We try and plan for the unknowns. It’s the unknown unknowns that you have concerns about.
Bob Gilruth
If there had been a space equivalent of Car and Driver magazine, its editors would have voted Gemini the Spacecraft of the Year.
By the time the spacecraft was man-rated and ready to fly two astronauts, its total cost had ballooned to $1.35 billion, almost double its original budget of $700 million. But Gus Grissom had done his job well. It was a pilot’s dream in every way that counted. And he had gotten his wish, thanks to Al Shepard’s inner-ear problem—he would command the first Gemini mission. To prepare, he and his shipmate John Young, one of the New Nine astronauts, had spent many hours in the Gemini simulators, precise duplicates of the capsule’s cabin in which a crew could approximate a complete mission, from liftoff to touchdown. Included were realistic visuals outside the windows and tilting and vibration that faithfully simulated the feel of launch and reentry. Nominal missions were flown at first, with various failure and abort situations added later.
At 4:40 a.m. on March 23, 1965, Deke Slayton knocked on the bedroom door of the crew quarters of Hangar S to wake up Gus Grissom and John Young. Slayton had first done this for Gordon Cooper on the final Mercury mission. He would do it for twenty-four flights altogether. He had also begun choosing the crew for each flight, subject to the approval of Bob Gilruth and a few senior NASA officials, though Slayton would be overruled only once.
Over the next twenty months, from March 1965 to November 1966, sixteen Americans would roar into space on ten different missions, roughly one every two months. Gemini’s crews would comprise three of the Mercury Seven, every remaining member of the New Nine, and five astronauts from the 1963 selection. Each flight would incrementally increase the knowledge and experience needed to reach the ultimate goal of a man on the moon. Each would face its share of problems, some minor, some major. None would endanger the lives of its crew except one.
Two unmanned Gemini missions preceded Gemini 3, though, because of the piloting required in the new spacecraft, there were no more flights for the astrochimps. They had done their duty, and most of them were eased into retirement at various zoos to live long and happy lives.
On March 23, 1965, Gemini 3 blasted into space from Cape Kennedy’s launch complex 19, as would every Gemini mission, to begin a three-orbit shakedown cruise. Grissom had tried naming the craft Molly Brown, after the popular Broadway musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown, a dig at the criticism of his Mercury flight. (Grissom had a sense of humor; his first name choice was Titanic.) NASA management was unamused, but allowed the name to stick. It would be the only Gemini spacecraft to have a name beyond the flight designation.
In the launch control center several hundred yards away—a blockhouse similar to its predecessors but even better fortified—was Wernher von Braun. It was his fifty-third birthday. His Marshall team had nothing to do with the Gemini program, and he and his center were busy enough; though costs and problems were rising on his Saturns and their F-1 engines, several test Saturns had been launched into orbit successfully. He was already worrying about Marshall’s post-Apollo fate, since there were no plans for more large boosters. But he wanted to see for himself the launch of a spacecraft capable of maneuvering and changing orbit.
Grissom’s flight went as smoothly as expected. “Grissom Maneuvers the Gemini” ran the large headline on the front page of the New York Times the next day, emphasizing the superior piloting control available on the spacecraft. Grissom raved about its maneuverability and handling; unlike Mercury, Gemini had powerful thrusters that allowed it to change orbit and effectively go where its pilot wanted, short of leaving the Earth’s gravity (which would require a larger rocket engine). Every astronaut who flew it agreed with Grissom. Passengers no more, they were finally flying in space.
An EVA had been planned for a later Gemini flight, but after Alexei Leonov’s space walk five days before Gemini 3—a mission clearly timed to preempt Grissom’s—NASA officials decided to move it up. Ed White, a world-class athlete who had barely missed qualifying for the 1952 Olympic track team, seemed a perfect choice for an activity that might be strenuous. In the weeks leading up to Gemini 4, some newspaper articles suggested the EVA might have been advanced to match the Soviets. Flight director Chris Kraft took offense when asked about it in one interview: “We’re not playing Mickey Mouse with this thing,” he replied testily. “I don’t think it’s very fair to suggest we’re carrying out a propaganda stunt.” But on a wall in the MOCR at the Manned Spacecraft Center was a neatly lettered poster that belied Kraft’s denial: WE ARE 301 MAN-ORBITS AND 443 MAN-HOURS BEHIND THE RUSSIANS IN SPACE FLIGHT TIME.
For the first time, Kraft would lead his ground team from Houston. The MOCR would handle all future manned missions, taking control as soon as the rocket cleared the launch tower. The new Mission Operations Control Room in Building 30 (there were two MOCRs, actually, one on the second floor, used for simulations and practice runs, and one on the third, used for all the Gemini and Apollo Saturn V missions) was larger and more up-to-date and would host not one or two but three shifts of flight controllers for around-the-clock operations. Gene Kranz would oversee one shift; he named his team White, in contrast to Kraft’s Red team. John Hodge, the pipe-smoking engineer whose gray hair and British accent gave him a distinguished air, would handle the third shift, Blue. (Each flight director picked his team’s color; when a flight director left, that color was retired.) He had been Kraft’s assistant for a while but was promoted to flight director when it became clear that the last Mercury mission, Gordon Cooper’s daylong Faith 7 flight, would require a third shift. And the tracking network had been increased to some twenty-odd stations around the world to improve communication. Data radioed from the spacecraft was received at NASA’s Goddard Center near Washington, DC, digested, and then sent to Mission Control in Houston.
On June 3, 1965, ten weeks after Grissom’s flight, astronauts Jim McDivitt and Ed White, El Lago neighbors and good friends since their time together studying aeronautical engineering at the University of Missouri, orbited the Earth for four days in Gemini 4. The mission had two main goals. One would end up being a perplexing failure, the other a smashing success.
A spacecraft had never tried to rendezvous with, or even approach closely, an object in a different orbital path. But rendezvous and docking would be required for a lunar landing using LOR, the chosen method. Command pilot McDivitt tried to maneuver his Gemini close to the spent upper stage of its Titan II booster, but as he pointed the nose of his craft toward the target and activated his thruster jets to close the distance, a curious thing happened—the booster moved away and downward. A few minutes later, he tried again, once more with no luck. After a few more attempts, Kraft finally told him to quit trying. Without an onboard rendezvous radar, planned for later Gemini missions, rendezvous would have to wait.
What this revealed was the complexity of orbital mechanics, which on the most basic level worked exactly the opposite of how it did with aircraft. Adding speed while in orbit raises a ship to a higher orbital path, where it will paradoxically slow down, since the craft’s orbital speed is a direct function of its distance from the center of gravity of the object it’s circling—in this case, Earth. The ship’s target will now be traversing a lower, and shorter, orbit, and will consequently move faster around the Earth. To catch up to a target ahead of it or in a higher orbit, the ship needs to reduce its speed and drop into a lower orbit. At the correct moment, a burst of speed will lift the craft close enough to the target’s orbit to eliminate all relative motion between them, at which point these paradoxical effects virtually disappear, and station-keeping, or flying in formation in space, is achieved. Only then can docking be attempted. McDivitt’s failure was a lesson learned, and much of the subsequent Gemini missions would involve perfecting orbital mechanics and rendezvous maneuvers.
The second goal, however, was achieved. A few hours after the failed rendezvous, the cabin was depressurized, and after some difficulty, White’s hatch was opened. A hundred miles above the Earth, he went drifting out into the void of space connected to the craft by a twenty-five-foot, gold-tape-wrapped umbilical cord supplying his oxygen. For twenty minutes, he floated around the capsule, maneuvering with bursts of compressed air from a small zip gun and shooting photos with a Hasselblad on his chest. McDivitt also had a camera, and his vivid images of his cavorting crewmate, the arc of the Earth and its clouds, continents, and oceans behind him, became iconic. Each man had decided to have an American flag patch sewn onto the left shoulder of his spacesuit, and every subsequent astronaut would wear the Stars and Stripes there.
White enjoyed himself so much that he needed a bit of coaxing to return to the craft. When he finally pulled himself into the cabin, he stood on his seat, drinking in the view. “This is the saddest moment of my life,” he said. He needed McDivitt’s help to close the hatch, and by the time he was securely fastened in his seat, he was exhausted. But his performance impressed his superiors; a few weeks later, he would be named backup commander for Gemini 7, and soon after that, he’d be assigned to the crew of the first Apollo flight. McDivitt was also rewarded; he was given command of another early Apollo mission.
The Gemini flights continued at such a rapid pace that eventually some of the American public lost interest. White’s space walk, especially the striking color photographs of it taken by McDivitt that ran in magazines and newspapers worldwide, was a hit, but the novelty of a man in space, one blasted into the heavens atop a massive rocket, was wearing off. Though manned spaceflight was anything but routine—a hundred things could go wrong during launch or reentry, and a thousand in between—it began to appear that way to most Americans, especially since NASA avoided talk of a mission’s danger and stressed its safety. No astronaut had died during Mercury, and Gemini appeared to be just as safe. Besides, everyone knew that the Apollo moon landing was the main attraction. To many, Gemini seemed a warm-up act, and like most warm-up acts, it attracted a smaller audience.
Near the end of August, Gemini 5 stayed in orbit eight days—the minimum length of time needed for a lunar landing and return to Earth—and easily exceeded the Russians’ five-day flight of Vostok 5. But its mission, with command pilot Gordon Cooper and New Nine astronaut Pete Conrad at the controls, was plagued by problems, from issues with the fuel cells (on their maiden voyage) and the electrical systems to low oxygen levels and jammed thrusters. The complications didn’t help Cooper’s mood; occasionally, his attitude seemed peevish, which only worsened his reputation with his NASA bosses.
But the eight-day ordeal eased the fears of some doctors about the dangers of prolonged weightlessness and also about the human ability to travel to the moon and back. The next two missions would further test long-duration spaceflight and the perplexing problem of rendezvous.
The Soviets hadn’t sent a man into space since Gemini had begun, and the growing accolades the American space program was receiving weren’t sitting well with them. After Gemini 5, they accused the United States of conducting clandestine military activities. “The real purpose of the program is obvious,” claimed a Russian newspaper, and the article insisted that the astronauts had brought spy cameras to photograph Soviet activities below, despite the fact that the spacecraft’s orbital path had not carried it over the USSR once. To make matters more urgent for the Russians, midway through that flight, President Johnson announced the official approval of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program, in which Geminis would shuttle air force crews to a cylindrical laboratory for up to thirty days of reconnaissance experiments and defense research. The Soviets responded, predictably, with plans for their own military space stations. The Cold War had not thawed appreciably.
Publicly, Deke Slayton would claim that every astronaut could fly any seat in any flight, but privately, he didn’t really believe that, nor did he put the theory into practice in his crew selection. “All astronauts are created equal, but some are more equal than others,” he would write later. Some men in the 1962 group—John Young, Ed White, Tom Stafford, and Frank Borman, for instance—seemed to ooze that indefinable quality of leadership, and they became Slayton’s early favorites, though the rest of the class wasn’t far behind. It was loaded with well-educated engineers who just happened to be experienced test pilots as well. Slayton had told them that there would be plenty of flights for all of them, and as the Mercury ranks thinned and Gemini flights began to stack up, that seemed to be the case.
Not so for the October 1963 class of additional astronauts, the Final Fourteen. With the test-pilot requirement already dropped, the half a dozen without that experience wondered if it would work against them. None of them could figure out what Slayton based his selections on—if it wasn’t test-pilot experience, what was it? Off-duty socializing? Sucking up to him and Shepard? How they fared in the many courses they took, or how they weathered the centrifuge and other machines?
Those picked to command a mission had a say in who their shipmates would be, and they often chose men who shared their service affiliations or other experiences. The navy aviators looked out for their own, as did the air force pilots. Men who had graduated in the same test-pilot class at Edwards or the navy test-pilot school at Patuxent took care of one another. Crew commanders who were West Point grads tried to get other former cadets as crewmates or at least recommend them for crews. Annapolis grads did the same. Some of this was successful, but not all—Deke had his own reasons for picking who he did. For instance, for the upcoming Apollo crews, he decided that in the first few flights, the command module pilot, who at one point would be orbiting the moon alone while his crewmates were in the LM, would not be a rookie astronaut.
Since no one knew Deke’s criteria, everyone competed in any way possible to at least snag a backup role on a flight. About halfway through Gemini, a pattern began to emerge, though it wasn’t a hard and fast rule: after a mission, a backup crew would skip two flights and be named the prime crew on the third.
The Gemini missions continued. On December 5, 1965, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell blasted into low Earth orbit on Gemini 7, beginning a marathon fourteen-day flight. Ten days later, Gemini 6, with Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford aboard, launched; their mission to dock with a radio-controlled Atlas-Agena target vehicle had been delayed when the Agena exploded six minutes after liftoff. After the craft reached orbit, Schirra skillfully maneuvered to within a foot of Gemini 7. During three revolutions of the Earth, the two vehicles kept within one hundred yards of each other in an impressive feat of station-keeping. Twenty-five hours and fifteen minutes after liftoff, Gemini 6 splashed down, having completed the world’s first manned spaceflight rendezvous. Gemini 7 dropped into the Pacific two days later, its two occupants weary, sore, and extremely fragrant—but healthy. Two of the three frogmen who attached the flotation collar to the command module after splashdown vomited when the hatch opened and they got a direct blast of fourteen-day-old air and the men who had lived in it.
Gemini 7’s two weeks in space reaffirmed that an eight-day lunar voyage could be made safely, and it further tested the Mission Control team. The flight was Kraft’s final one as a flight director; after Gemini 7, he would turn full-time to his duties as director of flight operations. To join Kranz and Hodge, his two other Flights, he tapped a backup flight director named Glynn Lunney, the youngest of the original members of the Space Task Group. Lunney had been involved with Mercury from the start, both in mission planning and as a flight guidance officer controlling the trajectory of the spacecraft, before working backup on a couple of early Gemini missions. Kraft also started grooming a couple of others, including Cliff Charlesworth, formerly a civilian physicist with both the navy and the army.
But Kraft was still there for every mission’s launch and much of the remainder of its flight, sitting in the back row watching over the operation he had created and the men he had hired to work it, biting his tongue occasionally but letting his new flight directors make the tough decisions. During every Mercury mission, but never at any other time, he had worn a Mercury lapel pin for luck. Now he did the same with a Gemini pin. And after every successful splashdown, he would light up a good-luck cigar. Soon many in Mission Control were doing the same thing, and the light haze from cigarette and pipe smoke became even thicker.
With Gemini 7, America had clearly surpassed the Soviet space program. All that was missing—besides more EVA experience—was successful docking. That would be the number-one objective of the ambitious Gemini 8 mission, a three-day flight that would also feature an extended space walk and several important experiments. Neil Armstrong, a quiet former navy aviator and X-15 pilot, would command the mission. His copilot—rather, his pilot, since Deke Slayton had decreed before Gemini began that no astronaut would ever be called a copilot—was Dave Scott, one of the Final Fourteen, on his first spaceflight. Scott had it all: good looks, confidence, a master’s in astronautical engineering. He was a fighter pilot’s son, a fighter pilot and test pilot himself, and married to the daughter of a retired air force general—clearly one of NASA’s fair-haired boys, evidenced by the fact that he was the first in his astronaut class chosen to fly into space. He and Armstrong had been training for six solid months, and the upcoming mission featured an extended EVA for Scott.
Armstrong had been the backup command pilot on Gemini 5, so, per Deke Slayton’s crew-rotation process, he was duly selected to command Gemini 8. His backup crewmate, Elliot See, the other civilian member of the New Nine, had also been a former navy pilot. It was a good match. The two had shared an office, and they became close—at least, as close as Armstrong ever got to anyone. See was serious and soft-spoken, even gentle, but a fine pilot. Though See was in line to fly with Armstrong on Gemini 8, Slayton had decided See wasn’t physically capable of a potentially strenuous EVA, so he’d picked the muscular Scott, and See actually got a promotion: to the command pilot seat for Gemini 9, scheduled for June.
See and his Gemini 9 crewmate, Charlie Bassett—See’s opposite, an athletic, friendly extrovert—had been training for several months. On the morning of Monday, February 28, 1966, they flew from Houston to St. Louis for a two-week session on McDonnell’s rendezvous-docking simulator. According to Tom Stafford, who knew See well, he was “a capable pilot, if a little shaky on instruments.” As they approached Lambert Field, he was at the controls of their T-38, the fast but fragile jet trainer astronauts used to fly all over the country. On his second approach, in rain and snow, heavy fog, and limited visibility, See descended quickly from low cloud cover to find he was too far left of the runway. He banked left and dropped altitude to keep the runway in sight, planning on another approach, but a building loomed in front of him; he fired his afterburners, turned right, and tried to pull his plane up. The T-38 was noticeably less responsive at low speeds, and the jet crashed into the roof of the building—the McDonnell plant, where their spacecraft was being assembled—then careered into the parking lot and exploded. Both men died on impact, just five hundred feet from their Gemini spacecraft.
Their deaths shook up the astronaut community—and the flight schedule. The backup crew for Gemini 9 was Tom Stafford and Eugene Cernan. Per Slayton’s system, they were slated to be the prime crew on Gemini 12, the program’s last mission. Now they were promoted to prime crew for Gemini 9. Their backups on that flight were Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin. With no more Gemini missions, it was a dead-end job. Lovell already had a Gemini flight under his belt, but Aldrin, a member of the third class of astronauts and not one of Slayton’s favorites, would still be competing with dozens of others for a crew assignment of any kind, and at best, he’d get one of the later Apollo flights. The crash in St. Louis was tragic, but in practical terms, it didn’t change much, and many of the men were just glad it hadn’t happened during an actual mission; that might have had dire consequences for the program. But it was a lucky break for Aldrin: he and Lovell became Gemini 9’s backup crew and, most likely, Gemini 12’s prime crew, if all went well and no one pulled a Scott Carpenter.
Two days after their accident, See and Bassett’s Gemini capsule was sent to the Cape for final preparations. They hadn’t been the first astronauts to die. Ted Freeman, one of the third class of astronauts, had crashed his T-38 when a goose flew into his port-side air intake during a landing on October 31, 1964. At the funeral attended by their fellow astronauts, See and Bassett were buried in Arlington National Cemetery, close to each other and near Freeman’s grave. And though Armstrong had been shaken up by See’s death, which happened just sixteen days before Gemini 8 launched, he’d seen many friends and colleagues die during his almost two decades of war and flight research. He knew he had a job to do, and he would be ready to fly by launch day.
Four years earlier, in 1962, thirty-one-year-old Neil Armstrong had been in an enviable position for a test pilot. There was no more exciting or exacting cutting-edge aircraft than the rocket-powered X-15, based on a concept study by Walter Dornberger, von Braun’s old boss at Peenemünde. Its sleek black body, needle nose, stubby, almost vestigial wings, and thick wedge of a tail fin looked like every boy’s dream of a rocket ship. And it was, to some extent. Designed to explore the limits of an aircraft, and a pilot, at hypersonic speeds and extreme altitudes, it could reach speeds of—well, there was no telling how fast it could go, or how high. When the X-15 rose so high that the air became too thin for the terrestrial laws of aerodynamics to apply and its rudders, elevators, and ailerons became ineffective, small attitude-control thruster rockets on its nose and wingtips supplemented its aerodynamic controls. One pilot had already flown it more than four thousand miles an hour; another, forty-seven miles straight up into the atmosphere. That it could reach the edge of outer space—about sixty-two miles up—seemed entirely possible. An orbital X-15 space-plane had even been considered before Mercury was announced.
Armstrong was one of the few men chosen to fly the X-15, and he had reason to believe he would eventually become the program’s chief test pilot. He might even fly the air force’s X-20 Dyna-Soar, an even more ambitious space-plane, if it ever became operational. The X-20, which was designed to reach Earth orbit and glide down to a landing, was meant for aerial reconnaissance, satellite maintenance, and enemy-satellite destruction, if need be. An aerospace-engineering super-challenge, the X-20 program was just the kind of project Armstrong loved and had spent most of his life working toward.
Born August 5, 1930, in a farmhouse near the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, to Stephen Armstrong, and his wife, Viola, Neil Alden Armstrong was of Scots-Irish ancestry on his father’s side and German on his mother’s. From an early age, he was someone who thought before he spoke, and he avoided argument and confrontation. Others thought him shy, though he made friends easily—he had to, since his father’s job, auditing the county books throughout the state, took about a year in each place, which meant a lot of moving around; Neil lived at sixteen different addresses in his first fourteen years. His family finally relocated back to Wapakoneta, 115 miles north of Cincinnati, for good before his sophomore year in high school.
As a boy, Neil read almost constantly—he was “consumed by learning,” remembered his younger brother. From his mother, he inherited a love of music, and he learned to play the piano and baritone horn. But science became his true passion, one he would never outgrow. When Neil was five, he and his father took a ride in a barnstorming pilot’s Ford Tri-Motor, a durable early airliner that could carry a dozen or so passengers. That sparked a lifelong love of flight and of airplane models, made of anything he could find and usually powered by rubber bands; he also built a small wind tunnel in his basement. He was still in elementary school when he decided to become an aircraft designer. When Armstrong was a teenager, to learn all he could about aeronautics, he began hitchhiking the three miles to Wapakoneta’s small, grassy airfield for flying lessons. Each one was nine dollars, and he worked several jobs after school, sometimes for as much as forty cents an hour, to finance his dream. He earned his student pilot’s license on August 5, 1946, his sixteenth birthday, and soloed a few weeks later, all before he learned to drive a car.
In October 1947, when he was seventeen, Armstrong entered Purdue University, a few hours’ drive from Wapakoneta, on a four-year navy scholarship. He wasn’t particularly interested in a military career, but his parents didn’t have the money for college. Aeronautical engineering was his field of study. He made time for model-airplane contests, both entering and attending. In the spring of 1949, at the age of eighteen, he reported for three years of military duty, after which he would finish his degree. He spent eighteen months in intensive flight training and then much of the next two years flying a Grumman F9F Panther, one of the first jet fighters, in a ground-attack squadron. The Korean War began in June 1950, and in mid-1951, his unit was sent to the center of the action. He still found time to fashion model airplanes from wood when he wasn’t flying combat missions from carriers off the coast of Korea. He flew seventy-eight, but his seventh, on September 3, 1951, was almost his last.
He and his squadron primarily worked risky air-to-ground jobs that resulted in heavy casualties from thick antiaircraft fire; “bridge breaking, train stopping, tank shooting and that sort of thing,” recalled Armstrong. While making a low-level bomb run over a hilly area in North Korea, flying at three hundred and fifty miles an hour, Ensign Armstrong’s Panther hit a cable that ripped off six feet of its right wing. He lost aileron control, and his ordnance-heavy craft dropped to within twenty feet of the ground; he would have to bail out soon. Somehow, Armstrong pulled the plane up to fourteen thousand feet and nursed it more than two hundred miles along the Korean peninsula to friendly territory. He ejected just off the coast, but strong winds blew him inland and he came down in a rice paddy; he cracked his tailbone but was otherwise unhurt. A jeep arrived within minutes to whisk him to an American airfield nearby. The driver told him that the explosions audible off the coast were North Korean mines in the bay—right where Armstrong had been aiming to land.
That would not be the last time that his skill, quick thinking, and coolness under pressure combined with good luck to keep him alive.
Armstrong left the navy in 1952 and returned to Purdue the next year. He earned his aeronautical engineering degree in January 1955 and signed on with the NACA as a research pilot a few months later. Over the next seven years, mostly at the Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB in California, he flew the newest—and most dangerous—experimental aircraft at supersonic speeds. In 1956, he married Janet Shearon, a smart and lively Purdue student whom he had courted—in the carefully deliberate way he would approach many things in his life—for a few years. She was attracted to the soft-spoken navy veteran for several reasons: “He was a very steadfast person. He was good-looking. He had a good sense of humor. He was fun to be with. He was older.” And although he was quiet, he was not meek; once he’d made up his mind about something, his course was set.
In his time at Edwards, Armstrong made more than nine hundred flights in dozens of the most advanced aircraft in the world, including the X-15, and he contributed much to their analysis and improvement. He was a skillful pilot and an excellent engineer. Those two attributes would make him very attractive to NASA. But Armstrong was happy where he was, on the cutting edge of aeronautical research.
On March 22, 1956, Armstrong was copiloting a B-29 mother ship flying over the Mojave Desert, and just seconds after it had released an experimental rocket plane, he felt a jolt and saw a propeller hub whiz by the cockpit. He looked over to see that the number-four propeller had disintegrated, and parts of it had damaged two other engines. The pilot’s controls were gone, but Armstrong’s still worked, barely, and with one engine, he managed to guide the big plane down from thirty thousand feet to a landing on a dry lake bed. Many of his flights were dangerous, but some were more dangerous than others.
Armstrong and his wife lived in an isolated cabin forty miles south of Edwards in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. There they began raising a family, a boy and a girl. On their sixth wedding anniversary, January 28, 1962, he and his wife suffered the worst loss any parent can. Their two-year-old daughter, Karen—whom Neil had nicknamed Muffie—died after an eight-month struggle with an inoperable brain tumor that was diagnosed soon after a playground fall. Edwards grounded all of its aircraft on the day of her funeral.
The Armstrongs’ four-year-old son, Rick, was a comfort to them, as were friends and family, and Neil tried to lose himself in his work. But the next few months saw some lapses in judgment. Once, during an X-15 flight, he bounced his plane too high in the thin air twenty-odd miles above the Earth. He couldn’t turn properly, which resulted in his overshooting Edwards by forty-five miles and just barely making it back.
Early on, Armstrong had been unimpressed with the Mercury program. But soon after John Glenn’s February 20, 1962, orbital flight—just a month after Karen’s death—he realized that participation in NASA’s manned space program would put him “way out at the margins of knowledge.” When NASA announced openings for another group of astronauts, he applied. His application arrived a few days past the June 1 deadline. An NACA employee who had worked closely with Armstrong at Edwards and knew of his strong qualifications had recently transferred to Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center to oversee the astronaut training programs. All the applications came to him. He slipped Armstrong’s late application into the pile with the rest before the selection panel’s first meeting.
Three months later, after Armstrong had had many interviews and undergone two weeks of measuring, poking, and prodding, Deke Slayton called him with the news that he was now an astronaut.
The mission started off well. Despite a series of equipment problems in the two weeks before the launch, at 10:41 a.m. on March 16, 1966, Gemini 8 and its crew of Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott lifted off smoothly. After reaching orbit, command pilot Armstrong initiated the first of nine thruster maneuvers—burns—to catch the target, an Agena upper stage launched ninety-five minutes earlier and now in a higher orbit. Both Armstrong and Scott had spent extensive time in the much-improved, full-size Gemini simulator practicing rendezvous and docking with a full-size Agena. They were aided by Gemini’s guidance computer, primitive but effective in determining the locations of the two spacecraft and calculating the best transfer arc. Less than six hours after liftoff, Armstrong braked his ship about a hundred and fifty feet from the silver-and-white, twenty-six-foot-long Agena, shining in the bright sunlight. Rendezvous was accomplished.
After a half an hour of station-keeping and inspecting the Agena for problems, Armstrong slowly approached to within three feet using the Gemini’s small thruster jets. He received permission to dock, a job that required exquisite timing and a feather-light touch. A few moments later, like a giant shuttlecock nuzzling a huge thermos, his craft’s nose eased into a docking collar in the front of the Agena and latched on. “Flight, we are docked. It’s…really a smoothie,” said Armstrong. In Mission Control, there were cheers, backslapping, and handshakes; even the reporters in the newsroom cheered. Armstrong and Scott had just achieved the first docking in space.
Flight controllers—and virtually everyone else in NASA—were wary of the Agena and had been even before its explosion five months earlier during the original Gemini 6 mission. They suspected the Agena’s rocket thrusters might be faulty and had instructed Jim Lovell, CapCom at a tracking station on Madagascar, to warn the Gemini 8 crew. Just before they passed out of communications range, Lovell told them, “If you run into trouble and the attitude-control system in the Agena goes wild, just…turn it off and take control with the spacecraft.”
Armstrong and Scott would soon be incommunicado. They turned up the cockpit lights and pulled out their flight books, then began doing docking chores and checking command links between the two spacecraft. In a little while, they could begin to relax and maybe even get some sleep.
Gemini 8 had moved into night, and since the lights were on in the cockpit, the crew couldn’t see much through their two small windows. After a couple of hours of taking care of Agena operations and general housekeeping, they’d try to sleep. Scott, especially, needed a good rest. He was scheduled to do a two-hour-plus EVA the next day. While on a twenty-five-foot umbilical and a seventy-five-foot extension tether, he would float over to the Agena using a handheld maneuvering unit. Armstrong would undock and back away, pulling Scott, then move forward and dock again. Other delicate procedures would follow.
Twenty-seven minutes after uniting with the Agena, Scott looked up at the control panel and noticed that they were in a slow thirty-degree left roll. He told Armstrong, who used thrusters to correct it. After a minute or so, the roll started again. Remembering what Lovell had advised, Armstrong told Scott, who had all the Agena controls on his side, to turn off its attitude-control system. Scott did. The roll stabilized, but a few minutes later it began again, this time at a faster rate—and then even faster. Armstrong ordered Scott to switch the Agena on and then off again in case it was an electrical problem while he fought the motion with his attitude hand controller on the console between them, with little success.
They were spinning in space while connected to a rocket full of fuel, and they could not call anyone for guidance. This was an emergency situation that they had not practiced for and that no one had imagined. Something had to be done and quickly, before the gyrations broke them apart, caused the Agena to rupture or explode, or ripped the Gemini from one or both parts of its adapter section, which carried their power and life-sustaining essentials. Oxygen loss and quick death from asphyxiation would almost certainly follow. To make matters worse, Scott noticed that the fuel in one of their control systems was down to 13 percent.
Neither of them heard the loud cracking sound that would have meant their own thrusters firing. It had to be the Agena. “We’d better get off,” Scott said to Armstrong.
“Okay, let me see if we can get the rates of rotation down so we don’t re-contact. You ready?”
“Stand by.”
Once they undocked, the Agena would be dead to ground control. Scott set the rocket’s recording devices so a ground tracking station could pick up its data as it passed overhead and learn why it had malfunctioned.
“Okay, any time,” he said. “We’re ready.”
“Go,” said Armstrong, and as Scott hit the undocking switch, he quickly pulled them away from the Agena before the two spacecraft whirligigged into each other.
The Gemini rolled even more rapidly and began to tumble end over end, resembling more than anything a brutal MASTIF training session 160 miles above the Earth. Armstrong and Scott hadn’t battled that machine—it had been discontinued after the Mercury Seven had undergone its tortures—but they had logged plenty of time on the human centrifuge, a study in sadism itself. That experience proved invaluable to them now. Brilliant sunlight glinted off the spaceship’s black nose, and then darkness, and then sunlight—soon it was spinning at a rate estimated to be close to two full revolutions per second. As Armstrong put it later, “Physiological limits were being approached.”
Test pilots had a phrase for flights that went bad: go to worms. The mission had swiftly gone to worms.
“Buddy, we’ve got troubles,” Scott said.
“I gotta cage my eyeballs,” Armstrong said drily. The two went to work trying to stabilize their craft.
About then, they came in range of another tracking station, Coastal Sentry Quebec, a ship in the western Pacific south of Japan with limited ability to communicate with Mission Control. The station crew could tell something was amiss. Their telemetry told them the Gemini had undocked, but they had no idea why. They would have only a few minutes to communicate before the spacecraft sped over them and out of range again.
“Gemini 8, CSQ CapCom. How do you read?”
“We’ve got serious problems here,” Scott said. “We’re tumbling end over end up here. We’re disengaged from the Agena.”
The CSQ CapCom could hear Scott, though the violent spinning distorted his speech, and scrambling antenna patterns fragmented the transmission. Voices faded in and out. The station could do nothing but acknowledge and ask what the problem was.
“We’re rolling up and we can’t turn anything off,” Armstrong said, “continuously increasing in a left roll.”
They were still spinning in roll, pitch, and yaw at more than a revolution per second. Everything that had been loose in the cabin—charts, checklists, flight plan—was bouncing against the walls. Both men were being thrown around, and they were becoming dizzy. They had trouble seeing the overhead dials and switches. Nausea was soon to come, from the contents of their stomachs sloshing around, as was vestibular nystagmus, a sickening, dizzying sensation that caused an uncontrollable movement of the eyeballs and blurred vision. Both were seconds away from passing out, and if they did, the chances of recovery would be remote. They could hear Flight Control cutting in from Houston and asking CSQ what was going on, then CSQ trying to explain, and then they were out of range again for another fifteen minutes.
They both knew there was only one option: the reentry control system and its two separate rings of thrusters in the nose of the spacecraft.
“All we have left is the reentry system,” Armstrong said, his voice strained.
“Do it,” said Scott.
There were half a dozen control panels around the interior of the spacecraft. The reentry control switch was in an awkward spot, right above Armstrong’s head. After countless hours in the simulator, each man knew the position of every control by feel; as fighter pilots, they’d always gone through blindfolded cockpit checks, and they carried that over into their Gemini training. There were a dozen switches on the plate with the reentry control switch. Somehow Armstrong reached up and found the right one. He flicked it on, then threw the switches to activate the engines that would control the Gemini’s reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
But when Armstrong tried the hand controller, he got no response. He asked Scott to give it a try—Scott got no response either. Without a hand controller, they wouldn’t make it home. Still whirling and tumbling—the craft’s thrusters were turned off, but there was no air to slow the capsule’s movements—they started throwing switches again in case one was in the wrong position. Just then, the hand controllers began working. With a delicate pulsing of the thrusters, Armstrong managed to slow down the violent spinning and then, finally, stop it. He turned off the reentry control system to save fuel—they’d need it, and they had used about 75 percent of it just to stop the spinning. He reactivated his maneuvering thrusters one by one until he found the culprit: number eight, a yaw thruster, was stuck in the on position, probably due to an electrical short. They hadn’t heard the thruster popping because it had been on the entire time. The Gemini, not the Agena, had been at fault.
A Gemini mission rule dictated that using the reentry system meant that the mission must be aborted; if these thrusters developed a leak, the crew would not be able to get the craft into position for the critical retrofire that would stabilize it and return them to Earth at the proper angle. Attitude control was essential to reenter the atmosphere safely. Flight director John Hodge knew he had to call an end to the mission. But where? And when? As soon as it was possible, of course, but could they find a prime or secondary recovery site?
After their twenty-six-minute ordeal, Armstrong said, “Sorry, partner”—he had planned to let Scott take the Gemini’s controls later, and the EVA Scott had trained so long and hard for wouldn’t happen. But Scott knew they had no choice.
Over the next twenty minutes, several groups of flight controllers—the calamity had occurred during a shift change—ran through the options. If they didn’t bring Gemini 8 down very soon, they wouldn’t have another opportunity for a full day—fifteen more revolutions. Too long, and too risky. Reentry in the seventh orbit, less than three hours away, was recommended. Hodge gave the go-ahead. If retrofire was nominal, the recovery point would be about 620 miles southeast of Japan. A navy destroyer, the USS Leonard F. Mason, began moving at flank speed toward the position.
As Gemini 8 passed over Africa, Armstrong was concerned that they’d land in a remote area far from civilization—and possibly on hard ground. The spacecraft was designed to handle that, but the impact would be excessive, even with their shock-absorbing contour couches, and since they had no control over the landing, it would be impossible to avoid ground obstacles or a steep hill or even a mountain. Scott worried when he saw the Himalayas getting larger below them as they reentered the atmosphere. But retrofire was nominal, and as the craft plummeted to Earth, the two astronauts were relieved to see the blue of water below them. Twenty minutes after they made a hard splashdown in rough seas, three frogmen dropped from an air force transport plane and secured the spacecraft. Three hours later, the destroyer winched Gemini 8 on deck. The crew was healthy but worn out after their ten-hour-and-forty-one-minute flight.
During the brief mission, camera crews had been camped out as usual in the front yards of the Armstrong and Scott houses near the Manned Spacecraft Center outside Houston, and more personnel were rushed there when news of the ordeal broke. The major TV networks interrupted their regular programs with emergency news bulletins, to the annoyance of some irate Batman viewers—more than a thousand called ABC to complain. The next day, the New York Daily News ran the headline “A Nightmare in Space!,” and Life magazine ran stories about the mission in its next two issues, one of them under the title “Wild Spin in a Sky Gone Berserk.” Neither Armstrong nor Scott appreciated the melodramatic approach, regardless of its accuracy. Armstrong downplayed the danger, as was his habit; a few years later, he would use the math/physics/engineering term trivial, meaning “easy to work out,” to describe the crisis: “It was a non-trivial situation,” he said.
Both Armstrong and Scott were commended for their calmness and professional performance under extreme conditions. There was whispering among some of the newer astronauts that the two had panicked, but no experienced astronaut thought that; they had followed the book and done what they’d had to do to survive—and done it well. Years later, Kraft would have the last word: “If we had heard about the problem when they were still docked, we would have told them to do exactly what they did, ‘Get off that thing!’” Far from blaming the two astronauts, the NASA brass were impressed, especially with the commander. The flight only confirmed what they already knew: Armstrong was one cool customer in a crisis.
The failure rattled NASA and caused some newspapers and at least one congressman to demand a space-rescue system. Max Faget initiated plans for a study—one idea called for an extra seat to somehow be squeezed into the already cramped cabin of a Gemini spacecraft, which could be launched with a single astronaut to rescue two comrades—but due to red tape and a lack of funding, nothing came of it. If a spacecraft became stranded in orbit, there was still no way to save its occupants.
The same day as the Gemini 8 flight, halfway around the globe, two other space travelers made a safe landing in Central Asia. They had spent twenty-two days in space, much longer than anyone ever had, and had endured heavy doses of radiation from traversing the Van Allen radiation belts repeatedly. But they were fairly healthy, though weary, dehydrated, and suffering from bedsores. The two Soviets were retrieved from their capsule and whisked away to Moscow for a triumphant TV appearance. Later they both gave birth to healthy puppies.
The flight of the two female dogs, Veterok and Ugolyok, appeared, at least to observers in the West, to be a practice run for a Soviet shot at the moon. There was no other reason to send mammals into space.
Despite Gemini 8’s near disaster and the other successful Gemini missions, the American public was uninterested. They began calling in to the TV networks broadcasting news about the flights to complain about interrupted football games and missed shows—even when the interruptions concerned troubled missions like Gemini 8. To the average American, the space program didn’t seem to have much of a point. The early days of Mercury had been unprecedented—blasting a man into space in a capsule atop a rocket was dangerous and exciting. Ed White’s space walk had been a refreshing change, and so was the rendezvous between Gemini 6 and Gemini 7. But after that, the flights just didn’t seem important, and worse, they became routine. “Americans no longer half-expected the whole thing to blow up,” wrote Life space correspondent Loudon Wainwright in an article entitled “All Systems Are Ho-Hum.” Besides, everyone knew that Apollo was the big one, the program that would put a man on the moon.
But the missions continued, launching with almost metronomic precision every two months. Launches became so “businesslike,” remembered Paul Haney, the NASA public affairs officer at the time, that it was “almost like working an airline terminal.” The last four involved perfecting rendezvous, docking, and EVA skills. The rendezvous and docking went well, but none of the first three EVAs did. Each spacewalker had a difficult time, especially when he ran into Newton’s pesky third law of motion (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction) and its peculiar effect in the microgravity environment of low Earth orbit. Every astronaut found that working for an extended time in a twenty-one-layer spacesuit, inflexible when pressurized, was much more difficult in space than it had been in the ground simulation.
None of them had a harder time than Eugene Cernan on Gemini 9. He spent two hours and eight minutes on an EVA, during which he exhausted himself trying to maneuver in a spacesuit that had, in his words, “all the flexibility of a rusty suit of armor.” His heart rate zoomed to 180 beats a minute, and his visor fogged up so badly he could hardly see. Down in Mission Control, the controllers thought he might lose consciousness. Cernan barely made it back to the hatch, where his crewmate, Tom Stafford, had to help drag him inside. By the end of the three-day flight, he had lost thirteen and a half pounds.
Two handrails were added to the outside of the Gemini, and the astronauts were given a maneuvering gun, so Michael Collins’s Gemini 10 EVA in July 1966 was an improvement on Cernan’s. He was able to perform a few assigned tasks, but when he tried to spacewalk over to an inert Agena target vehicle on an extra-long tether, he cartwheeled and spun out of control between the two spacecraft. At one point he started sliding around the Agena and had to reach into it and grab a bunch of wires to stop himself. Later, he got so entangled in his fifty-foot umbilical that he needed help from crewmate John Young to unwind and get into his seat. His ramble was cut short after only thirty-nine minutes. Two months later, Gemini 11 offered little advance in that area. After a perfect docking with the target vehicle just eighty-five minutes after launch, Dick Gordon sallied through his hatch for a planned two-hour EVA. Forty-four minutes later, blinded by sweat and utterly exhausted, he was ordered inside by command pilot Pete Conrad. Gordon had discussed the EVA issues at length with his spacewalking predecessors, and he’d prepared obsessively for it, but no one had managed to make a completely successful EVA.
Gemini 11 did, however, score a first. Viewers in seventeen foreign countries watched a live TV broadcast of a space launch via AT&T’s Telstar, the first active communications satellite. It wouldn’t be long before low Earth orbit would be filled with hundreds of satellites of all kinds—communications, weather, research, and defense.
As Gemini neared the end of its scheduled run of missions, the Soviet manned spaceflight program became suspiciously quiet. When CIA intel reports indicated the Soviets were constructing a giant rocket, it was thought that they might attempt a voyage to the moon sometime in 1967 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their revolution.
NASA’s confidence in Gemini was at its peak. Plans were made for an ambitious Gemini lunar mission: a capsule would dock with a large, fully fueled Agena—or possibly with one or more of the powerful Centaur upper-stage rockets—which would boost the spacecraft to an escape velocity of twenty-five thousand miles per hour and propel it to the moon. After a lunar flyby, the Gemini would slingshot back to Earth. It was even suggested that a small, lightweight “bug,” an open-cockpit lander attached to the Gemini, could carry a single astronaut and drop him down to the lunar surface. Astronaut Pete Conrad supported the idea—naturally, he hoped to be one of the two men selected for the mission.
But Apollo, despite some setbacks, was also proceeding apace, and there was no need for competing moon-landing programs. Besides, NASA wasn’t quite prepared to send humans 240,000 miles into space and return them to terra firma, especially if the journey involved an excursion to the little-known luna firma.
An earlier idea for Gemini was again proposed: as a rescue vehicle. If an Apollo craft became stranded in lunar orbit, an enlarged Gemini reentry module, beefed up with rockets for the return to Earth and life-support systems for the extra passengers, would rendezvous with it, and the Apollo crew could EVA to the rescue craft. Another suggestion was a version of Gemini, perhaps manned, perhaps unmanned, that could rescue an Apollo crew at any point during its mission, even on the lunar surface. These ideas were feasible but expensive, and NASA’s budget had already reached its height; cost cutting would begin after 1966. Only Apollo would go to the moon, and there would be no rescue available if the astronauts ran into trouble far from home.
Gemini’s final flight provided one last opportunity to solve the problems of EVA. If something went wrong on an Apollo moon mission during docking and two astronauts were stuck in the LM, they’d have to make their way over to the command module and climb in through its exterior hatch, so EVA expertise was essential.
Buzz Aldrin—who had indeed scored one of Gemini 12’s prime crew seats—was determined to approach the space walk scientifically. A host of handholds, rails, foot restraints, and tethers were added to both the Gemini and the Agena, and Aldrin trained underwater in a spacesuit, using weights to achieve neutral buoyancy and approximate the microgravity conditions of Earth orbit. On November 11, 1966, he and Lovell lifted off in Gemini 12 and headed toward their Agena target vehicle. Then another Gemini first, an onboard radar, failed. Aldrin, who had written his MIT doctoral dissertation on manned orbital rendezvous, used a sextant, slide rule, charts he had largely prepared himself, and their small onboard computer to get them to the Agena. (Some in NASA joked that the radar failure was no accident.) They docked three hours and forty-five minutes later, then separated and docked again several times, approaching from different angles. Rendezvous and docking, clearly, had been mastered.
The next day, Aldrin opened his hatch and floated out on an umbilical for a space walk of two hours and twenty minutes. With the help of waist tethers, the hand- and footholds, and several rest periods, he performed a variety of complicated chores without difficulty. Everyone in NASA breathed a sigh of relief. The problems of EVA had finally been solved. For good measure, the astronauts used their onboard computer to handle both the guidance and firing of the attitude-adjusting rockets, another first.
The ten manned Gemini missions—each far more complicated than any Mercury flight—provided an opportunity for NASA to increase its knowledge and experience in manned spaceflight and to introduce and perfect techniques and equipment necessary to reach the moon. The Gemini program had garnered a total of 1,993 hours in space, valuable experience not only for the men in the spacecraft but also for the personnel on the ground, from the launch operations at Cape Kennedy to flight control and tracking operations. Apollo would not be possible without it.
The Mission Control Center especially had come into its own. Despite Gemini’s smashing success, each mission had had its share of problems large and small—fickle fuel cells, cranky electrical systems, temperamental thrusters, patchy rendezvous radars, corrupted computer programs, and unreliable Agenas. Indeed, it seemed one of the few unfailing systems throughout the program was the human one, both in the void of space and on the ground. The pilots had excelled, and Kraft’s resourceful teams of flight controllers and their backroom support groups had tackled multiple complications, and solved or found work-arounds for almost every one that mattered. Except for Gemini 8, every mission had continued to its end. More important, every astronaut returned to Earth safely. Spaceflight, it seemed to many Americans, wasn’t so dangerous after all.