_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [42]
For the first six weeks, preparations to fly the Gemini went without a hitch until one morning Alan awoke feeling nauseated. Well, just not nauseated. He was so dizzy, and the room was spinning so fast, he couldn’t focus, and he found himself on the floor. He got up clinging to the wall and did his best to get his face in the commode before he vomited.
The sickness left as quickly as it came, and he was off to Deke’s office to report what had happened. The two chalked it up to some bad hooch, and Alan went about his work without a problem until the fifth day. Just as suddenly as the nausea had appeared before, it came back.
Alan checked in with the flight surgeons. “You’ve got a serious problem with your left inner ear,” they told him. “You have what is called Ménière’s syndrome.”
“Never heard of it,” Alan shot back.
The doctors gathered around. “Certain people who are driven, motivated, will occasionally develop this problem,” they explained. “Fluid pressure builds up in your inner ear, and it makes the semicircular canals, the motion detectors, extremely sensitive. This results in disorientation, dizziness, and nausea. You also have glaucoma. That’s just another indication that as an individual you’re highly hyper.”
America’s first astronaut listened patiently to the diagnosis and said, “I have one question.”
“Shoot.”
“You going to pull my wings?”
“Yep.”
A dispirited Alan Shepard sat down with Deke for a heart-to-heart. “Deke, we’ve got to beat this crap,” he said as a promise.
“Yep,” Deke nodded. “But until you do, I have a job for you.”
Deke was being moved up to a newly created post called chief of flight crew operations. He slid Alan into his old job as chief astronaut.
“Hang in there with me, buddy,” he winked. “We’ll figure out a way to get our asses back in space.”
Alan laughed. “You got it, partner.”
They shook hands and moved Shepard and Stafford’s backups, astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young, into the first Gemini’s seats.
Meanwhile the Russians were busy. A cosmonaut was about to shake the world again. Aleksei A. Leonov pushed himself gently through the hatch, and the first human satellite drifted away from the Russian ship. He was stunned by the sight of Earth below and he turned and tumbled and slowly rolled about, careful not to look directly into the blinding sun. A small camera attached to the top of the Voshkod spaceship’s airlock captured the smiling, laughing Leonov as he sprightly leapt and skipped.
The date was March 18, 1965, and for the ten minutes allotted, Leonov walked three thousand miles through orbit, flinging out his arms in rapturous joy as he floated, turned, and somersaulted. Below, Earth rolled by at 17,400 miles per hour.
He would later tell me he had no fear—no worry about falling. He knew he was a human satellite fixed in his own orbit around Earth. “There was only a sense of the infinite expanse and depth of the universe,” he said.
When it was time for him to return to the Voshkod, Leonov took a final look at the beautiful, blue planet rolling beneath him and slid into the airlock, feet first. Suddenly he could not move. He was jammed in the opening. Pavel Belyaev, his commander inside, informed him he was running low on oxygen. That got his attention. Leonov studied the situation. Outside in total vacuum, his spacesuit had expanded and he was caught like a cork in a bottle. Let out some pressure, he ordered himself. Slowly, he depressurized the suit, and using his athletic strength, he pulled himself back into the airlock.
The first EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) was history.
The day after the spacewalk, trouble revisited the Voshkod crew. When it came time to fire the retro-rockets for reentry, the automatic stabilization system failed.