Space: The Moon in Their Grasp

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We are 120 feet apart and sitting.

The voice was almost unbelievably calm. But behind every word was an unmistakable note of triumph. From 185 miles above the earth, Air Force Major Thomas Stafford reported that he and his fellow astronauts had just made the first manned rendezvous in space. Moving with exquisite precision across the night sky, the spacecraft Gemini 6 tracked down its partner, Gemini 7. As the two ships edged closer to fly in formation, then circle each other in a stately orbital ballet, Stafford and Command Pilot Wally Schirra joined Gemini 7’s Lieut. Colonel Frank Borman and Commander James Lovell at the farthest reach of the fast-expanding age of space.

With their successful mission, the four astronauts leaped over past delays and put the U.S. space program back on schedule. Pure science and practical engineering had cooperated to solve the incredibly complex equations of orbital mathematics. Human skill and human courage had added the vital ingredients that made the computations correct. Now the dream of docking two spacecraft while they whirl through their curving courses promised to be no more of a problem than parking a compact car; rescue of astronauts adrift in space became a definite possibility. A manned orbiting laboratory suddenly seemed more than an imaginative scheme; a space station that can be constructed aloft seemed within man’s grasp. And the men of Gemini 7 who had blasted off eleven days earlier to spend a full two weeks above the atmosphere had vastly extended the known limits of human endurance.

Now the moon itself seemed nearer and definitely accessible. Man’s technical talents had brought a lunar visit down out of the realm of science fiction. The Apollo program, with its planned lunar landing before the decade runs out, no longer seemed a fanciful goal for overambitious scientists. From the scorched launching pads of Cape Kennedy to the lonely tracking ships in the Pacific, Gemini had pumped new life into U.S. space work. And a public grown almost blasé about news of men in orbit waited for the astronauts’ return with singular pride.

While the World Watched. By the time Gemini 6 began its searing descent through the atmosphere, the entire country was back before its television screens. The anxious watchers had a better view than ever. Cameras on the deck of the aircraft carrier Wasp, waiting in the Atlantic, got a special space-age lift. They relayed their pictures through the Early Bird communications satellite and brought the tense drama of splashdown into millions of homes and offices (it was 10:29 a.m.) with astonishing clarity.

Search planes catapulted off the carrier and helicopters flapped aloft while the world watched. Televiewers rode the windy flight deck as the Wasp raced to Gemini 6’s landing point just under 14 miles away—the closest a Gemini capsule has yet come to its predicted impact point. Dense smoke from the capsule’s marker bomb rolled heavily across the camera’s field of view, and soon the capsule itself bobbed into range.

Navy frogmen were already there; a flotation collar was lashed into place and a plugged-in telephone provided close-up communication with the astronauts even before they opened their hatches. TV brought its fans as close as any Wasp crewman when the capsule was finally hoisted on deck, and as his hatch opened, Wally Schirra gave the familiar thumbs-up signal of success. Then, while the band played Anchors Aweigh, the two space travelers walked briskly down the red carpet of welcome between lines of cheering sailors and marines.

At week’s end, viewers saw a nearly identical telecast as Borman and Lovell—despite bouts of trouble with thrusters and fuel cells—splashed down only 7.6 miles from their planned impact point, winning a bet made with Schirra and Stafford that they would land closest to the target. There was one notable difference. After a 330-hour, 5.7 million-mile journey, the Gemini 7 astronauts were understandably anxious to leave their cramped quarters as soon as possible. Shortly after they opened their hatches, they were hoisted aboard a helicopter and flown to the deck of the Wasp. Though few would have been surprised if Borman and Lovell had found it difficult to unbend and walk, both climbed unaided from the helicopter, chipper and in remarkably good shape.

No Place to Go. Return to earth after their demanding ordeal in space was obviously a relief for the travel-jaded astronauts. But for them, as for Schirra and Stafford, the biggest moment had already passed. That was the historic instant when the two space capsules eased into sight of each other. For Gemini 7, it marked the end of a long loneliness; for Gemini 6, it meant the end of a long period of misfortune. Until then, its mission had seemed dogged by failure.

In October, when an Agena rendezvous rocket “backfired” and disintegrated in space, Schirra and Stafford were left sitting in Gemini 6 atop a Titan II on a Cape Kennedy launch pad. They were all dressed up with no place to go. Last week their first attempt to launch was frustrated when a monitoring-cable plug was accidentally jarred loose from the Titan II’s tail, causing an automatic shutdown of its engines only two seconds before liftoff. Later investigation disclosed that the engines would have shut down anyway—on either of the first two launching attempts. Workmen had forgotten to remove a thimble-sized plastic dust cap used during the shipment of an engine part. That cap would have prevented lift-off by blocking the rapid buildup of thrust.

Wally Schirra, to be sure, had never succumbed to the growing pessimism. “If we had 999 chances out of 1,000 of having a successful flight,” he explained, in a preflight interview for the National Broadcasting Company, “no one would want the 1,000th flight. But you don’t add up a whole bunch of flights and say we’re due for a failure. It’s 999 out of 1,000 on each flight.”

Schirra’s statistics sounded like whistling in the dark. Even the omens were bad. During the aborted launch attempt, a Cape Kennedy rescue helicopter crash-landed in nearby Banana River. Then word was received that NASA’s respected director of space medicine, Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace, and his wife were missing on a private plane flight. Search parties later found their bodies beside the plane’s wreckage near Aspen, Colo.

A Delicate Balance. On the day of the successful rendezvous, however, the fog that had shrouded Cape Kennedy during the night—and the cloud that had hovered over Gemini 6 even longer —suddenly blew away. “For the third time, go,” exulted Schirra just before the Titan II left the pad in a launch that was as close to perfect as any in all the Cape’s history.

Calculating with split-second exactitude, NASA scientists had determined the proper time of Gemini 6’s launch by the position and orbit of Gemini 7. Because the earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours, while Gemini 7 was circling around it once every 96 minutes, there were only one or two brief periods a day when the launch pad for Gemini 6 was located approximately under Gemini 7’s orbit and when the orbiting ship was close by—the proper launch “window” for a rendezvous attempt. For Wednesday, ideal launch time had been calculated at 26 seconds after 8:37 a.m. And in an impressive display of launch-pad precision, Gemini 6 lifted off—on schedule to the second. Rendezvous with Gemini 7 would be possible on the fourth orbit.

A powerful Titan II rocket swiftly shoved Gemini 6 into an elliptical orbit that dipped as close to earth as 100 miles (perigee) and swung as far away as 161 miles (apogee). The average velocity was 17,535 m.p.h., only 8 m.p.h. slower than planned. Even more important, a maneuver of Gemini 6’s second-stage launch rocket had placed the capsule in an orbital plane that nearly coincided with Gemini 7’s; its path was almost directly below that of Gemini 7, slanting away at an angle of less than one-tenth of 1°.

Some 1,200 miles ahead, Gemini 7 sailed along at 17,290 m.p.h. The strategy of rendezvous, painstakingly plotted by NASA scientists and computers, called for Gemini 6 to catch up by taking advantage of orbital mechanics—the physical laws that govern the motion of orbiting bodies. Those laws state that an orbital path is determined by a delicate balance between gravity, which tries to pull a satellite down, and centrifugal force, which is proportional to the satellite’s speed and tends to shove it farther away from the earth. A satellite orbiting close to earth, where the pull of gravity is strong, needs a high velocity to keep itself aloft. At higher altitudes, where the strength of gravity has decreased, a lower velocity will maintain an orbit. In last week’s rendezvous mission, Gemini 6 was inserted into a lower orbit than Gemini 7; thus it was moving at a higher speed and would eventually overtake its target.

During the first three orbits of Gemini 6, Command Pilot Schirra made a number of ground-computed corrective maneuvers. To change his elliptical orbit into a circle that reached up closer to Gemini 7, he made several “posigrade” burns—bursts from his forward-thrusting rockets. At two hours and 18 minutes after launch, for instance, Schirra made a posigrade burn when Gemini 6 reached its second apogee over the Indian Ocean. That thrust helped the change from ellipse to circle by increasing the perigee from 100 to 140 miles above the earth; following the laws of orbital mechanics, though, it also reduced Gemini 6’s closing speed on Gemini 7, now only 500 miles ahead. Later, he moved his flight path sideward and edged into the same orbital plane as Gemini 7 by yawing his spacecraft 90°, then firing a brief but finely timed thrust toward the south at right angles to his direction of motion.

Right Answers, Right Time. Despite such complexities, the scheduled maneuvers were perfectly calculated by one of the unsung heroes of the mission: an IBM 7094 Mode II computer, one of five located deep in the bowels of NASA’s Mission Control Center near Houston. Primped and primed and ready to go for more than a year, the electronic memory housed in the grey, blue-trimmed cabinets had been taught all the incredible complications of orbital calculations, had learned the long, involved equations worked out by teams of crack mathematicians.

As information about Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 was fed back from NASA’s worldwide tracking stations, the computer was ready to deliver, in microseconds, answers that its human tutors would take too long to supply. Its orders constantly changed Gemini 6’s flight plan, pumped out new burn times, duration of burn, power of burn, direction of thrust. It was the computer, for example, that noticed the apogee was half a mile low and called for a tiny “tweak” burn at the second perigee. “During the rendezvous,” says NASA Flight Director Chris Kraft proudly, “it gave us the right answers at the right time.”

Over the Atlantic, during the third orbit of Gemini 6, the radar transmitter in the spacecraft’s nose locked onto a transponder on Gemini 7. The transponder returned signals that were translated into position data by a computer aboard Gemini 6, now only 235 miles behind. At about the same time, the two capsules established voice contact. “We are reading you loud and clear,” called Borman. “Good, Frank. See you soon,” replied Schirra confidently. “We will be up there shortly.”

Blue Lights. After Gemini 6 was jockeyed into a nearly circular orbit 170 miles above the earth and only 17 miles below Gemini 7’s flight path, Copilot Stafford caught his first glimpse of 7’s blue acquisition lights pulsing in the blackness above the South Atlantic. “Spotted Gemini 7 at 12 o’clock high,” he reported.

Astronauts Borman and Lovell, who had been flying most of their mission in underwear, were now in their space suits. If the two spacecraft inadvertently bumped, their skins might rupture and the astronauts would need protection against decompression of the cabin. Meanwhile, Schirra made another posigrade burn to lift his ship into a higher orbit that would lead to its meeting with Gemini 7.

As the two capsules groped for each other, Mission Control in Houston monitored their progress through the Coastal Sentry, a tracking ship bobbing in the sea off Formosa. “The range is 20,000 feet,” reported the Coastal Sentry, “18,200 . . . 15,000 . . .”

Then, relayed from Gemini 6, came Astronaut Tom Stafford’s barely audible voice: “1.7 [nautical miles], 1.3 . . .” Suddenly there was silence, as the orbiting capsules passed out of radio range of the tracking ship. A short time later, they coasted around the dark side of the earth into brilliant morning sunshine. Astronauts Stafford and Schirra found themselves looking into the windows of Gemini 7, at the bearded faces of Astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell.

The capsules drew closer as Schirra carefully fired short bursts on his rocket thrusters. As they drifted into radio range of another tracking ship off Hawaii, Stafford’s voice crackled through the air, reporting the 120-ft. rendezvous. That laconic message set off an enthusiastic celebration in the Mission Control room in Houston. Shirtsleeved controllers jumped to their feet, cheered, broke out American flags, and pinned them to their consoles. Chris Kraft, having puffed on his traditional “mission accomplished” cigar, held a glass of champagne aloft and described the rendezvous as “an incredible performance, the biggest milestone since the flight of John Glenn.”

Call a Policeman. But there was more to come. Firing short blips on his thrusters, Schirra moved Gemini 6 to within 10 ft. of Gemini 7 while the astronauts exchanged wisecracks. “There seems to be a lot of traffic up here,” said Schirra. “Call a policeman,” retorted Borman.

“You’ve sure got big beards,” Schirra radioed to the Gemini 7 crew.

“For once we’re in style,” said Borman in reply.

While they chatted, Gemini 6 swung in a small orbit around Gemini 7, which was holding its own maneuvering to a minimum to conserve its dwindling fuel supply. For 5½ hours, the spacecraft continued to orbit in formation, their distance apart varying between 20 ft. and 100 ft., while the astronauts took color movies and still pictures in the harsh, eerie sunlight of space. They photographed plumes from the jet thrusters and visually inspected each other’s spacecraft.

At one point, Schirra reported sighting “white flakes or bubbles and things” emerging from Gemini 7’s adapter section. Gemini 7, it turned out, was purging its fuel cells, releasing water and impurities into space, where they immediately froze into particles of ice. When Gemini 6 joshed Gemini 7 about the mysterious straps trailing from its adapter, Frank Borman was quick to retort that similar straps were dangling from Gemini 6. The straps turned out to be the remnants of the covers for the shaped explosives that severed the spacecraft from the second stage of the Titan II rockets. The astronauts also noticed that the windows in both craft had been dulled by a kind of space-age smog that probably came from particles released during the firing of thrusters.

Eventually, Gemini 6 maneuvered into a safer orbit that kept the ships between 25 and 48 miles apart while their tired crews slept. Next morning, an hour before he fired retrorockets for Gemini 6’s trip back to earth, the irrepressible Schirra solemnly reported sighting an unidentified satellite in a low trajectory in polar orbit. It was trying to contact him, he told Mission Control in Houston. Then, before Chris Kraft & Co. had time to recover, he pulled out a harmonica and played Jingle Bells.

Eyeball Maneuvers. From the time that Schirra made the final major thrust that moved his ship up toward Gemini 7’s circular orbit, Gemini 6 was completely on its own, freed from direct guidance by Houston, largely dependent on its on-board computer, its radar and Command Pilot Schirra’s “eyeball” maneuvering. Both Schirra and Stafford literally had their hands full. Schirra’s left hand was on the OAMS (Orbital Attitude Maneuvering System) translation stick, which controls Gemini’s 85-Ib. and 100-lb. thrusters, and is—in NASA parlance—”direction oriented.” When he wanted to move forward, he merely moved the stick forward; when he wanted to go into reverse, he pulled the stick back; he moved it right or left for sideward motion. In his right hand, he clasped a notched pistol grip that controlled smaller thrusters used to pitch, yaw or roll the Gemini around one of its own axes—maneuvers that could fix its attitude in space. By working both controls simultaneously, Schirra was able to make his spacecraft respond as smoothly as a trained seal. Stafford, meanwhile, was busy with a circular slide rule and a heavily crosshatched plotting chart in his lap, checking the on-board computer’s data and relaying information to Mission Control.

At short range, where the thrusts are small, there is little time for orbital mechanics to take hold, and Schirra was able to largely ignore their strange effects and allow his pilot’s instincts to take over. After blipping his thrusters to edge closer to Gemini 7, he fired short reverse blasts to come to a stop, since there is no friction in space to slow him down. Back and forth, up and down, he maneuvered with a precision that brought expressions of admiration from Borman and from ground control in Houston, which noted that at rendezvous he had used less than 50% of the maneuvering propellant he had aboard.

As Schirra had predicted, it was “a piece of cake.”

Calm & Effective. Perhaps. But there was little doubt last week that much of the credit for the successful rendezvous belonged to casual Wally Schirra, who, at 42, is the oldest astronaut flying. It was his cool and seasoned performance during the abortive Sunday launch of Gemini 6 that made the midweek triumph possible. Had he panicked and pulled the Dring (“chicken switch”) that would have ejected him and Copilot Stafford from the Gemini capsule, the mission could probably not have been sent aloft on time. His superb piloting of the capsule, perfected in long hours of practice in the Houston docking simulator, and his nearly on-target splashdown near the carrier Wasp were reminiscent of his first space flight. In 1962 Schirra flew a near-perfect mission in the Mercury capsule Sigma 7, landing only four miles from the recovery carrier in the Pacific.

Son of a World War I fighter pilot and a mother who had been a wing walker in a flying circus, Schirra took to the air naturally. An Annapolis graduate who flew 90 combat missions in Korea, he is a fast mover on the earth, too, in a maroon Maserati.

Schirra’s quiet but effective copilot, Tom Stafford, 35, is a topflight aeronautical engineer. His rapid slide-rule calculations supplemented the information supplied by the ship’s on-board computer and helped keep the crew and the men in Houston on top of the spacecraft’s rapidly changing position. Also an Annapolis man, Stafford decided to make his career in the Air Force, has written two handbooks on flight-testing programs.

We Made It. In their less glamorous, but physically more demanding roles aboard Gemini 7, Frank Borman and James Lovell demonstrated a neat combination of endurance, stoicism and humor that was vital to their mission’s success. Like Schirra, Borman, 37, was air-oriented from youth, building model airplanes and later selling newspapers to pay for flying lessons. He ranked eighth in his graduating class at West Point before he joined the Air Force. Then an eardrum broken during a practice dive-bombing run made him doubt that he would ever fly again. He was delighted when recovery proved him wrong. Lovell, also 37, has been involved in launches since he was 16 and designed a rocket that rose 80 ft. In a term paper at Annapolis in 1952, he predicted that rockets would finally have their day when man penetrated space. He still builds model missiles for his son, bubbles over with so much nervous energy that fellow astronauts call him “Shaky.”

While the four astronauts soared toward their meeting in space, their wives made their own rendezvous at the Stafford home in El Lago, near the space center. There they sipped coffee, listened to announcements, and followed air-to-ground conversations piped into a loudspeaker from Mission Control. “Whee! We made it!” shouted Susan Borman as she congratulated Faye Stafford, who had nearly jumped off her living-room couch at lift-off and was still jumping up and down an hour later. Marilyn Lovell, expecting her fourth child soon, was also in high spirits. “I’m just stopping by on my way to the hospital,” she joked. Jo Schirra tried to take the excitement in stride, sent her two children to school after Gemini 6’s blastoff. But the following morning, when Schirra stepped aboard the Wasp, Jo Schirra admitted that she had found “every bit” of the mission exciting. The flawless recovery, she said, was “even more than I expected.”

Public Sensors. Though Gemini 7 Astronauts Borman and Lovell were the only humans in space during most of the 14-day flight, their mission, which was primarily medical, was also very public. Nearly all of their important body functions—from thinking to urinating—were monitored through sensors attached to their bodies, recorded on instruments in the spacecraft, or relayed to Houston where batteries of doctors pored over telemetered data. Each man was required to bag and date his own solid and liquid wastes, to be turned over to doctors at flight’s end. For want of a more descriptive term, Borman and Lovell described their extended mission in the cramped capsule as “two weeks in a men’s room.”

Alone once more after rendezvous, the Gemini 7 astronauts received a humorous plea from Post Office officials—relayed through Mission Control in Houston—to mail Christmas cards and packages early. “I have a stack of stuff up here,” Lovell complained, “but I can’t find a post office.” Replied a controller: “You should have sent it down with Gemini 6.”

As uncomfortable as it was for the pilots, Gemini 7’s flight will provide NASA doctors with invaluable information on the effects of prolonged weightlessness. Their findings may well influence the conditioning and medical treatment of Apollo pilots, who will have to spend between eight and 14 weightless days during a successful trip to the moon.

Getting a Little Crummy. Last week, by coincidence, Russian scientists reported that two of the three cosmonauts sent aloft on the first Voskhod flight showed symptoms of motion sickness and suffered from illusions. Earlier Cosmonaut Gherman Titov came down with a celebrated case of vertigo on the first day-long Vostok flight. But NASA’s chief space-flight surgeon, Charles Berry, believes that insufficient training, rather than still unexplained phenomena, was the cause of the Russian problem. With the exception of Titov, he notes, none of the Russians bothered by weightlessness had received lengthy training or were jet pilots (who learn to ignore the strange inner-ear sensations associated with acceleration and weightlessness).

Of more immediate concern to Berry are what he calls “adaptive changes.” During the four-day flight of Gemini 4, for instance, Astronauts Jim McDivitt and Ed White lost as much as 10% of the calcium in their heel bones and little fingers. Both Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad lost weight and about 13% of their blood volume. They also had reduced red-cell counts after their eight-day flight. But both returned to normal after 72 hours. The condition of Borman and Lovell, who were weary but seemed otherwise healthy after their two-week trip, should reveal if any further and more permanent deterioration occurs during longer flights.

To determine where the lost calcium goes, the NASA doctors will look for traces of calcium in the astronauts’ liquid and solid wastes, examine blood and perspiration samples taken immediately after they return to earth. Even the astronauts’ underwear will be carefully washed in distilled water to collect dried perspiration for later analysis. Lovell will be examined to see if pneumatic cuffs, which were automatically tightened around his thighs for two minutes out of every six, kept his heart from becoming lazy in the weightless environment by forcing it to work harder at pumping blood. His condition will be compared with that of Borman, who was not fitted with the cuffs.

One unavoidable result of prolonged space flight was a foregone conclusion. By the end of Gemini 7’s tenth day in flight, Borman admitted to NASA’s Dr. Owen Coons: “We’re getting to the stage where we’re starting to itch a little bit. We’re just getting a little crummy.”

Uncomfortable as they were, Borman and Lovell found time in between their duties for medicine to make contributions to other sciences. By using a hand-held sextant to sight stars setting on the earth’s horizon, they were able to determine their position in space and demonstrate that astronauts can navigate without the aid of a computer. In an experiment for the Defense Department, they tracked the payload of a Minuteman missile, took infra-red measurements of the plasma sheath of ionized air that was created when it plunged back into the atmosphere below them. Another experiment, communication with earth through a laser beam, was only partially successful. After several fruitless attempts, the astronauts spotted the blue-green beam from a laser-transmitting station in Hawaii, aimed their own beam toward it, but were unable to keep it in sight long enough for voice communications.

High Promise. Last week’s impressive demonstrations of precision launchings and splash-downs, flawless electronic communications and computations, smooth orbital maneuvering and stolid endurance, held out high promise for the remaining five flights of the Gemini program. Gemini 8, scheduled for early next year, will attempt to perform the original mission of Gemini 6: docking in space. If the necessary modifications of the backfiring Agena cannot be made in time, NASA will use a hastily contrived “Augmented Target Docking Adapter.” One way or another, Gemini 8 will have a target vehicle.

Later Geminis will fly two-day missions, primarily to practice rendezvous and docking; while on earth orbit, they will simulate the maneuver that will eventually bring Apollo’s Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) back to the moon-orbiting command capsule for its return trip to earth. Next year will also see the first flights of unmanned Apollo vehicles, perhaps even a manned orbit of the three-man vehicle.

The ambitious and complex Apollo mission seems less formidable now as a result of the Gemini performance. The 14-day flight of Gemini 7 surpassed the total number of Russian man-hours in space, but more important, it equaled the longest scheduled duration of a successful Apollo round trip to the moon. And it apparently proved that man can survive such long periods of weightlessness without permanent ill effects.

Wally Schirra’s seemingly effortless piloting of Gemini 6 made the intricate Apollo space navigation seem more feasible. On the way to the moon, for example, the LEM will have to be detached from the back of the command and service modules, then reattached in front. When the Apollo is finally in orbit around the moon, two of its three crewmen will climb into the LEM and head for the moon’s surface. After from four to 34 hours of exploration, they will blast off and rendezvous with the orbiting Apollo for the return trip to earth, using much the same techniques employed so successfully by Gemini 6 and its partner Gemini 7.

Spirit of 76. NASA’s timetable calls for the first U.S. astronauts to explore the moon within four years, a goal that has always seemed unduly optimistic—by almost any standards. But Gemini’s “Spirit of 76” mission last week dispelled most doubts. It brought the elusive moon into reach, and gave U.S. astronauts good reason to start planning still more ambitious voyages, as hostile space began to show the first small signs of hospitality.