_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [44]
Jewish delicatessens are what I love most about New York City, and Wolfie’s was as close as you could get in Cocoa Beach. The night before Gemini 3’s launch I was in Wolfie’s, listening to a fun ruckus in the kitchen. Naturally, my nose for news led me through the kitchen door, where some secret tests were underway. Certain members of the astronaut corps were concerned about crumbs gumming up the works in Gemini 3’s cockpit. Several corned beef sandwiches were taken to the top of a tall ladder and dropped on sandwich paper on the floor. The sandwich that held together the best without crumbling during “free fall” was sealed tightly into a package and given to the care of astronaut Wally Schirra. Wally smuggled it into John Young’s spacesuit pocket before Molly Brown headed for orbit.
A couple of hours into the flight, when the mission was under control, John brought out the tasty surprise, sharing it with Gus. Gus laughed, and Gemini 3’s crew enjoyed its Wolfie’s picnic in space.
Not a crumb was dropped, but when NASA’s medical teams heard about the great corned beef caper, they went ballistic. “Eating the sandwich in flight ruined our tests,” said one doctor. Engineers agreed. Any crumbs floating about in weightlessness could have fouled up any of the spaceship’s equipment and electronic systems.
Seeing a chance to get their faces on television, some members of Congress leaped into the fray, shouting, “NASA has lost control of its astronauts.”
Deke Slayton was caught between that old rock and hard place. His astronauts were aerospace engineers as well as pilots and were as concerned about the machines they flew as they were about their own persons. Besides, he had been told about the sandwich gag before liftoff and as long as it was packaged properly, and knowing the pressure his Gemini 3 pilots were under, he judged it a great way of relieving the tension.
Jay Barbree and Gus Grissom laugh about the great corned beef sandwich caper. (Barbree Collection).
So now he had to diffuse the brouhaha. He had to come to Gus and John’s rescue. He told the brass he had known about the sandwich and approved it, and then he wrote a new order: “The attempt to bootleg any item on board a flight without my approval will result in appropriate disciplinary action.” Whatever that is, Deke smiled. The prank was forgotten.
In Houston, the new Manned Spacecraft Center was nearing completion, with workers bolting down the last of the all-new Mission Control Center’s equipment. The mouthpiece for the astronauts in those days was a lovable pilot named Bob Button from New Jersey. He tried to live that down, but what the hell—someone had to be from New Jersey, and we reporters and astronauts loved him. Bob was the one kid who played well with all the others in the sandbox, and he loved to spend his off time around the local airport, where he’d created the Gemini Flying Club.
One of Button’s flying buddies was a pilot named Neil Armstrong. Armstrong wasn’t only an astronaut and one of NASA’s ace test pilots, he was an elite glider driver as well.
One day Button and Armstrong and colleague Jack Riley, from NASA’s Public Affairs office, decided to take a Piper Tri-Pacer up for some night flying. They just wanted to bore some holes in the black sky. Button took the pilot’s seat and Armstrong slid into the copilot’s chair, while Riley got in back and went to sleep.
The weather was CAVU (Ceilings And Visibility Unlimited), with none of those low cumulus clouds that always seemed to hover around Houston like fat moths, and as they passed five thousand feet Armstrong was watching the blackness grow darker. They were headed out over the Gulf of Mexico.
“We flew this way in almost total silence for about an hour,” Button told me. “We kept the lights of Houston barely in sight on the northern horizon.”
Then, Armstrong broke his silence. “Okay, let’s head back.”
“By now,” Button continued, “we were topping ten thousand feet and it was a long way down for the little Tri-Pacer. So, in