_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [48]
A snail could have made better time, but finally he was there. “Whew!” he radioed Stafford with a breath of relief. “It’s a strange world out here!”
“Take a rest,” Stafford ordered him.
Gene was grateful for the order, and as he rested, he wondered. Could Ed White’s steering jet have made the difference?
He caught his breath and tackled getting the astronaut-maneuvering unit on his back. He couldn’t. He had failed at everything he’d tried, and Cernan quickly came to the conclusion he was useless. Nothing really worked, and when it was over, the second American to walk, or whatever, in space had been outside two hours and nine minutes. All of it had been a terrible nightmare.
Mike Collins on Gemini 10, and Dick Gordon on Gemini 11, wrestled with the same problems as Gene Cernan and Ed White did. Collins, who used a steering jet to move from point to point, reported: “I found that the lack of a handhold is a big impediment. I could hang onto the Agena, but I could not get around to the other side where I wanted to go. That is indeed a problem.” Gordon, like Cernan, sweated and his visor fogged. “I’m pooped,” he said simply after cutting his walk short.
Deke Slayton wasn’t pleased. “What the hell is the matter with these spacewalk planners?” he demanded. “We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, changing orbit, stopping and restarting rocket engines—all the things you need to do to get to the moon, but no one can function outside. What the hell is their problem? Can’t they figure this spacewalk thing out?”
There was one Gemini mission left and Deke Slayton, the director of flight crew operations, demanded a solution.
Veteran Jim Lovell would command Gemini 12. His spacewalking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, an MIT graduate, and Aldrin had been listening. He was not only smart; Buzz was a tinkerer.
For his mission Aldrin fashioned special devices like a wrist tether, the same type of tether that window washers use to keep from falling, and he made portable handrails and handholds he could mount onto the Gemini or the Agena rocket. These would keep his body under control, but he needed shoes. He crafted himself a pair of “golden slippers,” foot restraints resembling wooden Dutch shoes he could bolt to a workstation in the Gemini 12’s equipment bay, and he was bringing along tools—a whole bunch of them that he could grip with his thick space gloves. But more important, they were tools that would function in weightlessness, in the extreme temperatures of space.
On November 11, 1966, the last Gemini thundered from its pad and hunted down its Agena target. Docking went perfectly, and then Buzz Aldrin went outside and banished the woes of spacewalking. He proved a master. He took his time, stopping here and there to do some work as he moved down the nose of the Gemini and then to the Agena, making his way without effort along a six-foot rail he had locked into place.
Aldrin hooked different equipment to the ship, removed other equipment, and reattached it. He used a unique “space wrench” to loosen and tighten bolts. He snipped wires, reconnected cables, and set in place a series of tubes.
Mission Control was stunned. John Young said, “You’d think he graduated from Georgia Tech instead of MIT,” and CapCom could only ask, “How’s them slippers, Buzz?”
“They’re great. Great!” Buzz sang: “I was walking through space one day…”
It was a great engineering achievement right out of Buzz Aldrin’s book, “Tinkering for Astronauts,” to end the Gemini program.
Deke smiled, and when the Gemini 12 crew returned to their quarters on the Cape, they were slack-jaw surprised.
James Lovell and Buzz Aldrin, are met in the astronauts’ Cape Canaveral quarters with the sign “WELCOME BACK RECORD BREAKING COSMONAUTS.” Their den mother,