, Alexey Kosygin. In an earlier day Kruschev would have been shot, but the USSR had changed enough to allow him to retire in relative obscurity. Kruschev was not even placed under house arrest, though the authorities kept a close eye and a tight leash on him. Kruschev was too spirited to take well to a leash and they had to yank him back hard on it once or twice, before he finally died in 1971.
Kruschev had been energetic in his rule and wanted to reform the system, but he had ended up rocking the boat far too much and in too erratic a fashion for Communist Party power figures. Crop failures in recent years, which were attributed to half-baked schemes promoted by Kruschev and his people, were the last straw.
The crop failures also illustrated the deepest weakness of the Soviet space program. The USSR was expending a large amount of resources to put cosmonauts into orbit, while the country could not put bread on the table of its citizens and was frantically building weapons to counter American military power. Brezhnev was aware of this imbalance in priorities and had no great enthusiasm for space spectaculars. The Soviet space effort had gained considerable momentum of its own and would continue, even scoring further significant victories, but the loss of its top patron, Nikita Kruschev, was a major blow.
* A second unmanned Voskhod test flight, designated "Cosmos 57", was performed on 22 February 1965, but due to a ground command error, it activated its self-destruct system shortly after reaching orbit, leaving behind a cloud of debris.
The second manned Voskhod flight was flown on 18 and 19 March 1965. "Voskhod 2" was a two-man mission, the crew consisting of Pavel Belyaev and Alexey Leonov, but in classic Korolyev style it also accomplished yet another space victory for the USSR: the first space walk or EVA. Voskhod 2 was fitted with an inflatable airlock, through which Leonov emerged to float in space. He was wearing a new "Berkut (Golden Eagle)" space suit designed for the task, with its own 45-minute oxygen supply. A television camera mounted on the outer hatch recorded his movements for relay to Earth. The movements were not very graceful: Leonov found it difficult to maneuver and banged into the spacecraft several times. After twelve minutes of such amusements, Leonov tried to get back into the airlock, and found to his alarm that he would not fit.
The sweaty, exhausted, and worried cosmonaut had to repeatedly depressurize his suit, finally going below a pressure level where he was at risk of getting "the bends", with nitrogen bubbles forming in his bloodstream and causing agonizing pain. It was either take the risk or die in space. He finally managed to depressurize his suit enough to allow him to climb back into the Voskhod. Leonov later claimed he had a suicide pill in his helmet to fall back on if all else failed.
The airlock was discarded before reentry. The automatic reentry system failed, and so the spacecraft made an additional orbit and returned to Earth under manual control. The cosmonauts overshot their landing zone by 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles), landing in snow-covered Siberian forests. The antenna for their radio beacon, which a recovery team was supposed to use to find the spacecraft and its crew, was broken, and the two men spent a frosty dark night in the capsule. Some stories claimed they were harassed by wolves who kept them from getting out and making a fire; other stories say it was a bear; possibly they simply heard strange noises outside and wondered what was making them.
A rescue team arrived in the morning, but they had to make camp overnight before they could get back to civilization. To cover up the silence of the cosmonauts in the meantime, Soviet media claimed they were "resting" after their mission, which in a sense was true.
The mission had not gone as well as anticipated. The Soviets would not perform another EVA until 1969. In truth, however, floating around in the vacuum in a spacesuit was another thing that wasn't quite as easy as the science-fiction writers had thought, and the Americans would have plenty of difficulties of their own with it. Although further Voskhod missions were being considered at the time, Voskhod 2 would turn out to be the last manned Voskhod flight: Soviet manned space flight was entering an idle period.
* One of the reasons that Voskhod flights were discontinued was that the American Gemini missions in 1965 and 1966 had matched or exceeded all of the Voskhod's capabilities. The Soviets would have to come up with something better to upstage the Americans.
Gemini had got off to a slow, methodical start. The first unmanned flight, "Gemini-Titan 1 (GT-1)" or just "Gemini 1", went into orbit on 8 April 1964 and remained in orbit for four days. It burned up on reentry as intended, the mission goals not including recovery. Everything went well, which was a relief after the many problems and delays the program had suffered.
A second unmanned Gemini flight, "Gemini 2", was launched on 19 January 1965, after the Soviets had splashed their three-man Voskhod flight across front pages. Gemini 2 was a suborbital flight, focused on validation of the recovery system. The mission had been badly delayed by a resurgence of technical problems, as well as troubles caused by lightning and then hurricanes, and had forced NASA to give up on their hopes of putting the initial manned Gemini into orbit in 1964. In some ways this was just as well, since the problems with the ejection system and fuel cells were still being ironed out, and the Gemini-Agena was well behind schedule.
The launch itself went very well, in fact extremely well considering that it was "on its own" up to the last minutes of the flight. Mission Control suffered a power blackout at launch and didn't get systems back online until the flight was almost over. It turned out the news media had plugged into the Mission Control power circuit, and tripped the circuit breakers when they lit up their lighting. In debriefing, somebody suggested to Chris Kraft that he keep a flashlight on hand for future flights. He was not amused. The news media were told to bring generators in the future.
The first manned Gemini flight, "Gemini 3", was finally launched on 23 March 1965, after the Soviets had finished with Voskhod, and took Gus Grissom and John Young into orbit. This made Grissom the first person to fly in space twice. Remembering how Liberty Bell 7 had sunk to the bottom of the ocean, Grissom, inspired by a popular musical, named the Gemini "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" for good luck. NASA public relations thought it was frivolous and asked for an alternate name. Grissom suggested: "Titanic". The name stayed "Molly Brown", but the order came down to stop giving spacecraft names for the time being and avoid the whole problem.
Gemini 3 was simply a technology validation mission to ensure that the spacecraft would perform as designed, and only lasted five hours. Things went well and the mission scored a "first", a significant one this time, when the two astronauts used the spacecraft's orbital maneuvering system to change the spacecraft's orbit. A manned spacecraft had actually been "flown" in space under piloted control, not simply turned around with its reaction thrusters, paving the way to orbital rendezvous tests.
Gemini 3 was also marked by an incident where Young "awarded" Grissom a corned-beef sandwich that had been smuggled on board the spacecraft. It started spreading crumbs around and they had to stash it away quickly. The US Congress reacted fussily with such frivolity on a mission that cost so many taxpayer dollars, even though the mission accomplished most of its list of objectives, and in the future astronauts had to be more careful about what they took along on a spaceflight.
There had been a red-faced shouting match between Chris Kraft and Deke Slayton over turf issues between Mission Control and the astronauts on the eve of the launch; it had introduced turbulence in what was otherwise a flawless flight, and led to Kraft refusing to speak with Slayton for a bit. They cooled off and talked it out after the flight, essentially taking the obvious tack to give Mission control authority over the mission and the astronauts authority over the spacecraft itself. Gene Kranz later commented that everyone was under so much pressure that such blowups were not surprising, and in fact it was surprising they never came to blows.
* Gemini seemed to be a solid system now, and to make up for lost time program officials decided to conduct launches on two-month instead of three-month intervals, as had been originally planned. The first "real" Gemini mission was "Gemini 4", which lifted off on 3 June 1965, carrying Jim McDivitt and Ed White into orbit. The Titan pogoed for a bit during the ascent, causing the astronauts to stutter over the communications link, but the booster then smoothed out its flight.
The mission lasted four days, putting the US in reach of Soviet capabilities. It was supposed to have lasted seven, but continued fuel cell development problems dictated the use of shorter-lived conventional storage batteries. Mission Control was now operating for the first time from "Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR)" -- the new, much improved facility at Houston, instead of the original cramped facility at Cape Canaveral.
Hopes that the Gemini-Agena would be ready in time were also let down, but the crew attempted a mock "rendezvous" with the upper stage of the Titan II that had put them into orbit. The stage had been fitted with flashing strobe beacons to help the crew spot it. The astronauts turned the Gemini around and approached the stage, but they had difficulties matching velocities: their training had not quite soaked up the reality that in general orbital altitude is a function of velocity and vice-versa, with a lower orbit being a faster orbit. It wasn't like parking a car, or even like refueling in midair from a tanker jet. They finally had to give it up when the stage started to tumble. The exercise did prove useful in demonstrating that trying to match velocities with another space vehicle was yet another thing that was not as simple as had been assumed, and program engineers starting working to figure out how to improve matters.
Gemini 4 also involved the first American EVA or "spacewalk", which had been hastily inserted into the flight plan in response to Leonov's EVA. A few hours after launch, the astronauts depressurized the capsule, and Ed White then opened up his hatch to float around in space for 21 minutes, using a compressed-air gun to maneuver. There were no problems, White saying it was "the greatest experience, this is just tremendous", though admittedly he wasn't really trying to do anything practical.
When McDivitt told White to get back in before the spacecraft passed into Earth's nightside and darkness, White replied: "It's the saddest moment of my life." The whole exercise seemed like a great success; the fact that he had considerable difficulty getting back into the cramped capsule and was overheated for hours afterward didn't get that much attention.
The relatively long mission allowed NASA to evaluate dietary and sanitation measures for extended spaceflight, and the astronauts used bungee cords to see if they could maintain muscle tone while being cooped up in a flying compact car for several days. They also took large numbers of photographs of Earth landscapes with hand-held cameras, part of an ongoing NASA effort that eventually helped lead to the development of Earth resource satellites.
After 62 orbits, Gemini 4 returned to Earth under manual control because the spacecraft's computer had failed. Although NASA had wanted Gemini to be much more robust than Mercury, the new capsule was complicated and full of new technology; Gemini's reliability was nothing to write home about. Gemini 4 landed about 80 kilometers (50 miles) off target.
Public reaction to the flight was extremely enthusiastic. Although White's spacewalk had been as much as a stunt as Leonov's, the American spacewalk had been announced in advance and conducted live on TV. Once again, NASA was able to use the agency's openness to advantage.
* Gemini 4 was judged a success, and was followed by eight more Gemini missions. "Gemini 5" was launched on 21 August 1965, carrying Gordo Cooper and Pete "Tweety" Conrad on an eight-day mission. Gemini 5 was mainly an endurance test, carrying the new fuel cells to support a long spaceflight, but the flight was also supposed to test the spacecraft's rendezvous system.
Since the Gemini-Agena upper stage still wasn't ready at the time, the two astronauts were to play "tag" with a 30 kilogram (66 pound) rendezvous evaluation pod, basically just a radar "beacon" with a flashing light, that would be released from the Gemini's adapter section once in orbit.
Unfortunately, a fuel cell fault in the spacecraft forced the cancellation of the rendezvous test, and in fact almost cut the flight short. Mission controllers were able to devise a workaround that kept the two astronauts in space for the scheduled 120 orbits. However, there had been a miscalculation on the rate at which the fuel cells produced water and the astronauts found themselves scrambling to store the overflow in every container they could find. Spacecraft engineers made a note to add a water dump valve to later Geminis.
Cooper and Conrad returned safely to Earth, though their spacecraft was badly cluttered by the rubbish accumulated during the long mission. Among the rubbish was a litter of freeze-dried shrimp, the result of an accident with a food packet that filled the capsule with little pink satellites. The capsule landed short of target; it turned out that the flight dynamics engineers had miscalculated the trajectory for the reentry maneuver, forgetting to factor in the Earth's rotation during the reentry period. No real harm was done, but the engineers weren't allowed to forget it.
Conrad was particularly glad to get the mission done with. In contrast to the laid-back Gordo Cooper, Conrad was on the hyperactive side. The Gemini was as tight or worse a fit for two astronauts as the Mercury capsule had been for one, with no room to do more than just sit there, and Conrad said that just sitting there in the Gemini capsule for eight days was the "hardest thing I've ever done."
* "Gemini 6" was supposed to be the first mission to rendezvous with the modified Agena upper stage, the crew consisting of Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford. The Atlas Agena lifted off from Cape Canaveral on 25 October 1965. The Gemini was supposed to follow a short time later that day, but the Agena failed to make orbit and the Gemini launch was scrubbed.
Walter Burke, a McDonnell vice-president in charge of space and missiles, suggested that NASA simply launch "Gemini 7", which was in advanced preparation, and have the two spacecraft rendezvous with each other. They couldn't dock, but they could maneuver together, which was more than the Soviets could do at the time. The dual mission would be useful practice, and would also show up those smartass Commies.
Senior NASA management was cold to the idea at first, but the astronauts and a lot of other folks in the ranks were enthusiastic, and fleshed out the details solidly enough to sell the idea. Arranging two launches so close together would be difficult, since there was only one launch pad at Cape Canaveral that could support a Gemini-Titan launch, but mission planners finally decided that they could get it done with a little clever juggling. They could erect and check out the second Gemini-Titan first, and then pull it off the pad and store it; then erect, check out, and launch the first Gemini-Titan; and finally pull the second Gemini-Titan out of storage and launch it.
Putting two manned spacecraft into orbit at one time would also greatly strain Mission Control's resources, particularly since the communications network was only set up to handle one manned spacecraft and one unmanned spacecraft at a time. The resolution was to treat Gemini 7 as an unmanned target during the rendezvous phase and led Gemini 6 do all the heavy lifting in the rendezvous. There was a lot of discussion and running around, but all the pieces were put into place.
Gemini 7 was launched on 4 December 1965, carrying Frank Borman and Jim Lovell on a 14-day mission. Since they were not going to perform a spacewalk, they were outfitted in new Dave Clark G5C lightweight spacesuits that only weighed 7.3 kilograms (16 pounds). They were comfortable and easy to take off and put on; the crew wore pilot-style helmets under soft hoods.
Gemini 6 had been rescheduled for launch after Gemini 7, but the next attempt to put Schirra and Stafford into orbit, on 12 December 1965, also had to be scrubbed due to a launchpad failure when an umbilical cable dropped a second too soon, causing the Titan's engines to shut down after ignition. The booster's fuel tanks were fully pressurized, and there was a major possibility of the Titan going up like a bomb, producing what was called a "BFRC (Big Fucking Red Cloud)" of burning toxic storable fuel. Schirra, the command pilot, sensed the failure and had to decide instantly whether the two astronauts would eject. Since the Titan hadn't budged off the pad he decided against it. Had he done so, the dual mission would have had to be cancelled.
Distrust of the ejection seats and a pilot's instinct to "stay with the aircraft" did much to influence Schirra's decision. He had taken a bet with his and Stafford's life, and he got a lot of respect for gutsiness. The pressure in the fuel tanks bled off quickly and everyone started breathing again. The incident turned out to be lucky, in a sense, since the booster inspection revealed that somebody had failed to remove a dust cover during engine assembly, an oversight that might have had disastrous consequences.
After three days of intense work, Gemini 6 was finally successfully launched on 15 December, and the capsule was shot into an orbit about 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) behind Gemini 7. Gemini 7 was fitted with auxiliary lights to act as a docking target; Gemini 6 closed the distance and met up with Gemini 7 a little over seven hours after launch. There was a ripple of applause and cheers in Mission Control. The Geminis maneuvered with each other for several orbits, coming within 30 centimeters (a foot) on one occasion. Schirra and Stafford held up a card labeled "BEAT ARMY" to one of their forward portholes, and Borman, a West Point graduate, held up a placard labeled "BEAT NAVY" in reply.
The rendezvous exercise completed, Gemini 6 returned to Earth a little under 26 hours after launch. Although Gemini 6 was powered by batteries, the last of the Geminis to not carry fuel cells, the two astronauts could have stayed up somewhat longer, but Gemini 7 was having problems with their fuel cell systems and ground controllers had their hands full. Gemini 7 managed to complete its mission, though the two astronauts had to conserve electric power, returning to Earth after 330 hours 35 minutes in orbit.
They were glad to get back home. Two weeks cramped into the tiny capsule was both uncomfortable and tedious, a test of endurance, and certainly a test of getting along. Borman was a no-nonsense decisive manager type; some people, like Deke Slayton, thought he was a take-charge sort of guy, while others found him obnoxious, Gene Cernan describing him as a "tight-assed sonofabitch". Lovell was just as competent but much more relaxed and almost everyone liked him; he was cheery, easy going, with a corny sense of humor. They got along well. They sang top-forty pop hits to each other to pass the time.
The primitive sanitation was a particular problem, badly aggravated when a urine bag broke in Borman's hands. The flight was, as Lovell commented later, something like sitting in a latrine for two weeks without access to a shower. However, they had demonstrated that men could stay in space for the full duration of a Moon mission and then some.
* "Gemini 8", a retry attempt to perform an Agena docking, was launched on 16 March 1966. The crew was Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott. The docking was performed successfully -- the first time a spacecraft had docked with another spacecraft, another win for the Americans.
However, the triumph was very short-lived, since the assembled spacecraft began to roll. The astronauts managed to regain stability, but then the roll began again. They separated the two spacecraft, but the Gemini began to roll faster, at a rate of about once a second, and the hand controllers failed. Scott reported: "We have serious problems here. We're tumbling end over end, and we've disengaged from the Agena."
Soon they were spinning at a rate of about once a second. The astronauts were in serious danger: if the spin kept up, they might black out and never recover. They quickly discovered that an attitude-control thruster had become stuck ON, and disabled the main attitude control system. They were able to use the re-entry control system to maneuver, but of course the spacecraft had to be brought down immediately. The Gemini splashed down in an emergency recovery zone, in the Pacific off of Okinawa, after less than 11 hours in orbit. They had to wait about 40 minutes for recovery but were unharmed.
Armstrong was a reserved person who always chose his words carefully. When he was asked about his mental state during the emergency, he thought it over and replied: "I suspect you could categorize it as anxiety." His coolness under stress while the capsule was tumbling impressed ground controllers, but there was some muttered sniping at Armstrong in the astronaut corps. Given the big egos involved, it wasn't any surprise that some felt that they could have handled the emergency better than a civilian test pilot. It was chickenshit, but sometimes the competitiveness in the astronaut corps brought out the worst in people.
* "Gemini 9" was a third attempt to dock with an Agena, and was launched on 3 June 1966. The crew was originally to have been Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, but fate had decided otherwise.
Neil Armstrong and Elliot See were the only civilian test pilots in the astronaut corps at the time. Armstrong had come from the X-15 program and was regarded as one of the best pilots of the corps, while See had come from General Electric, performing engine flight test, and was regarded as one of the weakest. On 28 February, the Gemini 9 prime crew of See and Bassett and the backup crew of Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan were flying in two T-38s to the McDonnell factory in Saint Louis where the Gemini capsules were being built to get some simulator time.
See was in the front seat of one T-38, with Bassett in the back, while Stafford was in the front seat of the second, with Cernan in the back. The weather was lousy in Saint Louis, with low cloud cover, rain, and snow. The two T-38s, flying close together, were buffeted around in the squall, and Stafford decided to abort his approach and perform another go-round. See decided to try to land, banking off and disappearing into the muck, causing Stafford to exclaim: "Goddam! Where the hell's he going?!"
See realized he couldn't make the approach and throttled up to get back up into the sky, but the T-38 clipped the roof of the factory building where the Gemini was being assembled, tearing off the wing and causing the jet to cartwheel into the parking lot in the rear. Both See and Bassett were thrown out of the aircraft and killed immediately. Fortunately they didn't kill anyone else when they hit, though 14 people were injured, none seriously. Stafford and Cernan remained circling around in the murk, not knowing what had happened because everyone was trying to sort the disaster out. There was some confusion on the ground for a while as to which of the two aircraft had crashed in the parking lot, and for a while people thought that it was Stafford and Cernan who had been killed.
It could have been much worse. If See had been a bit lower, he would have slammed directly into the factory building, leaving carnage behind -- and incidentally destroying the Gemini spacecraft being built there, setting the entire program seriously behind schedule.
* The Gemini mission went on, with Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan assigned in See and Bassett's place. An Agena was been launched on 17 May to wait for them in orbit, but there was a booster failure and it didn't reach space. A back-up rendezvous target was launched on 1 June. It wasn't actually a Gemini-Agena, consisting only of the docking system of the GATV without the rocket motor and other flight systems that had been thrown together as a backup system. The "Agena Target Docking Adapter (ATDA)", known for some reason as the "Blob", couldn't be used to perform orbital changes but it could be used for rendezvous practice.
The ATDA appeared to be fine as far as ground controllers could determine, but when the two astronauts approached it on their third orbit, they found out that its clamshell payload shroud hadn't been released. The shroud was flapping open and shut, giving the appearance of an "angry alligator". As it turned out, it was classic Murphy's Law: it was possible to install the straps holding the shroud in place backwards, and so somebody installed them backwards.
Astronaut Ed Aldrin pushed for a spacewalk, with Cernan simply cutting the band loose. A lot of the other astronauts found "Buzz" Aldrin exasperating. He was single-minded and opinionated; he had recently graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing a doctoral thesis on space rendezvous, and would even give astronauts' wives extended lectures on the subject while their eyes glazed over. He became known as "Doctor Rendezvous".
Aldrin pushed the EVA idea to the management and some seemed to be swayed a bit, though it was very dodgy: the ATDA was tumbling, cutting the band might cause it to lash back, and the ATDA also carried unpredictable pyrotechnic devices. Later on, astronauts and cosmonauts would carry out EVA operations that were at least as dodgy without any serious difficulty, but at that time nobody had ever done any real work during an EVA, much less tried to tackle such a complicated situation. It was out of the question then, and given the fact that nobody even realized just how deeply ignorant they were about EVA at the time, every bit as out of the question in hindsight.
Gene Kranz even threatened to resign if the EVA was ordered, but he was apparently overreacting, having misjudged the enthusiasm for the idea. Neither Chris Kraft nor Bob Gilruth liked it; in fact, a few days later Gilruth suggested to Deke Slayton that Aldrin be pulled off his mission slot, leading to a long argument. Everyone knew Aldrin was bright, but sometimes he could get so blinkered-and-blindered that he didn't seem to have any good sense.
With the shroud flapping back and forth there was no way to dock, but the astronauts did practice simulated rendezvous with the otherwise useless Blob. Rendezvous was not trivial: it was hunting a very small object in a very big sky, and the technology available to the Gemini astronauts was so primitive that plotting out the rendezvous maneuvers required considerable effort with pencil, paper, and slide rule. It was an exhausting procedure: after the third and final rendezvous with the ATDA, Stafford had to call down to mission control and say that he and Cernan simply had to get some rest instead of going on down the list to the next task.
This announcement came as something of a shock down on the ground, since it was the first time astronauts had begged off on their scheduled tasks. Cooler heads realized that Stafford wouldn't have suggested a change in plans if it wasn't necessary, and CAPCOM Neil Armstrong, always the coolest by his nature, told the press: "I'm glad to see Tom use exceptionally good judgement."
* After resting up, on 4 June, Cernan was scheduled to make an extended spacewalk of almost three hours. He was supposed to remove an "astronaut maneuvering unit (AMU)", a big pack fitted with a thruster system, from the Gemini's adapter section, and test it out. He was wearing a specially modified Dave Clark G4C suit that had heat shielding to protect it from the AMU's thrusters. Life support for the suit was provided by an umbilical from the capsule.
The Soviets had of course said nothing about Leonov's desperate effort to get back in the Voskhod, and Ed White's short stint of floating around in space had looked like a joyride. The reality was that there was nothing trivial about any activity in an almost completely alien environment where anything that an astronaut might do -- including nothing -- could kill him. Cernan had trouble from the start, wrestling with his umbilical as though he were fighting a snake, turning and tumbling, struggling with a spacesuit that strongly resisted his every move, trying to get to the back of the Gemini and avoid the sharp edges around the rear rim. Although he had spent a considerable amount of time in the gym before the flight to condition himself, he still became overheated and exhausted.
Cernan described it later: "Every time I'd push or turn a valve, it would turn my entire body in zero gravity. I had nothing to hold on to. And we take for granted gravity, because we can do that kind of work with ease if something is holding our feet to the ground. Nothing was holding me anywhere."
In hindsight, all that shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. It was absolutely elementary physics at work, but hindsight is convenient, and in the real world doing something entirely new is bound to provide some surprises. Cernan sweated so hard that his face visor fogged up, nobody having thought to put defog film on the visor like a scuba diver would put on a face mask. He would have to stop every now and then to rub his nose on the faceplate to create a peephole.
Cernan called it a "hair-raising" experience. Just before launch, almost as an afterthought, Deke Slayton had come up to Tom Stafford and told him that if Cernan died during the EVA, Stafford had to make sure that he got Cernan's body back to Earth, since a dead astronaut orbiting over people's heads would be a very bad advertisement for NASA. Stafford was appalled that the matter hadn't been brought up before. There was no way he could get Cernan's dead body back in the hatch, no way to close the hatch if he did get the corpse back in the spacecraft, and no way to reenter with the hatch open. All Stafford could say was that he would do what he could, which in reality wasn't much, and if he failed all he could do was cut Cernan loose and come back down without him. Cernan wasn't part of the conversation, but it was simple cold logic and understood it perfectly well: "I might still be a satellite out there."
Now this had gone from a wild idea to a very ugly real possibility. Stafford told himself to hell with it and called Mission Control to tell them that as mission commander, he was calling it quits. The AMU test had to be given up, and although Cernan was supposed to stay "outside" for almost three hours, he returned to the capsule in two. He groped blindly around to get back to the capsule, having to stop periodically to wait for the visor to clear a bit, finally reaching the hatch in a state of exhaustion.
However, he wasn't out of the woods yet; the worst was still to come. Stafford managed to help Cernan get in the capsule and then they cranked down the hatch until it finally closed, leaving Cernan in a tortured position where breathing was very difficult; he croaked to Stafford over their private intercom: "Tom, if we can't pressurize the spacecraft in a hurry and I have to stay this way for the rest of the flight, I'll die!"
Stafford got the cabin pressure back up as fast as he could, which equalized the pressure against Cernan's spacesuit, allowing him to relax and start breathing again. Cernan pulled off his helmet and inhaled the cool cabin air; his face was beet red, and Stafford, fearing that Cernan was about to pass out, sprayed his face with water, though spraying fluids in the capsule was normally forbidden because droplets might short out spacecraft systems. Cernan's hands were so swollen that when he pulled off the suit's gloves, some of his skin came with them. It was so much of a relief that he didn't care.
Gemini 9 came back home on 6 June, landing almost exactly on target. The touchdown was hard and gave the astronauts a very bad moment: when they hit, water seemed to seep into the capsule as if it were sinking, and Cernan felt water pooling up in the legs of his spacesuit, as if it had sprung a leak. Recovery team frogmen quickly managed to put a flotation collar on the capsule, but as it turned out it hadn't been in any danger. The water in the Gemini was from the capsule's own water supply: the rough landing had broken a water line. As far as the water in Cernan's boots went, it was his own sweat from the EVA, puddling up under the influence of gravity.
Nobody had guessed EVA would be so difficult. Reporters asked NASA officials why Cernan had so much trouble when White had found the experience so enjoyable. The difference was, of course, that White had been taking a joyride while Cernan had been trying to get something done, but for the moment everybody was muddled. Cernan knew that the same astronauts who had quietly sniped at Neil Armstrong were likely sniping at him as well: of course, if they had been there, they would've done much better.
* "Gemini 10" was launched on 18 July 1966, the crew consisting of John W. Young and USAF Captain Michael Collins. They were supposed to dock with an Agena that had been launched for the mission, and use its rocket engine to change orbits for a rendezvous with the Agena launched for the nearly-disastrous Gemini 8 mission.
The mission went very well, with Collins performing two EVAs. Collins had been briefed by Cernan and some improvements had been made, for example modifying the hatch to make it easier to close. The first spacewalk went well, but the second, to retrieve a micrometeroid experiment from the older Agena, ended up with Collins tangled up in his umbilical cord and becoming overheated. This time, the EVA was cut short without much hesitation; it wasn't good news, but at least Gene Cernan breathed a bit easier, knowing EVA really was difficult. The two astronauts returned to Earth on 21 July.
* "Gemini 11" was launched on 12 September 1966, the crew consisting of Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon. The first goal of the flight was to dock with an Agena on the first orbit, and this was successfully accomplished.
Gordon conducted a spacewalk to connect a 30 meter (100 foot long) tether to the Agena to conduct studies in using tethered spacecraft for "gravity gradient" stabilization, in which the difference in gravity at the ends of the tether kept the two spacecraft aligned perpendicular to the Earth below, and in spinning the two to provide artificial gravity. The EVA was another fiasco, and though Gordon successfully attached the tether, he wore himself out doing it. He got so tired that he simply straddled his legs over the Agena and sat there to get some rest, with Conrad calling out: "Ride 'em, cowboy!" Once again, the spacewalk was cut short without hesitation.
On the second day of the flight, the astronauts used the Agena's engine to kick themselves up to an altitude of 1,370 kilometers (850 miles). Watching the Agena firing in front of them was spectacular, as was the vista of the globe stretched out before them at the peak of their extended orbit. They conducted other experiments and returned to Earth on 15 September, this time landing closer to the carrier than any previous mission.
* By this time, everyone was becoming extremely frustrated with EVA. Gene Kranz of Mission Control later summarized what happened: "As engineers, we started saying: Look, we've had three missions where the EVAs didn't go well -- what was wrong? Then we have a science advisory team step in and say: Look, your entire principles of EVA are wrong -- how you train, how you prepare the crew, the kinds of tools and instruments you use." They went back to the drawing board. There was one more flight in the Gemini program, and this time they were going to get EVA right.
"Gemini 12" was launched on 11 November 1966, the crew consisting of Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin. This mission performed a docking with an Agena, and Aldrin was in his element. Now Doctor Rendezvous was putting his learning into practice.
Aldrin performed spacewalks totalling five and a half hours. He had trained for spacewalks floating in a spacesuit in a swimming pool back on Earth. The Gemini had also been modified with an extensive set of handrails and footholds, including a "workstation" on the nose and another in the rear where he could set up shop to work on something, held in place with two snap-on tethers connected to his suit. Even the Agena had been fitted with handrails. The task list had been reduced to the simplest sets of actions to see how well they could be performed: instead of trying to get something done during an EVA, mission planners had stepped back to first principles to determine how an EVA should be done in the first place.
It was plenty of effort, but everything went according to plan: NASA had got over the hump on EVA. Aldrin said it was a "piece of cake". Gene Cernan didn't much care for Aldrin and thought he got a big head over the whole thing, writing later: "In true Buzz fashion, he would openly claim in later years that he had personally solved all the problems of EVA."
Gemini 12 came back to Earth on 15 November, ending the program. Gemini had validated long-duration missions, rendezvous, and spacewalking. There had been some lobbying during the program about going further, using the Gemini for a swingby flight of the Moon, using the Gemini-Agena to boost out of Earth orbit, but von Braun had been against it, calling it a "last resort" in public, and it never came close to happening. That was just as well, since Gemini had been plagued with a string of technical problems and such a mission clearly would have been risky to the point of suicidal.
To be sure, Gemini had been flown specifically to uncover such difficulties so they could be addressed, but Apollo could not be anywhere near as unreliable if a Moon mission were to have any chance of success. Within weeks, this issue would become all-important.
* One of the footnotes of the Gemini program was the end of Shorty Powers' career as the astronauts' mouthpiece. He had always been a hard drinker, and the drinking had been getting progressively worse. When it was discovered that he had been leaking inside information on the Gemini program to a reporter in return for bottles of whiskey, he was shunted off to a dead-end job where he could do no further harm, at least to anyone but himself. The astronauts weren't too sad to see him go. Powers would die in 1980, effectively having drunk himself to death.
* Both the Soviets and the Americans were continuing to send robot probes to the Moon, with the USSR taking a lead but the US gradually catching up and moving ahead. The Soviets performed attempts to launch Luna E-6 soft-lander probes using the Molniya booster on 21 March and 20 April 1964, but neither made orbit. One did make orbit after launch on 12 March 1965, but that was as far as it got, with the spacecraft designated "Cosmos 60". Yet another launch on 10 April 1965 didn't make orbit.
A shot on 9 May 1965 seemed to go according to plan, with the spacecraft announced as "Luna 5" as it fell towards the Moon. Unfortunately, it could not stop its fall and it crashed into the Sea of Clouds. A German telescopic observatory claimed to have seen an enormous cloud of dust kicked up by its violent impact into the Lunar surface. "Luna 6" was launched on 8 June. The spacecraft engine failed to shut down after midcourse correction, sending it wildly off course. The probe missed the Moon by almost 161,000 kilometers (100,000 miles).
A different class of probe, "Zond (Probe) 3", was launched on 18 July, and sent back photos of the lunar farside as it went into solar orbit. It was strictly a flyby probe, in fact it was a Venera 3MV planetary flyby spacecraft, the same type as used for the failed Zond 1 Venus shot and Zond 2 Mars shot. It was apparently a test flight, using the Moon as a target to evaluate the spacecraft's cameras and instruments.
Zond 3 was followed by more Luna E-6 soft landers. "Luna 7" was launched on 4 October. Its retrorockets went off too soon and the probe crashed into the Sea of Storms. "Luna 8" was launched on 3 December, but its retrorockets went off too late, with the probe also crashing into the Sea of Storms.
The Soviets were being very persistent, and their persistence finally paid off. "Luna 9" was launched on 31 January 1966 and landed successfully in the Ocean of Storms, relaying panoramic TV shots of the Moonscape around it for three days. Their streak of bad luck had ended, for the moment, and in spite of all their troubles they had again scored a "first" in space against the Americans.
The Soviets attempted to launch their first true lunar orbiter, as opposed to the Luna E-3 swingby probes, on 1 March 1966. It was a "Luna E-6S" spacecraft, based on the same bus as that which carried the Luna E-6 soft lander but with a sophisticated instrument payload of space physics instruments. It was battery operated and had no camera. The spacecraft never made it out of Earth orbit and was assigned the designation of "Cosmos 111".
However, less than a month later, on 31 March 1966 the USSR launched a second E-6S lunar orbiter, which successfully entered Moon orbit on 4 April, to be named "Luna 10". It was the first successful lunar orbiter and returned data for almost two months. Luna 10 was followed by two more successful lunar orbiters, including "Luna 11", launched on 24 August 1966, and "Luna 12", launched on 22 October 1966. These were both "E-6LF" spacecraft, much like the E-6S but equipped with a camera.
The last Soviet Moon probe of 1966 was "Luna 13", launched on 21 December. It was a "Luna E-6M" soft lander, much like the older Luna E-6 system but with an improved and bigger lander that added a seismic sensor, a soil penetration tester, and a radiation detector to the camera. It successfully performed a soft landing and took measurements. That was the end of Moon probe shots for a while; the focus then changed to providing support for the Red manned Moon effort.
* The US was close behind the USSR in sending robot probes to the Moon. With the Ranger missions ended, it was time to move to the next stages of American Lunar exploration: putting an observation platform into orbit around the Moon, and soft-landing a sampling probe on the Moon's surface. Studies for a "Lunar Orbiter" had been underway since 1960, and the NASA Langley center received the green light for the project in early 1963. JPL had been working on the soft-lander, named "Surveyor", through the same timeframe.
Both projects reached the operational stage at roughly the same time. The Lunar Orbiter was a 384 kilogram (847 pound) spacecraft carrying two cameras and some incidental experiments. The cameras took images on film, with a capacity of about 210 frames. The film was then developed on board and scanned for transmission back to Earth. This was the general scheme used by the unsuccessful Samos spy satellites, but it is unclear if NASA had access to any of the development work on the Samos system.
The first Lunar Orbiter was launched on the new Atlas-Agena D on 10 August 1966. The high resolution camera was out of focus, but the medium resolution camera returned an excellent set of images. Four other Lunar Orbiter missions followed to the last launch on 1 August 1967, with each mission proving successful. The first three were put into low-inclination orbits to survey landing sites for the Apollos. The last two were put into polar orbit so they could cover the entire surface, and managed to map about 99% of the Moon.
All the probes were deliberately crash-landed into the Moon to prevent them from becoming hazards to navigation. NASA headquarters took notice of the competence of the missions, the fact that Langley had met budget, and, not least, that Langley had not shown any inclination to quarrel with the top brass.
* In the meantime, JPL was moving forward on Surveyor, the first American lander probe. The Surveyors weighted about 269 kilograms (593 pounds). They were spindly craft, with three fold-out landing legs around a central bus with instruments; spacecraft power, control, and communications systems; and a solid-fuel retrorocket, surrounded by three liquid-fuel vernier rockets. Twin solar panels were raised above the probe.
The Surveyor was to be the first operational payload carried by an Atlas fitted with the Centaur upper stage, powered by twin RL-10 LOX-LH2 engines. As mentioned earlier, JPL had great hopes for the Centaur, since it would give them much greater payload capability than the Agena, but development had been troublesome. One of the particular problems was that LH2 is much colder than LOX. This meant troublesome thermal interactions between the LOX and LH2 tanks in the stage, with the LOX heating up and vaporizing the LH2, and LH2 freezing the LOX solid.
The first launch test of an Atlas-Centaur was on 8 May 1962, but the booster exploded less than a minute into flight. After considerable backtracking, a successful test flight was performed on 23 November 1963, but problems continued. In 1965, an Atlas-Centaur not only didn't get off the ground, but exploded so violently that it wrecked the launchpad.
On 30 May 1966 an Atlas-Centaur finally performed a flawless mission, throwing Surveyor 1 towards the Moon. The problems with Ranger likely added to the nerves as the spacecraft approached the lunar surface, but the probe soft-landed successfully on the Moon on 2 June. The soft landing confirmed that the lunar soil was capable of supporting a manned Moon landing, since there had been fears, most loudly voiced by astronomer Thomas Gold, that spacecraft landing on the Moon might sink into a sea of dust, laid down by aeons of micrometeorites falling on the lunar surface. The Surveyor probes would provide no evidence to support this idea, but much to the annoyance of NASA Gold would continue to doggedly insist that the lunar surface was covered with pits of "moondust" until events finally proved otherwise beyond any sane argument.
"Surveyor 2" was launched on 20 September, but crashed into the Moon and was destroyed. "Surveyor 3" landed successfully on 19 April 1967. Surveyor 4 also was destroyed in a crash-landing, but at least it was the last failure of a NASA Moon probe. The next three Surveyor missions went perfectly. The last of the probes, "Surveyor 7", touched down on 9 January 1968. All the Surveyors had a TV camera. Surveyors 3 and 7 had a scoop on a robot arm that was used to test the integrity of the Moon's soil. Surveyors 5, 6, and 7 had a simple chemical analysis system to perform studies of lunar material.
* In the end, after an expenditure of over $900 million USD, the American lunar probe program had mixed results. There were questions over the real scientific value of the missions, and the Ranger and Surveyor programs had resulted in endless contention between JPL and NASA headquarters. But the early failures of the program had led to improvements in processes that would help make the Apollo landings a success and provide a basis for further American robotic planetary exploration.
