Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

After about an hour of floating near the Agena (“station keeping”) Mission Control told them, “Go ahead and dock.” The spacecraft’s cylindrical neck eased into the open throat of the Agena’s docking adapter. Mechanical latches sprang out to connect the two vehicles.

“Flight,” Neil called to flight director Gene Kranz in Houston, “we are docked! It’s really a smoothie.”

The Mission Control room was loud with cheers and whistles among the usually quiet flight directors. Gemini had just passed a milestone. Orbital docking brought us one step closer to an LOR mission and a landing on the moon. Because the Agena was built to accept engine commands directly from the Gemini spacecraft, the mission plan next called for Neil and Dave to fire the Agena engine to change their orbit. But the docked Gemini-Agena began rolling, slowly at first, and then with increasingly wilder gyrations.

“Neil,” Dave Scott said, “we’re in a bank.”

Armstrong didn’t have to be reminded. He struggled with his hand controllers to keep the cumbersome composite vehicle stable. He had to break away or the roll would become violent enough to damage the neck of the spacecraft where their parachute was stored. Neil fired the thrusters to undock, but the roll increased. The Gemini’s antennas would not stay in alignment, cutting off communication with the Earth station below, the tracking ship Coastal Sentry Quebec .

Finally, Scott got through. “We have serious problems here,” he announced. “We’re tumbling end over end up here.”

One of their RCS thrusters was stuck open, tossing the Gemini in an accelerating spin, which was now one revolution per second. Dave and Neil were having their vision blurred and they became dizzy.

Finally Armstrong broke the spin by completely shutting down the spacecraft’s orbital attitude and maneuver system and activating the separate reentry control thrusters. But this meant they would have to descend from orbit quickly because this thruster system could develop leaks once it had been fired.

The Mission Control room was on full alert. Around the country, NASA managers quickly consulted with each other then told Armstrong to go for an emergency retrofire with a descent trajectory into the western Pacific. Gemini VIII was above the Congo River when Gene Kranz and his flight controllers ordered the burn. The combined flame of the solid-rocket retros and the control thrusters dazzled the two pilots as they slid through the starry night. For the next 15 minutes they stared anxiously out their windows hoping to see the Pacific Ocean through the bright orbital dawn ahead. They still didn’t know if their retrofire had been accurate and whether they would land in the ocean or in some remote jungle – or maybe in enemy territory in Indochina.

As the sun climbed above the Pacific, Gemini VIII descended by parachute several hundred miles southeast of Japan. A search aircraft from Okinawa spotted their parachute and dropped rescue frogmen, who struggled to attach a flotation collar to the spacecraft as it rolled in the nasty 15foot swells. Several hours later Neil and Dave were aboard the destroyer Mason , seasick but otherwise okay. Their flight had lasted less than 12 hours.

Docking meant nothing if the composite vehicle could not be controlled. Lunar Orbit Rendezvous during an Apollo mission would depend on a perfectly controlled flight of the composite command and service module and the lunar module. But our first attempt at this had failed dangerously. No one was cheering in Mission Control.

After intensive investigations engineers at McDonnell, the manufacturers of the Gemini spacecraft, decided that a control thruster had stuck in its firing position due to an electrical short circuit. They modified the circuit to prevent any possibility of the thruster firing with the switch off.

Aldrin:

On the next Gemini mission, number nine, Jim Lovell and I were backup crew to Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan. Their job was to rendezvous and dock with a stand-in spacecraft, the Augmented Target Docking Adapter (ATDA), because they’d lost their Agena target when its Atlas booster had malfunctioned on the first launch attempt.

Launch morning, June 3, 1966, Jim and I checked out the spacecraft before the astronauts were sealed inside. It was great being at the Cape and working on an actual mission with real flight hardware – which had an oily, ozone-tainted smell – rather than with the simulators. The flight lifted off beautifully at 8:39 am, and once the orbital insertion was accomplished, Jim and I headed back to Houston in our T-38 to support the mission from there.

While we were in the air, however, Tom and Gene ran into the first of several problems. The rendezvous itself went smoothly, with the spacecraft radar coupled perfectly to the onboard computer. But as Tom fired his thrusters to ease up alongside the slowly tumbling ATDA, he exclaimed, “Look at that moose!” The target spacecraft presented a weird spectacle; instead of the circular docking throat at one end, the crew saw the conical white fiberglass launch shroud half open, gaping at them like the jaws of an “angry alligator.”

This launch shroud was held in place by a wire that had been improperly stowed before the target vehicle lifted off. It was hard to believe, but a multimillion-dollar mission was now jeopardized by a stainless steel wire worth 50 cents. As soon as Jim and I landed in Houston, we were ordered to an emergency planning meeting with all the flight directors and senior project officials. As backup pilot, I’d spent months training with Gene Cernan for his planned EVA. Gene had told me one day that he thought the way to overcome the problems of space walks was “brute force.” He was underestimating the difficulty of an EVA, but I knew he was a resourceful astronaut. I piped up at the meeting and suggested that he begin his EVA early, take along a pair of wire cutters from the spacecraft tool kit, and cut the damned shroud free.

Bob Gilruth and Chris Kraft looked at me like I was crazy. They said Gene could puncture his EVA suit while cutting the wires. No attempt was made to rescue the ATDA, and Gemini IX drifted free of its target vehicle. Another opportunity lost. (Deke Slayton later told me that I almost got jerked from my Gemini XII assignment for that suggestion. But in my own defense, these impromptu EVA repairs became commonplace on NASA’s Skylab and the Soviets’ Salyut space station in the 1970s.)

Two days later Gene Cernan began his scheduled EVA. The flight plan called for him to leave the cabin, clamber back to the adapter section, and don the bulky AMU backpack, becoming the world’s first true human satellite. Unfortunately, none of this worked out. After some tentative grappling around the edge of the hatch, he moved forward to conduct simple hand-tool experiments. But as Gene later said, he “really had no idea how to work in slow motion at orbital speeds.”

Any small movement of his fingers sent him tumbling to the limits of the umbilical that kept him attached to the spacecraft. The handholds and Velcro patches on the spacecraft he needed for leverage were either totally inadequate or too clumsy to use; his umbilical “snake” whipped around him, blocking his progress. Everything was harder than he’d thought it would be. He was unable to keep his movements under control. When the spacecraft crossed the terminator line into darkness, all his exertions finally caused his faceplate visor to fog. He was blinded as well as exhausted.

Gene and Tom Stafford decided to cancel the rest of the EVA. Now the mission’s other main objective had also ended in failure.

Around the middle of 1965 there had been talk of flying a Gemini spacecraft around the Moon in a mission called a LEO, or Large Earth Orbit. There had been sporadic interest from Congress down, but the top hierarchy of NASA felt it was more suitable for the Apollo missions. Charles Conrad and Dick Gordon were the crew of Gemini XI. Charles Conrad was very keen on the idea of going around the Moon. Eventually he persuaded management to try a very high orbit in his Gemini XI mission instead.