THE NEWLY NAMED crew of Gemini 7 learned a lot of things while they were training for their first flight into space, but the least pleasant of them was that no NASA doctor ever seemed to consider a week complete unless he got the chance to mess with an astronaut. To the medical men, astronauts offered one of the greatest controlled experiments ever devised. They were a small group of hand-selected, exquisitely trained men, representatives of a species purpose-built to live in the radiation-shielded, temperature-controlled environment of Earth, where all we know is the regular old pull of gravity, one g. Then those same men would be removed from that little incubator and hurled into a completely different environment for hours or days or even longer, while the entire science community studied how the men responded to such extreme otherworldliness.
Better still, the flying lab rats didn’t even have to be coaxed to volunteer. Astronauts clamored for the job—competed fiercely for it, in fact. They would practically do it for free. It was all the doctors could do to contain themselves.
The first astronaut class had suffered seemingly endless testing, and it became an open secret that the medical examinations they had endured in order to be selected had been exhaustive, invasive and flat-out humiliating. When the men were presented to the public at their first press conference in Washington, DC, in 1959, they could have been forgiven if they had hobbled to the rostrum. At one point in the carefully stage-managed session, a reporter wanted to know which test they liked least.
The other reporters laughed, the NASA administrators squirmed and the astronauts looked at one another and smiled. This was a question made for Wally Schirra.
Early on, Schirra had established himself as the bad boy and practical joker of the first astronaut class. On the dais, in 1959, Wally seemed prepared to answer the awkward question, but John Glenn stole the moment.
“That’s a real tough one,” he said. “It’s rather difficult to pick one, because if you figure out how many openings there are on a human body and how far you can go in any one of them . . .”
Glenn trailed off and then looked at the questioner with a nearly Wally-like twinkle. “Now you answer which one would be the toughest for you.”
The room howled. Glenn blushed. Then he sat back in his chair.
Even Schirra was forced to concede the match. “I think he’s answered for all of us,” he said.
Now, in early 1965, with the flight of Gemini 7 in the planning stages, the doctors had the most promising lab specimens of all in Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, and they planned to make the most of them. Borman and Lovell were made to repeat many of the awful exercises they had endured to get into the program in the first place—all the blood draws and dye injections, the electrified needles and centrifuge runs, the electroencephalograms and electrocardiograms and electromyograms. New tests would give the medics a baseline to measure how the astronauts held up during an unheard-of two weeks in space.
Of particular and nearly obsessive interest to the doctors was the matter of calcium retention. Put a man in space for too long and his skeleton—which suddenly has little work to do, since it no longer needs to support the body against gravity—will stop wasting time keeping itself strong. Calcium in food, which would ordinarily go to maintaining and strengthening bones, will pass right through the body.
The experiment developed by the medical men was almost absurd in its thoroughness. The two astronauts would be required to bag and save every drop of urine and every gram of feces they produced in the nine days before the flight; do the same during the fourteen days aloft and for the four additional days that would follow; and turn it all over to the NASA doctors. Even that wouldn’t provide enough data, however, so tears and sweat would also be collected before the mission. Further, Borman and Lovell would be required to stand in a wading pool in nothing but their skivvies while distilled water was poured over them, after which every drop would be collected and sampled for calcium. During and after the flight, the medics would demand that the astronauts save and turn in their underwear—unwashed, please—at the end of every day so that it could be sampled for the sweat it had spent eighteen or so hours wicking up from the men’s most personal places.
Blood pressure, balance, heart rate, respiration and vision would be tested as well, both before the flight and repeatedly while the astronauts were in orbit. But the vision test presented a problem. In a tiny two-man cockpit, it would be impossible to position an eye chart far enough away for it to be effective. Even if it were possible, the doctors wondered if the men would run the test honestly and tell the truth if their vision was going soft, or if they would lie to avoid the risk of being told to come home early.
The plan to use an eye chart was abandoned. Instead, on a vacant plot of land forty miles north of Laredo, Texas, NASA groundsmen would flatten and rake eight squares of terrain—2,000 feet long to a side each—and cover them with either white Styrofoam or dark turf. The astronauts would have to describe the pattern of the alternating dark-light squares as they flew overhead, a pattern that could be switched up every time the spacecraft passed over Laredo. Let the flyboys try to cheat on that one.
And then finally the doctors went too far. “If you’re going to try staying in space for two weeks,” one of the doctors said, “it’s probably smart to simulate it on Earth first.”
“We’re spending half our time in simulators as it is,” Borman answered.
“But for only a few hours at a time,” the doctor said.
“We could always book more,” Lovell said as Borman nodded in agreement.
“Right,” the doctor responded. “But what we’re talking about is simulating the whole thing, the whole two weeks—beginning to end. Just to play it safe.”
Borman was incredulous. “You want us to spend fourteen days in straight-up seats? In a one-g environment—with no bathroom breaks?”
“Well, yes,” the doctor said.
“Are you out of your minds?” Borman barked.
The doctors had no answer for that, though they surely would have offered one if they did. At the prerogative of the mission commander, that experiment was scrapped.
If anything made the notion of spending two weeks in the corrugated can that was Gemini 7 more tolerable for Borman, it was the prospect of going aloft with his fellow astronaut, Jim Lovell.
Borman had met Lovell during the astronaut selection process, when they and a group of other applicants were undergoing physicals at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, and he liked him from the start. For one thing, there was Lovell’s temperament. The military was full of growling types and joker types, and, Borman had to admit, hard-driven, hard-charging grinds like himself. What it lacked were the easygoing, uncomplicated types, the men who never got rattled. They stayed cool not because they didn’t take things seriously or failed to understand the odds, but because it simply was not in their natures to run hot.
“If you can’t get along with Lovell,” went the popular wisdom in the astronaut corps, “you can’t get along with anyone.”
Just as appealing to Borman was Lovell’s background, which was so much like his own. He could forgive Lovell’s choice of the Naval Academy over West Point because, as any West Pointer would tell you, every man is entitled to one major mistake in his life. But Lovell, just like Borman, had had to scrap his way into his school of choice and later, into NASA’s astronaut program after an overblown medical technicality made him ineligible. Lovell took his initial rejection as a temporary answer, one that would be set right in the future. In 1962, when NASA was screening its second class of astronaut candidates, it was.
Before Gemini 7 could get its chance to go to space, Gemini 6 would have to fly. Geminis 3, 4, and 5 had been almost complete successes, with the high point being Ed White’s Gemini 4 space walk, the first ever for an American astronaut. The flight of Gemini 6 would begin with a launch less than two months before Borman and Lovell’s scheduled liftoff in December 1965. Both men planned to be on hand to watch the two-man Gemini 6 crew—Wally Schirra and rookie Tom Stafford—take off.
Like all space launches, countdown and liftoff would occur under the watchful eye of the engineers in the blockhouse at Cape Kennedy, but once the engine bells at the bottom of the rocket climbed higher than the launch tower next to the launchpad, Mission Control in Houston would take over. Cape Kennedy, Florida, was the perfect launch site for two big reasons: First, if any rocket that launched from there crashed, it would fall harmlessly into the Atlantic Ocean, rather than near a population center. Second, it was nearly as close to the equator as you can get in the Continental US, which means your rocket gets extra speed for free.
The equator is the widest part of the Earth, with a circumference of 24,000 miles. The Earth takes twenty-four hours to rotate, which means that if you’re standing at any point on the equator, you’re always moving at 1,000 miles per hour, even if you can’t feel it. If you go to near the top of the Earth, just 3.8 miles from the North Pole, and draw a circle so that every point on that circle is also 3.8 miles from the North Pole, you have a different circumference of only twenty-four miles. But the spot on which you’re standing will take the same twenty-four hours to make one complete rotation, which means you’re only moving at one mile per hour. If you launch a rocket to orbit the Earth from that point, you get that extra one mile per hour added to your speed for free. If you launch it from the equator, you get 1,000 miles per hour for free. That makes a huge difference since rockets have to be very big and powerful to achieve the speed of 17,500 miles per hour, which allows a spacecraft to shoot into orbit. It helps a lot when you get a 1,000-mile-per-hour head start.
October 25 broke as a perfectly clear morning in coastal Florida. The day was unusually hot for so late in the year, but that didn’t stop the tens of thousands of campers and spectators from lining the beaches surrounding the launch site, and it didn’t stop the big three television networks and all the major newspapers from converging, too.
This wasn’t just the biggest show in town, nor simply a chance to witness history. Viewers gathered at the launch site and around their television sets to cheer on fellow Americans as they spectacularly defied gravity and departed our Earthly home, not to mention showed up the Soviets, who were racing to do the same. Americans tuned in to these launches as a balm, too, to remember all the ways the United States could lead, even as unsettling news was beginning to pile up day by day about the war in Vietnam and problems on the home front.
Swarms of people and press had attended the one-man Mercury launches, and the same was true for the first three Geminis. But Gemini 6 drew easily one of the biggest crowds yet, mostly because there would be two launches that day, barely ninety minutes apart, instead of the usual one. First up, the Atlas rocket would punch an uncrewed Agena spacecraft into the sky; after that, the Titan rocket with a Gemini spacecraft perched on top and Schirra and Stafford tucked inside would blast off. For the gawkers, that meant twice the number of countdowns and twice the level of thrills. For the morbid—and the media—it meant twice the chance that something would go disastrously wrong.
If everything went exactly as NASA had scripted it, the astronauts would spend a day chasing the Agena down in space and then park the nose of the Gemini into the collar of the Agena, locking them together like a single vehicle, a sequence they had practiced on Earth umpteen times.
NASA’s moon-landing plans called for exactly this kind of maneuver: someday, a lunar excursion module, or LEM, with two men aboard, would lift off from the surface of the moon and dock with a command module—an eleven-foot-tall cone that contained the cockpit where the astronauts lived—with one man aboard, that was orbiting overhead. Once all three men were safely inside the command module, they would jettison the LEM and all three would come home. The US had never managed such a rendezvous and docking feat even in Earth orbit, and the Soviet Union hadn’t, either. This would be a good chance to practice the maneuver, check a box in the pre–moon mission to-do list, and tweak the Russians as well. The entire Gemini 6 mission would take just two days, but the space race would be transformed after it was over.
So far, things looked promising. With just over two minutes to go, the TV cameras switched away from the correspondents to a view of the Atlas-Agena on the pad. A digital clock superimposed on the screen counted down the seconds; precisely at zero, the engine of the uncrewed rocket lit.
“Liftoff right on the button, right on the hour,” Walter Cronkite, the CBS News anchor, enthused. “There goes that fiery boom of the Atlas.”
While Cronkite admired these massive machines and the astronauts who flew them, most everyone in America admired Walter Cronkite. Sure, you could read about the launch or any of the day’s events in your local newspaper the next morning, but nothing beat the live broadcast on one of the three major television networks viewers could choose from. And Walter Cronkite, at once warm and serious, a reassuring storyteller who never strayed from the facts, was the visitor Americans trusted most to be invited into their living rooms night after night to convey the latest on anything worth knowing. Once again, he’d have an important story to tell.
But then, just under five minutes into the flight, at the moment the Agena was supposed to have separated from the booster, the tracking station on the Canary Islands reported that it had lost the signal from the Agena, with data screens going blank both there and in Mission Control in Houston. What took the place of the healthy vital signs of a spacecraft speeding into orbit was the worst thing possible: a radar signal from a land-based station that was receiving five scattered reflections spreading across the sky in what could only suggest an explosion.
It was fatal. The tens of thousands of people who had camped on the beaches to watch the two liftoffs might not have understood that, but the people in the VIP stands—at least the ones who worked for NASA—did. Schirra and Stafford, strapped into their rocket ship to nowhere, knew it, too. And so did every man at every console in the launch control center.
It would be a full fifty minutes before the Canary Islands tracking station confirmed the death of the Agena and, by extension, the scrubbing of the Gemini 6 launch with the simple words “No joy, no joy.” By then, Borman and Lovell, who had been watching from the viewing stand, had quit for the launch control center and found the predicted gloom. But they also found the beginnings of a mad bit of improvisational genius.
Chris Kraft was huddled with a few of his top engineers when one gave voice to what a few others were already thinking.
“Suppose we use a Gemini as a target instead of an Agena?” one asked. For those who didn’t quite understand his point, he added, “Launch Gemini 7 first and make it the target for 6.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Kraft said immediately. “That can’t be done.” But even as he spoke the words, it was becoming clear to him and everyone else in the room that it could indeed be done. In truth, it was practically begging to be done.
A joint mission would mean four men in orbit at once, placed there by a space program that only four years ago had struggled to launch even a single man on a suborbital high jump for a five-minute glimpse of space.
Once the two Geminis were in orbit, there could be no docking between them; the ships weren’t built that way. But it was the rendezvous part of the mission that was the hardest and most important: two pickup-truck-size vehicles that were moving at 17,500 miles per hour would have to find one another in millions of cubic miles of near-Earth space and then approach to within just inches of each other. The astronauts would get so close they’d be able to recognize one another’s faces in the windows; achieving that kind of precision would be a big step forward for the space program.
Launching a dual mission would not mean moving up the date of the Gemini 7 launch, not least because Borman and Lovell still had a month of training to go. But it would mean sending the two spacecraft up in reverse order. Once Gemini 7 launched and was in orbit, the ground team would have eight to ten days to roll out Gemini 6 and get it into space while a few days remained in the fourteen-day mission of Gemini 7.
Despite himself, Kraft had to admit that he was warming to the makeshift madness of the thing. NASA would have to resolve a number of problems first: how to modify a global tracking web built to follow one spacecraft so that it could keep track of two; whether the navigational algorithms could be written in time for the computers that would help guide the two spacecraft. But those were the kinds of problems Brainbusters had always been paid to solve, and these were the kinds of made-up, on-the-fly missions that astronauts always hoped to participate in. Kraft, ever and always a Brainbuster, gave the go-ahead: four men in two different spacecraft would for the first time ever meet in space.