_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [45]
“Riley bounced awake and nearly put his head through the fabric roof of the Tri-Pacer. ‘What happened?’ he yelled. I’m slapping the instrument panel, pushing any knob that’s sticking out, trying to get the mixture back into full rich. The engine comes back to life with a roar; Riley settles down. Neil was his usual cool self. He never uttered a word. Just gave me a half grin. I had done a really dumb thing!
“We shed altitude down to the traffic pattern and I turned on final and made one of my better landings. Having screwed up once, I wanted the landing to be a grease job.”
I looked at Button, who was now laughing heartily at himself. “Do you realize you almost killed the man destined to first step on the moon?”
“That’s me,” Button continued laughing. “But Neil was great about it.”
Neil Armstrong and Bob Button sign flight logs following the loss of their aircraft engine power over the Gulf of Mexico. (Button Collection).
“What did he say?”
“He smiled and said, ‘Bob, I don’t mean to kibitz, but you might want to keep in mind what they teach at test pilot school: When you flip a switch or pull a knob, hang on to it until the airplane does what you told it to do. You might not be able to find it a second time.’”
On June 3, 1965, the Gemini 4 crew, James McDivitt and Edward White, roared into space for four days. On their fourth trip around Earth, White opened his hatch and stepped into space over the blue Pacific between Hawaii and New Mexico. America’s first spacewalk was underway. White took a deep breath to relax. He gripped a handheld gun armed with pressurized oxygen and fired it in timed spurts. It pushed him in the direction he wished to go. This steering jet, right out of the science-fiction comics, did its job. He could maneuver his body to the limits of his twenty-five-foot tether.
The beauty of Earth rolling by beneath him was incredible, and White somersaulted, floated lazily on his back, and pirouetted, grinning like a kid enjoying a summer swim. He could “fly,” and he witnessed one of the strangest satellites ever launched. A thermal glove he had left on his seat drifted up and away to begin its own orbit.
White and McDivitt were so taken by what was happening that the twelve minutes planned for the spacewalk passed quickly. It was time for White to get back inside while they still had daylight. Gus Grissom was the CapCom, the astronaut assigned to talk to the Gemini 4 crew from the new Mission Control south of Houston. He knew that the euphoria White was showing was akin to the dangerous “raptures of the deep” that scuba divers experienced.
Ed White was still frolicking in space, and Grissom called in his best command voice, “Gemini 4, get back in.”
McDivitt repeated the order: “They want you to get back in now.”
Astronaut Ed White on America’s first spacewalk. (NASA).
“What does the flight director say?” asked a happy Ed White.
Flight director Chris Kraft moved to his microphone and barked, “THE FLIGHT DIRECTOR SAYS GET BACK IN!”
White laughed. “This is fun! I don’t want to come back in, but I’m coming.”
But the spacewalking astronaut discovered that maneuvering his body along the Gemini without the use of the jet gun was easier said than done. After seven minutes of tough going, he finally made it back inside.
He had been out twenty-one minutes instead of the planned twelve, and he told Mission Control, “There was very little sensation of speed. The view was something spectacular. I could see the outlines of cities, roads. I could see the wakes of ships at sea.” A smiling Ed White added one more thing. “It was fun.”
Gemini 5, with Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad, stretched long-duration flight to eight days. After spending that much time together inside a spaceship a little larger than a phone booth they splashed down, and newspapers everywhere ran a cartoon of