Science: How to Make Out with EVA

Nothing in the mass of telemetered data, no comment in the yards of tape-recorded communications brought back the drama of the three-day flight of Gemini 11 with quite the same impact as the remarkable color pictures shot by the astronauts. The movie footage and still shots released by NASA last week give an astronaut’s clear-eyed view of everything from the weird undulations of the tether that briefly connected Gemini and the Agena target vehicle, to vast panoramas of the earth seen from altitudes never before attained by man.

Devoid of Life. In the most spectacular movie sequence, shot with a camera fixed in the left cabin window, Gemini and Agena gyrate erratically at opposite ends of the oscillating Dacron tether while the earth swings dizzyingly below. Gradually, as Command Pilot Pete Conrad fires short blasts of his thrusters, the two ships settle down into stable rotation. The tether stretches taut between them. Frames taken after the tether is cut loose show the long Dacron strap winding in haphazard fashion around Agena.

Other shots from the cabin window show Gemini in a successful rendezvous and docking maneuver with Agena. As the coupled craft soar toward their record apogee of 850 miles, the curvature of the earth’s horizon becomes more pronounced, and the earth assumes an unmistakably globelike shape. Though the pictures are sharp and show geological features plainly, the earth seems devoid of life; it offers no visible evidence of its teeming population, its great cities, its bridges or its dams.

Movies of Richard Gordon’s unsuccessful space walk, shot automatically from a camera he mounted on Gemini’s hull, graphically illustrate the already familiar difficulties of extravehicular activity (EVA). As he moves slowly toward Gemini’s nose, the astronaut is clearly out of his element; his movements are labored and uncertain. The simple task of clamping Agena’s tether to Gemini’s docking bar is an exhausting struggle. As Gordon attempts to straddle Gemini’s nose, cowboy-fashion, he proves unable to assume a stable position. There is every indication that he may be bucked off at any moment.

Psychological Problems. During debriefing sessions last week, Gordon confirmed what the movies make obvious. In his weightless state, he complained, he had difficulty holding his equipment and keeping it in front of him. He found that his legs moved uncontrollably, that every motion required the utmost physical effort. Space experts were convinced that part of Gordon’s problems with EVA were psychological. “No matter how many times you’ve seen EVA films and been told that you’ll not fall,” said one Air Force officer assigned to the Gemini missions, “the first time you do it for real is something else. There’s a psychological factor involved which we don’t know very much about and which we cannot measure.”

To ease the psychological adjustment for Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who will take a space walk during the flight of Gemini 12 this fall, NASA now plans to acclimatize him more gradually to open space. Before he leaves Gemini’s cabin entirely, Aldrin will poke his head through the open hatch, stand up on his seat and shoot pictures with only the upper half of his body outside the spacecraft. NASA officials point out that Gordon and Gemini 9’s Eugene Cernan, both of whom had trouble with EVA, took their space walks before their open-hatch photography sessions. But Gemini 10 Astronaut Mike Collins, who warmed up by taking photographs through his open hatch first, experienced no apparent difficulties during his space walk; it was cut short only because Gemini 10 began to run out of fuel.

Underwater Workouts. In an attempt to familiarize Aldrin with weightlessness, which until now has been simulated for astronaut trainees in an Air Force KC-135 for only 30 seconds at a time, NASA has been giving him workouts in a Baltimore swimming pool that contains a full-size mock-up of Gemini’s equipment section. Dressed in a special pressure suit rigged with weights and floats that enable him to remain buoyant at a specific level underwater, Aldrin has spent hours practicing his EVA assignments under conditions that approximate but do not exactly duplicate weightlessness. Astronaut Cernan has also used the pool to re-enact his Gemini 9 experiences.

Aldrin’s underwater training has been largely pointed toward the most ambitious EVA activity scheduled for Gemini 12: use of the Buck Rogers-like, jet-propelled Astronaut Maneuvering Unit (TIME, Nov. 26). Initial plans called for Aldrin to emerge from his hatch and work his way back to the AMU, stowed in Gemini’s equipment section. After snapping the AMU’s chairlike arms into place, he was to strap himself in and then jet about in space, connected to Gemini by a 125-ft. safety tether.

But the spacewalk difficulties encountered by Gordon—and by Cernan before him—have had a restraining effect on NASA officials. Last week, anxious that nothing go wrong on the final Gemini flight, they canceled the entire AMU experiment and began planning a simpler and less arduous space walk that will give Aldrin a better chance of making out with EVA.