_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [46]
Frank Borman and Jim Lovell bettered 5’s record. They stayed inside Gemini 7’s cramped quarters for fourteen days, prompting Lovell to say, “It was like spending two weeks in a men’s room.”
The monotony of their marathon mission was broken on day eleven by visitors from Earth.
Gemini 6’s astronauts, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, flew their spacecraft right up to Gemini 7, put on the brakes, and began station keeping. It was the first rendezvous in space.
“We’ve got company,” Lovell reported.
“There’s a lot of traffic up here,” Schirra told Mission Control.
“Call a traffic cop,” Borman laughed.
Finally, American astronauts had performed a meaningful space-flight feat ahead of the cosmonauts. The two Gemini ships orbited Earth together in formation, doing fly-arounds and circling each other in a series of figure eights. Schirra reported he closed to a distance of six to eight inches, backed off, and flew in again.
As Gemini 6 rendezvoused with Gemini 7 in orbit, 6’s naval commander Wally Schirra’s reputation for pranks was obvious. The Gemini 7 crew read in 6’s pilot window, “Beat Army.” (NASA).
Gemini 6 returned to Earth the next day.
Gemini 7 came home two days later.
Rendezvous of the two ships was another milestone on the way to the moon, but docking two ships in space was still out there. That job would now fall to NASA’s only civilian astronaut, Neil Armstrong, who first raced to the edge of space in NASA’s X–15 rocket ship. He would command Gemini 8 with West Point graduate Dave Scott.
The Agena target stage rode an Atlas rocket into orbit on March 16, 1966, and ninety minutes later Armstrong and Scott were off for the hunt. Gemini 8 caught its quarry, and commander Armstrong circled and inspected the Agena rocket to confirm its stability. Then, with utmost care, Armstrong slowly nudged Gemini 8’s nose into Agena’s docking collar. Electric motors drove the docking clamps together. The two were now one.
“Flight, we are docked,” the all-business Armstrong reported to Mission Control. “It was a real smoothie.”
“Roger there, 8,” came the reply. “Way to go!”
Docking done, they took a breath and Armstrong checked his flight plan. They were scheduled to fire the Agena rocket and let it boost Gemini 8 to a higher orbit.
But it was not to be. In that very instant, the long Gemini/Agena combination—slowly at first—took off rolling like a log in water. Armstrong and Scott had just enough time to realize what was happening before they were thrown into a struggle to survive.
They were, in fact, in the first real emergency in spaceflight. They were 185 miles above China, out of touch with Mission Control, and they were terrifyingly alone. They were linked to a rocket loaded with deadly fuel that had become a twisting, turning, ticking bomb, looking for an opportunity to explode.
The only good news for NASA was that Gemini 8 was in the hands of Neil Armstrong. He managed to reduce the roll to a point that he could undock the two craft. With a bang the ships let each other go, and Armstrong was astonished all over again.
“What the hell!” Dave Scott yelled.
Gemini 8 was spinning even faster. The astronauts now knew the problem had not been with Agena, but with their ship. One of Gemini 8’s sixteen maneuvering rocket thrusters had stuck open. It was spewing fuel at full throttle. Unless they regained control, the severe whirling of the astronauts meant they would soon pass out.
Suddenly, some good news. The tumbling and spinning Gemini 8 had completed its crossing over China and was now heading out over the far Pacific. Coastal Sentry Queen, a Gemini tracking ship, was listening. “We have a serious problem here…We’re tumbling end over end up here. We’ve disengaged from the Agena.” The ship was hearing Neil Armstrong’s calm voice.
“It’s rolling and we can’t turn anything off,” Armstrong continued his report. Then he threw away the book. He decided to use Gemini 8’s nose rocket thrusters—a no-no. The nose thrusters were there