THE PEOPLE AT NASA knew how to put on a good show, and how to make it irresistible to the press. The rockets were beautiful, the astronauts were dashing, and their families were charming. If you read all the stories in the newspapers and magazines, you couldn’t help but believe that the space agency was showing and telling you everything you needed to know about how it went about its business. But the space agency was also good at keeping a very big secret: half the time their engineers were just making things up as they went along.
Building machines that could carry men safely above the atmosphere was an order of magnitude harder than building the flying machines that could merely carry men through it. Making the spacecraft themselves—the airtight pods that would be cockpit and home for the crew—was actually the easier part, if only because they would require little fuel to maneuver in space and were thus unlikely to blow up while they were still on Earth. The rockets themselves were another matter.
No one with any sense would admit this part of the story to the public or the press, of course, much less to the US Congress, which was providing the funding to keep the agency running. But from the beginning, a certain amount of on-the-fly improvisation was probably inevitable, because NASA’s Brainbusters, as they were called, were inventing ways to send humans where they had never been before—to space.
Frank Borman and the rest of the second astronaut class were welcomed to NASA in 1962, and by that point, the men who ran the agency had done a reasonably good job of figuring out how to make spacecraft and rockets. Americans had flown in space four times now: Al Shepard’s and Gus Grissom’s two suborbital missions, John Glenn’s three-lap romp around the planet, and Scott Carpenter’s duplicate three-orbit flight. All of these one-man Mercury missions were triumphs—as long as you didn’t look too closely.
Shepard’s flight had indeed been flawless. Grissom’s almost was, but then the spacecraft splashed down and the hatch blew too early and the astronaut almost drowned before being hauled out of the ocean by a horse collar dangling from a helicopter. Glenn’s flight, too, had been fine right until the end, when suddenly it looked like his heat shield—the thick plate of heat-dissipating material that would protect him from the 3,000-degree inferno of reentry—might be loose, which caused a lot of live-TV hand-wringing before the spacecraft at last hissed safely down into the ocean, with Glenn happy and unharmed. Carpenter’s flight was the least successful of the four, though the mistakes were more or less of his own making. After faffing around too much with his orbital experiments, he hit his reentry rockets too late, causing him to overshoot his recovery area by 250 miles and requiring the navy to go searching for him.
With the one-man Mercury spacecraft having achieved most of its objectives and only a couple of longer-duration missions left to fly, it was now time to roll out the bigger, more sophisticated two-man Gemini spacecraft, and to roll out the new astronauts who would fly them.
Americans swooned when the Original Seven astronauts had been unveiled in 1959, but the second crew of pilots, of which Frank Borman was one, was often known simply as the Next Nine.
Though the Next Nine didn’t make the same kind of splash as the Original Seven, they still got a lot of the same perks. Life magazine paid each of the new men $16,000 per year, an altogether princely sum for pilots who had spent a career earning military pay. Life did this to ensure its reporters could slip into the homes of the astronauts and their families and catch glimpses of how each family handled their dad’s new extraterrestrial assignment, details the world was hungry to read about. And in its own way, NASA provided, too. When they first got to Houston in September 1962, the nine new astronauts and their young families were told to report to the Shamrock Hilton, a legendary place that advertised itself as “America’s Magnificent Hotel.” To all appearances, the Shamrock’s nearly imperial lobby, massive ballrooms and trapezoidal swimming pool with its three-tier diving board lived up to the hype.
Frank Borman was as dazzled by the place as the other astronauts, but that didn’t mean he was entirely comfortable with it. He and his family had lived modestly at Edwards and they had driven from the air base to Houston in his 1960 Chevy. Just because his job had changed, Borman saw no reason to change his ways. Even a Life magazine contract didn’t inspire him to begin throwing his money around.
“We can’t afford this,” Borman whispered to Susan when they walked into the hotel.
But as it turned out, they could. When Borman approached the desk and gave his name, the clerk glanced down at his guest registry and then looked back up, beaming at the man he had just learned was an astronaut. The clerk assured him that the Shamrock was at his disposal for as long as he and his family needed it. It was the least the hotel could do for an American hero.
No matter how glamorous the new lodgings were, Borman would accept them for only so long, especially since he had thus far done nothing to earn the praise of the hotel’s staff. As quickly as possible, he and Susan went looking for a piece of land on which they could build a home. The house, which they built in the El Lago neighborhood, near other astronauts and their families, would be an extravagance, but the Bormans decided that their two boys finally deserved a real home.
If any of the Next Nine were under the impression that an astronaut’s job involved little more than learning to fly a spaceship, they were quickly set straight. The two-man Gemini hadn’t even been fully built yet, the Titan booster that would carry it into orbit had not yet been man-rated, and a lot of work needed to be done before anyone would take any rides aboard either of them.
Yes, there would be plenty of basic training in centrifuges and simulators. The astronauts would spend endless hours in classrooms, studying orbital mechanics, lifting bodies and zero gravity, or “zero-g” navigation, to say nothing of survival training on the ocean and in the deserts and anywhere else an errant landing might deposit a pair of astronauts. But that still left extra hours in the week, so all the new recruits would be assigned a specialty, thus giving them a direct hand in developing the hardware, software and flight procedures on which they would be banking their lives. The responsibility for matching up the man and the job went to the no-nonsense Donald Kent “Deke” Slayton, the same man who would call Frank Borman a few years later and ask him if he wanted to be the first spacecraft commander to fly to the moon.
Slayton was impressed by Frank Borman the moment he met him, and what he liked most were the traits that were not unlike Slayton’s own. He liked Borman’s absence of flash, his ability to block out distractions, his sheer doggedness.
Slayton gave the young astronaut a number of assignments, the most important of which was to investigate the Gemini’s intended rocket, the Titan, and make sure the rocket could fly without killing the men riding aboard it. Borman didn’t know a thing about boosters—or at least he didn’t know more than any new astronaut knew—but he knew that you couldn’t get into space without them.
A spacecraft depends on powerful rockets loaded with combustible fuel to shoot past the atmosphere—at least 100 miles up—to orbit successfully. And it needs to go fast, because air can push on the ship and slow it down the same way it does if you stick your hand out the window of a moving car. The spacecraft speeds out of the atmosphere going an unimaginable 17,500 miles per hour, which is why you can orbit the entire Earth once in less than ninety minutes. If you’re too slow or too low when you blast off, you’ll just fall back through the atmosphere to the ground, pulled down by the force of gravity, like a ball tossed into the air. But before you can go anywhere at all—fast or slow—you first have to get off the ground, and Borman had been suspicious of the Titan almost from the start.
The problem went to the very heart of the rocket’s design. The simplest boosters had one main engine, but the Titan had two. Two engines meant two chances for something to go wrong, and that could be especially dangerous on the launchpad. If the rocket started to lift off and both engines quit, it wouldn’t go anywhere. But the engines were mounted side by side, so if only one quit, the Titan would rise up and then go badly awry, flying first sideways and then down to an unsurvivable crash.
That scenario, Borman figured, was a risk that needed addressing. He dug into the Titan’s technical manuals and manufacturing schematics, and although he saw some fail-safes that ought to prevent a one-engine ignition from happening, he was not impressed by what the design ought to do. All that mattered was what the engine would do, and something in his gut told him this rocket was trouble.
So Borman went to see the rocket for himself, making it a point to be at Cape Kennedy for the next Titan test launch. When he got there, he met the engineers who had designed and built the booster, and he raised his concern with them.
The lead engineer waved off Borman’s worry. “It can’t happen,” he said.
“Anything can happen,” Borman answered.
The engineer shook his head. “There could never be a failure mode in which just one barrel fires,” he said flatly. “It’s simply not the way the system works.”
Borman let the matter go but decided to stay in the Cape for a few days and wait for the next Titan test. When the day for the new test arrived, he and the engineers crowded into the blockhouse, Mission Control for the launch. The rocket’s systems were checked, the countdown clock marched toward zero, and the launch director called, “Ignition.”
And on every screen what every man in the room saw was a single engine roaring with fire and a second engine remaining cold and dark and silent. The rocket strained to lift itself into the air.
“Shutdown!” the launch director called just before the crippled machine actually did leave the pad. That part at least worked as it was supposed to, and the Titan settled back to the ground.
Borman looked at the nearest engineer, and the engineer—to his credit—met his eyes. The young astronaut had been right after all: Anything can happen.
The first flight of the Gemini spacecraft, on April 8, 1964, was a lot less momentous than it might have been. Designed to be a test cruise of the Titan booster and the Gemini itself, it would carry no astronauts into space. The ship would orbit the Earth three times, but wouldn’t even reenter the atmosphere under the parachute that would someday be needed to return a crew safely. Instead, it would simply burn up on the way down. And to ensure that no bits of debris would endanger anyone on the ground below or reveal too much about the spacecraft’s design, should parts of it rain down behind the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain, NASA engineers drilled holes in the heat shield. The four-ton ship would be effectively vaporized by the intense heat it would face upon reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
When Gemini 1 accomplished its modest goals, NASA was elated. No American had been in space for almost a year, and the US was itching to be back in the game. After one more uncrewed flight, Gemini 3 would at last take off and carry its history-making two-man crew into space. Beyond that mission, there would be up to ten more, with a Gemini due to be launched as frequently as once every seven or eight weeks. That meant a lot of seats for a lot of astronauts, and although one flight might seem to be as good as any other, the whispered word among all the pilots was simple: Whatever you do, don’t get stuck with Gemini 7.
The problem with Gemini 7, as every astronaut knew, was that the mission apparently had but a single purpose: to torment its two-man crew for fourteen straight days and nights.
Ever since the Gemini was first unveiled, there had been a lot of talk coming out of NASA about the grandeur of the new spacecraft. It would be so much bigger and so much more sophisticated than the Mercury ships. There was plenty of truth to that: the Mercury had been little more than a pod filled with instruments, with a single man stuffed inside. The pilot could fire his thrusters to waggle the ship this way and that. He could fiddle with his altitude and orient himself for reentry, though the computer could do that perfectly well if he allowed it to. He could also fire his retro-rockets to bring himself home, but the automatic system was more than capable of handling that job for him, too. Even the Mercury’s window was little more than a porthole over the astronaut’s head, one he could see out of only if he craned his neck backward. For a pilot with any self-respect, the Mercury was as much carnival ride as spacecraft.
But the Gemini—the Gemini would be different. The astronauts flying it wouldn’t be going to the moon, but it would be as close to a dress rehearsal for lunar flights as was possible.
The Gemini would have a proper cockpit, with two men sitting upright and side by side in seats they liked to call couches, probably to fool themselves into thinking they felt more comfortable than they were. Each would have a window directly in front of him that could be used to sight-fly the ship, like a real pilot should. Gemini would be capable of rendezvousing and docking with other spacecraft, linking up in space the way an Apollo command module and a spidery lunar lander would have to do one day. The astronauts could fire their thrusters and raise their orbit to eight hundred or nine hundred or even one thousand miles up, blowing past the 176-mile altitude record astronaut Wally Schirra had set on his six-orbit Mercury flight. And on at least a few of the missions, an astronaut would open his hatch and climb outside and walk—actually walk—in space, becoming, in effect, a human spacecraft hanging in the void outside a mechanical spacecraft.
The Gemini missions would do all that and more, but they would test another machine as well: the human machine. By NASA’s calculations, the maximum length of a lunar voyage would last two weeks, far more time than any human being had ever dared spend in space. Before you could entrust your body to the mercies of the moon, you had to run the experiment much closer to home. If you were orbiting the Earth and your weightless blood began to pool in your brain, or your heart forgot how to work after too much time in microgravity, you could fire your rockets and be back on the ground and in the arms of a medic within a couple of hours.
Somewhere in the middle of all those dazzling Gemini missions, then, there would have to be one long, gritty, grind of a mission, one in which two astronauts would be sealed inside their ship, sent into space, and told they would be allowed to return home when fourteen days—or 224 orbits or 336 hours—had been completed. No rendezvous or altitude records or spacewalking for these men, though they would see plenty of sunrises and sunsets as they circled the planet over and over again. They wouldn’t conduct experiments, or at least not many. Instead, they would be the experiment.
This was the mission that every astronaut hoped to duck. Slayton, who was making flight assignments, called Borman into his office to inform him he had drawn the short straw: Borman had been assigned to Gemini 7. The chief astronaut did offer one consolation, however: on this flight he would be the commander, seated in the left-hand couch. In the right-hand seat would be navy man Jim Lovell, who, it seemed, had drawn a shorter straw still.
Borman and Lovell, as Slayton had ordered, promptly set about training for Gemini 7, the worst flight anyone could imagine—until it turned out to be something else entirely.