December 4, 1965
The precise moment when a Titan rocket ignited underneath an astronaut for the first time always came as a surprise. The pilots all thought they were prepared for it, because the people who trained them had sworn they would be. But when the moment finally happened, the astronauts realized that the trainers had no idea what they were talking about.
The first thing no one mentioned was the glug-glug-glugging sound that began thirty seconds before the engines even lit. More than 120,000 gallons of two different kinds of hot-tempered fuel were sloshing around in the 103-foot booster, and if the rocket was going to go anywhere at all, those volatile chemicals would have to flow and mix. And since the fuel pumps were high up in the booster, right beneath the Gemini spacecraft perched on top, the sound—like that of a giant bathtub draining—was impossible to miss and impossible to feel terribly good about.
The astronauts also weren’t prepared for the way the booster would sway in the wind while it was waiting to take off. The higher up the stack, the worse the sway, which meant it was worst of all for the two men tucked inside the Gemini at the very top. And though the astronauts had spent hours in centrifuges getting used to the seven g’s they would be pulling after they at last took off, they didn’t fully appreciate how quickly they would feel the grip of that force, almost the moment the rocket jumped off the pad. That was yet another feature of the Titan’s ballistic missile pedigree: a weapon that’s taking to the sky to defend the homeland from attack can hardly afford to dawdle while getting into the air.
Most of all, there was the noise of ignition. During the endless simulations, the trainers had never bothered trying to re-create it, because even the best sim could not reproduce the cannon roar of a Titan’s engines. You had to be inside the cannon itself, which is exactly where an astronaut would be on launch day and at no other time. Without the help of the radio, it would be hopeless to try to talk to the man in the next seat; the closed helmet muffled the astronauts’ voices, and the din of the rocket drowned everything else out. Even with the helmet microphone positioned just an inch from their mouths, the astronauts still had to shout to be heard.
At 2:30 p.m. on December 4, 1965—precisely the date and time the NASA flight controllers had aimed for, even with all the improvisational planning they’d done in the past six weeks—Frank Borman and Jim Lovell experienced the unimaginably ferocious blast of a Titan rocket for the first time.
“We’re on our way, Frank!” Lovell yelled to Borman.
Borman, rattling about in the left-hand seat, said something or other in response, but it was hopelessly lost in the noise, even to his own ears. He tried again, this time settling for a quick, affirmative “Right!”
“Communications are a little noisy from the spacecraft,” said NASA commentator Paul Haney, understating the reality by a considerable factor for the tens of millions of people watching on television.
The days leading up to the launch had been predictably busy, not only for Borman and Lovell but also for their understudies, Ed White and a rookie from the new third astronaut class, Mike Collins. White and Collins were the backup crew, and both men had to be ready to fly on very short notice.
Borman liked Collins, who would replace Lovell in the right-hand seat if circumstances made that necessary. He found Collins exceedingly smart and engaging, with a dry but lacerating wit and a near-lyrical gift for language. It was also hard not to notice Collins’s perceptive take on the people around him. Much later, Borman learned that Collins had sized him up as a driver, a capable and aggressive man with the habit of carrying himself like a politician who had an election approaching. In this case, as in most cases, Collins was spot-on.
But Borman found it especially fitting that his own understudy was Ed White. Borman had been a military man and an astronaut long enough to know how to establish a camaraderie with the men around him. But camaraderie and abiding friendship were different things, and though he shared the first with a great many people, he shared the second most powerfully with White. The Bormans and the Whites lived across the street from each other, and the families got along unusually well. Susan and Pat were closer than nearly any other pair of women in the astronaut wives sorority, and the Borman boys—Fred and Ed—got on well with the White children, Edwin and Bonnie Lynn, with admirably little teasing directed at the one girl from the three boys. The four friends and their children often spent weekends together, and the two astronauts would take the opportunity to fish and talk space, or fish and talk about anything other than space.
On Gemini 7’s launch day, Borman, Lovell, and their two backups awoke at 7:00 a.m. Both crews prepared meticulously for liftoff; before Borman and Lovell even entered the capsule, White and Collins spent an hour there, checking out the systems and making sure the craft was ready to fly. Just before noon, the two second-stringers climbed out and the two primary astronauts were loaded into the spacecraft and strapped into their seats. Then the twin hatches—one over each astronaut’s head—were closed.
The hours before ignition moved exceedingly slowly. Borman was glad that he and Lovell had eaten a big breakfast that morning; the meal was the last good one they would have for a while. Plenty of fine-sounding food was stowed aboard the spacecraft for the fourteen days they would spend aloft—chicken and vegetables, shrimp cocktail, beef and gravy, butterscotch pudding, packaged fruits—but all of it had been shrink-wrapped or freeze-dried to within an inch of its life, and all of it would have to be eaten with a spoon from a plastic pouch that had to be opened with a pair of surgical scissors. There would also be fruitcake—lots and lots of fruitcake—packaged like unholy sausage links in a long necklace stowed behind Lovell’s seat. It was energy-dense and high in calories, though nobody pretended it would taste any better in space than it did on Earth.
But now, as their rocket climbed and the g-forces built, food was not remotely on the astronauts’ minds. At two minutes and thirty-nine seconds into the launch, exactly on schedule, the first stage shut down and fell away, flinging Borman and Lovell forward against their seat restraints. A moment later, the second stage lit, slamming them back in their seats. The g-forces climbed on schedule to four and then five, six, and seven, meaning that within seconds the two men, who weighed the astronaut average of about 155 pounds on Earth, clocked in at nearly 1,100 pounds on the balance scale of gravitational physics.
And then, five minutes and forty seconds after they left the coast of Florida—less time than it would have taken to walk from the launchpad to the Cape Kennedy commissary—their engine cut off, their spacecraft entered orbit, and the astronauts suddenly weighed nothing at all. Around them, bits of dust and the odd screw or bolt, the sorts of things inevitably left behind in even the most painstakingly prepared spacecraft, floated lazily in the air. Like all first-timers, Borman and Lovell poked at the drifting flotsam, grinned at it, and then grinned at each other.
“Gemini 7, you are go!” called up the capsule communicator—or capcom—in Houston.
“Roger,” Borman answered, “thank you.”
“That’s the best sim we’ve had so far,” the capcom joked.
Borman and Lovell, who now formally and forever had joined the small fraternity of men who had flown in space, simply grinned again.
* * *
It didn’t take long before Gemini 7 became precisely the 336-hour grind it had been advertised to be. For a fortnight, a pair of full-grown men would be locked in an enclosure with no more habitable volume than the front seat of a Volkswagen Beetle and even less room overhead than the Beetle offers. The two astronauts quickly learned that they could extend and stretch their legs, but only if they bent their upper body. Or they could stretch their upper body, but only if they bent their legs. Doing both at once was impossible. There was also a lot of instrument noise, the whirring and ticking and whooshing of the thrusters and the ventilators that were the very heartbeat of the ship. Borman and Lovell might have found the noise reassuring, except that it never, ever stopped.
Even sleeping wasn’t easy, with the capcom’s chatter added to that constant background sound. That back-and-forth with the ground didn’t stop either, because NASA rules required that at least one astronaut remain awake at all times, and polite whispering was nothing like silence when your fellow pilot sat just inches away from you.
The menu, meanwhile, lived down to its advance billing. Foods that had to be rehydrated with a water gun never achieved the right texture: dry, powdery bites alternated with sticky, watery ones, and no single mouthful struck the proper balance. The fruits packed with sugary syrup were a little better, as was the punch. The fruitcake was … fruitcake.
Borman and Lovell kept as busy as they could with medical experiments and navigational sightings. They worked with the Navy to track Polaris missiles launched from deep-ocean submarines, a job that was both challenging and distracting, just as the NASA psychologists had hoped. Unavoidably, however, there was a lot of idle time. Both men had brought along a book: for Borman, it was Mark Twain’s Roughing It; for Lovell, Drums Along the Mohawk, the 1936 Walter Edmonds best seller. The choices pleased NASA; they were exactly the wholesome fare the agency wanted the world to see its astronauts reading. But in reality, neither book got more than a glimpse, though now and then Lovell did make a few notes in a journal he had packed.
The space suits themselves became impossible. For a fourteen-day flight, the usual fighter pilot pressure suits and the hard-shell helmets simply would not do, so NASA had ordered up lighter, softer suits with cloth helmets that zipped open and closed and could be folded back like a parka hood. The astronauts and most other people at NASA promptly dubbed them get-me-down suits, since they were not usable for space walks or much of anything beyond allowing the pilots to survive a sudden depressurization on takeoff or reentry. They were also clingy and almost unbearably hot. Peeling them off would leave the crew in their far more comfortable long johns, but NASA didn’t like that idea, since get-me-down suits can’t actually get you down if you’re not wearing them.
So Borman sweltered in his suit, turning his air circulation knob to its coolest setting, which helped only a little, while Lovell, over the course of the first few days, slipped slowly out of his. First he eased the suit down around his shoulders; surely NASA wouldn’t object to that. Then he lowered it to his waist, and finally he freed all but his lower legs. Both men reported their discomfort to the ground, and over the next six days, the question of suits or skivvies rose up the chain of command. The capcom passed it on to the flight director, who passed it on to Chris Kraft, who passed it on to the deputy administrator in Washington, who consulted with the lead flight surgeon, who reported that yes, the biomedical readings he was getting from the ship showed that Lovell—who by now was fooling no one with his secretly vanishing space suit—had healthier blood pressure and pulse readings than did poor suited Borman. The word thus came back down the chain that it was the opinion of the NASA brass that the advantages of flying without suits outweighed the advantages of wearing them, and the men of Gemini 7 were officially cleared to fly in their underwear.
As the first day unfolded into the first week and the unshowered, unshaven astronauts grew grittier and riper, there was the ongoing problem of how a man preserves his last scrap of privacy—to say nothing of dignity—in a spacecraft with no proper toilet facilities. Urinating in space was not a problem, and the doctors, it turned out, had decided that they would need only occasional samples. This meant the men could usually relieve themselves into a tube and then vent it through a small port on the exterior of the spacecraft, where it would instantly burst into a shower of glittery crystals, a phenomenon Schirra had dubbed the constellation Urion.
But urinating wasn’t the only problem, and the remaining one required plastic bags and disposable wipes and a lot of maneuvering if an astronaut was to take care of the matter properly. The other fellow, meanwhile, either pretended not to notice or acknowledged that he very much did notice and asked what in the world the man next to him had eaten before he left the ground. Lovell made peace with the fact that he would have to use the awful NASA fecal bags; for him it was a small price to pay for the privilege of flying in space.
Borman had his own solution to the problem: he simply wouldn’t confront it. In his view, if a man couldn’t control his own bowels, he couldn’t control anything at all, and if that meant controlling them for fourteen straight days, that’s what he would do. Through sheer will and orneriness, Borman made it through the first week and then through an eighth day. Partly out of self-interest, even Lovell was beginning to root for him. But no man can hold out forever.
“Jim,” Borman said on day nine, “I think this is it.”
“Frank, you have only five more days left to go here,” Lovell joked. But five days was five too many, and Borman, who believed that any obstacle could be overcome, learned in a new and very primal way that no, not all of them can be.
* * *
Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford began their own launch day drill on the morning of December 12, which was the ninth day of the Gemini 7 mission and would, if fate and weather and hardware all cooperated, be the first day of the Gemini 6 mission. There would be the usual steak and eggs and juice and coffee for breakfast, followed by the usual suit-up procedure—in proper pressure suits with proper hard-shell helmets—as well as the usual walk to the van and the waves to the press and then the quiet ride out to the launchpad. Walter Cronkite would be in his makeshift newsroom, outdoor reporters would be talking into cameras with the rocket and the gantry in the distance behind them, and the usual tens of thousands of campers and gawkers would be crowding the coast. This time, however, there would be two other spectators, 187 statute miles overhead.
“How’s the launch going with 6?” Borman radioed to Houston with less than an hour to go before liftoff. By then, he knew, Schirra and Stafford would be strapped into their spacecraft.
“Oh, 6 is going really well,” said Elliot See, a rookie astronaut who’d taken the capcom console shortly after the crew was deposited in the ship. “They’re still in the twenty-five-minute hold.”
“They’ve already had a twenty-five-minute hold?” Borman asked, mistakenly believing that an unplanned delay had already dragged on for twenty-five minutes as pad controllers sought to figure out a problem.
“It’s a built-in hold,” See reassured him. In fact, Mission Control had instituted a launch delay at the T-minus-twenty-five mark to allow for a series of system checks. “Houston said everything’s progressing normally.”
“Roger,” said Borman, relieved.
After more than a week in space, Borman and Lovell were justifiably bored, and the novelty of having visitors had been much on their minds, to say nothing of the challenging flying the rendezvous would involve. And as it happened, the path of their flight would carry them over Cape Kennedy at the precise moment Gemini 6’s engines were supposed to light. If the weather held, they would see the Titan’s controlled firestorm; from 187 miles up, it would look like little more than the flare of a match head, but they would know their friends were on the way.
Sitting in his television studio, Walter Cronkite was equally eager for liftoff. “This ought to be our most exciting day in space, perhaps exceeded only by our very first space flights,” Cronkite told his viewers.
The countdown ticked off smoothly. Perched at the top of the stack, Schirra and Stafford listened as the count approached zero and the glug-glug-glugging began. At precisely 9:54 a.m., they heard the unmistakable roar and shake of the engines igniting.
“My clock has started!” Stafford called over the din, referring to the mission clock on the instrument panel, which was programmed to begin recording every second of the flight the instant the spacecraft lifted off the pad and a tail plug popped loose.
But Elliot See cut in immediately: “Shut down, Gemini 6.”
Sure enough, Schirra and Stafford heard the roaring engines go quiet.
Schirra knew the shutdown protocol: without hesitating, he was supposed to yank the D-ring handle between his legs at the front of his seat. A Titan that had lifted even an inch off the ground and then lost its thrust would fall back with a thump that could easily ignite the fuel in the tanks, producing a lethal fireball. Pulling the D-ring would trigger the spacecraft’s ejection seats—the most powerful ones ever built—blasting the astronauts out of the capsule at a speed that could outrun the fireball, but only at the cost of a stunning ejection force of twenty g’s. While that load might well kill the men, taking that chance was better than getting caught in the fireball, which would definitely kill them.
Schirra had drilled and drilled for this emergency in simulators, but when the moment came, he decided to do exactly nothing. The engines had lit, the clock had started, yet something was missing, something Schirra expected to feel quite literally in the seat of his pants—the kick and the bump of a powerful machine that had begun to move. It was a subtle thing, all but indiscernible against the rumbling, shaking Titan; still, Schirra was certain he hadn’t felt it. The cockpit clock was wrong; it had started somehow, but the rocket hadn’t moved. The seat of Schirra’s pants was right.
The commander stayed calm, and as he looked at the instrument panel, he saw a pressure gauge indicating that the rocket was draining its tanks and returning to its safe mode, just as it was supposed to do after any harmless shutdown.
“Fuel pressure is lowering,” he radioed Mission Control, his voice uninflected.
“Roger,” See radioed back.
Schirra might have gambled with his and Stafford’s lives, but it was a well-considered gamble, and he had won. In the process, he had also saved the last chance for the rendezvous mission. Had he pulled the D-ring, he and Stafford might or might not have survived, but their spacecraft would have had two large holes in it where the hatches had been blown away. There would no repairing the spacecraft or replacing it with a fresh one before the end of Gemini 7’s mission.
Overhead, Borman and Lovell had not been able to see the brief fire that had lit and died on pad 19. Elliot See radioed the development up to their spacecraft.
“They got an ignition and a hold kill right afterward,” See said, using the crisp, technical phrasing that the moment called for.
Lovell and Borman looked at each other bleakly. They were still alone in low-Earth orbit, and still awaiting the promised visitors.
“Roger,” Lovell responded. “This is 7, your friendly target vehicle, standing by.”
* * *
President Lyndon Johnson was already in a foul temper when the news broke that a Gemini 6 mission had flopped yet again. The morning papers held nothing but bad news, with the New York Times reporting that congressional Republicans and five Republican governors had issued a unanimous declaration warning that Johnson’s escalating conflict in Vietnam was starting to look like “an endless Korean-style jungle war.” This was precisely the comparison Johnson had been seeking to avoid, and yet now it was in growing vogue. He could take that kind of defeatist talk from his own party’s pacifist left, but given that the GOP always seemed readier for a scrap with the Communists, this dart carried more sting.
Johnson was just as irritated to learn that an influential group of thirty black lawmakers and activists in the Democratic Party had put out a statement demanding a greater voice in the party’s policies and candidate selection. Johnson knew that their complaint was justified, but he had already spent a career’s worth of political capital pushing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through a recalcitrant Congress. That advocacy had cost him the loyalty of white southern voters, who had begun stomping off to the Republican Party, where Johnson’s equal rights initiatives were not in much favor. If Johnson couldn’t replace that lost constituency with newly enfranchised black voters, he would be a pariah in his own party.
And now the space program, which usually offered consolation, was falling on its face. James Webb and the rest of space agency officialdom knew that Johnson expected a problem like Gemini 6’s repeated failure to launch to be sorted out quickly. But in case that message hadn’t gotten through, the president took the additional step of issuing a carefully worded public statement. Twice in two sentences he spoke of his disappointment in this latest debacle. Johnson chose his words carefully: he made it clear that he did not expect to be disappointed again.
He wasn’t. Liftoff for Gemini 6 would come just two days after the failed launch, thanks to a sharp-eyed engineer who had been assigned to scour the Titan’s innards for whatever had scrubbed the ignition. Many hours later, he came running back from the launchpad at Cape Kennedy to report that he had found something deep within the ten-story stack of hardware—a nickel-sized plastic dust cover blocking what was supposed to be an open check valve. The cover had been placed there months before in the assembly plant in Baltimore, when a technician had removed a gas generator for cleaning and, as protocol demanded, covered the resulting opening to keep out any contamination. But the cover was easy to overlook, and he’d failed to observe the second part of that protocol, which called for taking it off it before reinstalling the generator and certifying the Titan as fit to fly. When the engines tried to light, that little scrap of nothing grounded the giant rocket.
Now the dust cover had been removed, the rocket had been refueled, and the astronauts had repeated their launch-morning drill. On December 14 at 10:28 a.m., Gemini 6 at last left Earth.
“The clock has started,” Schirra shouted as the Titan’s engines lit and, this time, stayed lit. “It’s a real one!”
“Trajectory is real good,” said See, who was once again manning the capcom console in Houston.
“Roger, she looks like a dream,” Schirra said.
“You’re go from here, Gemini 6.”
“You got a big fat go from us,” Schirra answered. “It looks great!”
Borman and Lovell, once again passing directly over coastal Florida, initially saw nothing, as overcast skies completely obscured the Cape. But when Schirra and Stafford punched through the cloud cover, Borman spotted the white thread of the condensation trail following the rocket and the firefly light of the Titan itself.
“I got it, I got the contrail!” Borman called.
Craning his neck to peek through Borman’s window, Lovell spotted it, too. “It’s going to be getting crowded up here,” he said.
It would take four orbits for that two-spacecraft crowd to form. And for nearly six hours, the Earth-based radar tracking that had been minding only Gemini 7 would have to mind 6 as well. Meanwhile, engineers in Mission Control would be working along with the astronauts and the computers to pinpoint two tiny machines in the vastness of the Earth’s orbital space and then draw them closer and closer together.
Borman and Lovell donned their hated suits, leaving only the hooded helmets unzipped and open. NASA rules would never allow two spacecraft to come even remotely within collision distance without ensuring that the astronauts would be protected if a crack-up occurred and a hull was breached.
For several days, Gemini 7 had been flying through its orbits in a slow tumble as a means of conserving fuel for planned and unplanned maneuvers. A spacecraft in orbit is not like a jet in flight, which will usually follow its nose wherever it is pointed. As long as Gemini 7’s velocity and altitude remained in the right balance, physics guaranteed a stable orbit no matter which way the spacecraft pitched or yawed or rolled. Now, however, Borman took hold of his thrusters and stabilized his ship in a proper, prow-first orientation. It was the only safe way to conduct a rendezvous; almost as important, at least to a pilot, it was the only respectable way.
Gemini 6, with its full tank of thruster fuel and its plan to spend only a little more than twenty-four hours in space, would do the real work in the orbital pas de deux. As Schirra, whose spacecraft was in a slightly lower orbit than Borman and Lovell’s, fired his aft thrusters, his speed would increase and his altitude would climb, until his ship had reached the assigned meeting point. While 6 went hunting and 7 awaited its visitor, the radar told both ships that they were indeed drawing close, but so far neither could see the other.
When the two craft were still more than sixty miles apart, with Gemini 6 in the shadow of the Earth’s night and Gemini 7 in the full light of day, Schirra turned off the cockpit lights, the better to see the target he was chasing. It was Stafford who spotted what they were looking for first, as the bright sunlight reflected off the back half of Gemini 7, which, unlike the dark front half, was painted a brilliant white.
“Hey, I think I got it,” he called over an open mike so that Houston could hear him, too. “That’s 7, Wally.”
“Negative,” Houston responded, relying on the radar readings flickering on a screen rather than the human eyeballs out in space.
“Yes,” Schirra replied, now seeing the pinprick of light as well.
“It’s either Sirius or 7,” Stafford allowed, conceding that he might only be seeing the brightest star visible in the sky at that moment.
But it wasn’t a star. Schirra tweaked his thrusters—blipping them, as Kraft and the men in Mission Control called it. He vented tiny breaths from the hydrazine jets in the rear of the ship to coax the spacecraft forward, then used counterthrusts from the nose jets when he got going too fast. The ships closed to a handful of miles, then a few thousand yards, and then a few hundred.
Soon the four men were close enough to see each other through the semicircular windows. While Schirra and Stafford were still crisp and clean-shaven after having showered just that morning, Borman and Lovell were uncombed and bearded.
“Hello there!” Schirra called out, beaming. Then he directed his attention to the ground. “We’re in formation with 7. Everything is great here!”
Borman smiled back but chose to stick to business. Orbital rendezvous might be a critical step in the long march to the moon, but it was also an exceedingly tricky one and could go badly awry at any second. “I’m reading about ten degrees, one hundred and ten degrees,” he said, updating Houston on the orientation of his ship on two of its three axes.
Schirra was in no mood to be serious yet. “We’re all sitting up here playing bridge together,” he said.
Knowing the rendezvous would last for only a few orbits, however, Schirra soon got to work. There was a lot to accomplish, including the inspection of each ship by the crew of the other. No American astronaut had ever seen his spacecraft from outside while in flight, save Ed White during his brief space walk from Gemini 4, and he’d spent most of the excursion concentrating on keeping himself upright. Now NASA would get a chance to eyeball its machines as they orbited, and the astronauts had been instructed to look for anomalies like gapped welds or seams that might not show in the telemetry but could be disastrous all the same. Inspecting the ships after they returned was much less reliable, because there was no way of knowing if damage had occurred during reentry.
Schirra was surprised to see a tangle of cords and cables streaming from the back of Gemini 7, the remains of the electrical network that had connected it to the Titan before explosive bolts blew the two machines apart.
“You guys are really showing a lot of droop on those wires hanging there,” Schirra radioed.
“You have one, too,” Borman answered, making it clear on the air-to-ground loop that he wasn’t the only commander in the sky today whose ship was not quite parade-ready. “It really belted around there when you were firing your thrusters.”
Small American flags and the words UNITED STATES were painted on all Gemini spacecraft, but when earlier Geminis had returned from orbit, much of the flag and the lettering had been burned away. No one had ever been sure whether the fire of liftoff or the fire of reentry had scoured them so badly.
“The flag and the letters are visible,” Lovell said now, inspecting 6 as it hovered nearby. “Looks like they’re seared as much at launch as they are when you come back.”
“Your blue field is practically burned off,” Stafford said.
For more than three orbits, the two ships kept their stations—approaching, retreating, flying circles around each other. The remarkable performance offered reassuring proof that the choreography needed for a trip to the moon was indeed possible. In Mission Control, cigars were lit and small flags were waved. Typically, this sort of celebration was reserved for the very end of a mission, but Kraft permitted it to take place early this time.
Schirra, too, had something special planned.
It had escaped no one’s notice that there were three Annapolis men in space today, with Borman the lone West Pointer—something the other three had needled him about repeatedly. Now, as Gemini 6 completed another pirouette around Gemini 7’s aft end, it reappeared around the front, and this time, its right-hand window was covered with a sign. Schirra had smuggled aboard a piece of blue cardboard bearing bright white letters that read, BEAT ARMY.
Borman dropped his head into his hands and laughed, then made as if to squint at the sign.
“Beat Navy,” he said aloud, reading the thing any way he damn well pleased.
Finally, on the first and only day of the mission of Gemini 6 and the eleventh day in the mission of Gemini 7, the station keeping that had been maintained for hours broke off. Schirra backed away, opened the distance he had worked so hard to close, and began easing down to a lower orbit, preparing to reenter Earth’s atmosphere.
When the two ships were no longer in sight of each other, Schirra radioed a final transmission—an urgent one, from the sound of it.
“Gemini 7, this is Gemini 6. We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in a polar orbit,” Schirra reported. “He has a very low trajectory and a very high climbing ratio. Looks like he might be going to reenter soon. Stand by, just let me try to pick up that thing.”
A moment later, crackling across the radio in both Gemini 7 and Mission Control, just nine days before Christmas 1965, there came a tinny chorus of “Jingle Bells.” It was performed live, on a harmonica and small set of bells, contraband that Schirra had carried aboard his ship along with his sign.
After he was done, Schirra said proudly, “That was live, 7, not tape.”
And then, all business once more, he peeled off and prepared to bring his spacecraft home.
“Really good job, Frank and Jim,” he said. “We’ll see you on the beach.”
* * *
Less than an hour later, Gemini 6 splashed down in the North Atlantic and was recovered by the aircraft carrier USS Wasp. Three days after that, Gemini 7 followed. Its fuel was gone, its power was flickering, and trash filled the narrow space behind the seats, the only stowage area the spacecraft had. Borman and Lovell—unsteady, exhausted, both sorely in need of a very long shower and a very long sleep—waved and smiled gamely as they arrived on the deck of the carrier.
The two astronauts were no better off than their utterly spent spacecraft, but two grueling weeks had come and had gone, the men had survived, and the rendezvous had been achieved. And Borman, who had been making a quiet bet with himself, was delighted to learn that when all the course plotting was done, Gemini 7 had splashed down closer to the Wasp than Schirra and his Gemini 6. That would be the end of “Beat Army.”