Space: Man Is Moon-Rated

Like any round-the-world travelers, Gemini 5 Astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad took some pictures to show the folks back home. The first photos released last week made a spectacular space travelogue, exceptionally clear and well-defined. From more than 150 miles up, the astronauts were able to get detailed shots of the launch pads at Cape Kennedy, the sharp relief of mountains and deserts, and incredible sights of underwater coral reefs (see color pages). The more than 1,000 pictures that they took with four cameras* demonstrated anew the potential of space photography for scientific and military applications.

Some of Gemini’s pictures of East Africa and the Middle East gave geologists a broad overview of rift-valley systems produced by faulting in the earth’s crust. Other pictures, each encompassing hundreds of square miles, will be useful to oceanographers studying ocean depths, underwater formations and ice floes. By taking selective color shots, Gemini did far better than the Tiros weather satellites, which photograph indiscriminately and only in black and white.

Goof on the Ground. In other technical areas, Gemini had at least one negative aspect. Instead of touching down last week within sight of the carrier Lake Champlain as planned, the astronauts fell short by 103 miles. Investigators at the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston soon traced the trouble: human error on the ground, not in space. One of the controllers at Houston had fed incorrect information to the big computer system on the ground, which in turn relayed the wrong re-entry calculations to the shoe-box-sized computer aboard Gemini 5. Said Howard W. Tindall Jr., mission-planning and analysis officer at Houston: “After all, it’s only our second try at controlling reentry. We’ll prove yet that it can be done.”

The astronauts themselves withstood the strains of flight and re-entry splendidly. Though they had been cramped into a half-sitting, half-lying position for eight days, they managed to do a couple of deep knee bends in the pickup helicopter, hopped nimbly onto the deck of the Lake Champlain and walked without wobbling. NASA doctors aboard the aircraft carrier probed the astronauts’ ears, looked down their throats, poked their chests, listened to their hearts, took their pulse, sampled their blood and made scores of other medical measurements. The first medical findings: the astronauts were in “wonderful shape.”

One Way to Diet. On the day after splashdown, they were flown to Cape Kennedy to begin eleven days of even more intensive physical checkups and debriefings. The exams showed that Cooper and Conrad were not so fatigued as the men of the four-day Gemini 4. For one reason, the Gemini 5 astronauts were able to get six or seven hours of sleep daily after the first few crucial days. When they slept in orbit, their heartbeats dropped to the high 30s. As they maneuvered their spacecraft and performed experiments, the beats rose to the 60s and 70s, which is about normal for them on earth. During the critical retro-fire sequence before splashdown, their hearts raced to the highest of the eight days—180. Still, no ill effects.

One finding that mystified the doctors was the astronauts’ significant weight loss. Cooper weighed in for lift-off at 152 Ibs., returned 7½ Ibs. lighter; Conrad started out at 154 Ibs., finished 8½ Ibs. lighter. The astronauts ate only 2,000 calories a day, compared with the 2,700 calories provided for them—but then, neither of them is a heavy eater. Dehydration? Though both astronauts drank six pints of liquid daily—which would seem to preclude the possibility of dehydration—doctors figured that there must be some still unknown factors in space flight that do dehydrate man. Within 48 hours after their return, Cooper was back to his normal weight and Conrad not far behind.

Tilt Test. Among the most encouraging postflight medical findings was the almost total absence of any symptoms of orthostatic hypotension—a condition that could result from weightlessness and lead to an increase in the heart rate, coupled with a sharp drop in blood pressure. Doctors have always feared that this could cause the spacemen to faint under the high G forces of reentry. But Cooper and Conrad stayed alert during both the re-entry and the many postflight tests. Every day the astronauts were strapped prone to a tilt table, then swung rapidly into a vertical position. The sudden jolt induces symptoms of orthostatic hypotension. The doctors wanted to see how long it took for the astronauts’ systems to recover from the jolt, and to compare this with the length of time it took in preflight tests. Time after time, the astronauts withstood the test without blacking out. After only five tests, their recovery rates had returned to normal.

The flight and the tests supported what Gemini’s chief surgeon, Dr. Charles A. Berry, has insisted right along: the human body is extraordinarily adaptable. With care and preparation, man can adjust to the exigencies and demands of space. From their first examinations, doctors could find no reason to fear for the safety of the astronauts on next year’s Gemini 7 mission, or on more adventurous flights later on. Said Dr. Berry: “We’ve qualified man to go to the moon.”

*A Zeiss Ikon Contarex with 200-mm. I 4 lens and a modified Questar telescopic lens (equal to a 50-in. telescope); a Hasselblad 500-C with Zeiss 70-mm. lens; a Widelux panoramic camera for photographing horizons; and a 16-mm. movie camera specially built by McDonnell Aircraft.