Cape Kennedy, Florida. 9:41 A.M. EST, Wednesday, March 16, 1966. This is Gemini Launch Control. We are T minus 114 minutes for Gemini VIII on Pad Nineteen and nineteen minutes away from the Atlas/Agena liftoff on Pad 14. Prime pilots for the mission, Astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott, were over the hatch and into the Gemini VIII spacecraft at thirty-eight minutes past the hour. They are now hooking up. . . . Both pilots will have an opportunity to observe the Atlas/Agena liftoff by looking through the windows of the Gemini VIII spacecraft at a television monitor mounted outside the spacecraft right above their hatches. . . .
Three and a half years into his career as an astronaut—1,277 days, to be exact—Neil Armstrong, thirty-five years old, finally entered a spacecraft, atop a fully fueled Titan II rocket, ready to make his first space shot.
9:58 A.M. This is Gemini Launch Control at T minus 2 minutes and counting on the Atlas/Agena liftoff. At Launch Complex Nineteen, they are just closing the hatches on the Gemini VIII spacecraft with Astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott on board . . .
Gemini VIII, the fourteenth flight overall in the U.S. manned space program, was definitely worth waiting for. A rendezvous in space had been made only once before, just four months earlier, and had never been managed by the Russians. It happened in December 1965 when astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford in Gemini VI coasted up from their orbit to stop only a few yards away from Gemini VII, with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell aboard. Now Gemini VIII was to perform not just a rendezvous but the first actual docking in space, by joining up with the specially designed, unmanned Gemini Agena Target Vehicle (GATV).
The Gemini VIII mission also called for thirty-three-year-old, Texas-born pilot Dave Scott to perform a far more complicated EVA than Ed White (Neil’s residential neighbor) had accomplished in America’s first space walk during Gemini IV in June 1965. Also promising to occupy the crew during their scheduled seventy-hour, fifty-five-orbit flight were onboard experiments involving zodiacal light photography, frog egg growth, synoptic terrain photography, nuclear emulsion, and atmospheric cloud spectrophotography. “We thought of it as being an absolutely super flight with great objectives,” Armstrong recalls, “and we really loved the challenge.
“In ancient Greek mythology, Gemini meant the twins, Castor and Pollux,” Armstrong explains. Armstrong and Scott designed the patch for Gemini VIII “having a ray of light emanating from Castor and Pollux going through a prism and reflecting the full spectrum of spaceflight.”
As was true for the entire Gemini program, Gemini VIII’s fundamental objective was preparing for the Moon landing. When NASA in the summer of 1962 decided, after a heated yearlong internal technical debate, that the lunar-orbit-rendezvous (LOR) method was the only way to get to the Moon by the end of the decade, it became absolutely essential to learn how to rendezvous and dock with another spacecraft.
It was up to Armstrong, as commander of Gemini VIII, to pull off, for the first time in the brief history of human spaceflight, those critical maneuvers. “The rendezvous and docking was certainly at the top of my priority list,” Armstrong declares. “Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford had confirmed in Gemini VII–VI that the rendezvous strategy that we were using worked. So we knew it was doable. But Gemini VIII provided a substantial piloting challenge, and that certainly appealed to me.
“Second to the rendezvous and docking, I would place the entry to a target landing area as my main ambition about the flight. Of course, that didn’t work out as we planned, because of the trouble we encountered after the docking” with the GATV.
As originally developed by Lockheed for the U.S. Air Force, the Agena was a second-stage rocket. As such, it proved so reliable that NASA mission planners as early as 1961 contemplated using it as a target vehicle in a rendezvous experiment, an idea that blossomed into Project Gemini. The repurposed Agena needed a three-way data communications system, a radar transponder and other tracking aids, an attitude stabilization system, and a docking collar. Most complicated of all, the GATV needed a restartable engine capable of no less than five start-and-stop cycles in space (in contrast to the two-start engine that came standard in the original Agena rocket), enabling the docked pair of spacecraft to be maneuvered in any direction, even to a different orbit.
Several times during its troubled development from 1961 through 1965, NASA came close to pulling the plug on the entire GATV program. It had wanted to fly the machine as early as Gemini IV in June 1965. By the end of the year, a mere three months before the scheduled launch of Gemini VIII, NASA came up with a substitute: a poor man’s target vehicle called simply the ATDA, or “augmented target docking adapter.” So desperate was NASA for a rendezvous and docking target for Gemini that its engineers, as part of an emergency effort known as Project Surefire, bolted the ATDA (the front end of an Agena without its motor and tanks) to a piece of surplus Gemini hardware and fitted it to the end of an Atlas booster. Fortunately, the crude arrangement did not have to be used, at least not for Gemini VIII. In the nick of time, just eleven days before the scheduled launch of Armstrong’s mission, a modified Agena was certified for launch.
10:00 A.M. We’ve got liftoff of the Atlas-Agena. Our network controller advises that liftoff was three seconds after the hour. . . . The flight dynamics plot looks very good. . . . Coming up on six minutes into the flight. . . . We are now 650 miles downrange and 120 miles in altitude. We are aiming for a 161-mile-high orbit. Agena confirms the shroud that encloses the target-docking adapter into which Neil Armstrong and David Scott will dock with this bird has separated.
A petty little prelaunch problem inside their own spacecraft almost cost Neil and Dave their chance to go after the Agena, now streaking into space: “Just after Dave and I slid through the hatches and into our couches, one of the guys in the flight preparation crew found some epoxy in the catcher mechanism on Dave’s harness. It was very hard for us to do anything about it, so restricted we were in our seats, but Pete Conrad, our backup commander, and pad leader Guenter Wendt, after a little sweating, got the catch unglued. I didn’t really pay much attention to it, because there were other things going on.” Scott thought about it a little more than Neil. “Just a little thing like that,” Dave surmised, “might have cost us the launch.”
10:08 A.M. The astronauts have been busy in the spacecraft at Launch Complex Nineteen. . . . When Neil Armstrong heard that the Agena had ignited and was performing well, he came back with a very strong and very happy “very good” remark. . . . During the last few minutes, we have checked the computers, and Flight Dynamics advises the Agena is in orbit. Its orbit is as follows: 162 nautical miles apogee and 156 miles perigee. This is as close as we could hope with an unmanned vehicle. It’s cause for a lot of smiles here in the Control Center. One of the controllers is passing around cigars that are labeled, It’s an Orbit. This is Gemini Mission Control Houston.
Janet stayed home with her two small boys in Houston and watched the liftoff nervously on television. Neil had gotten motel reservations for his parents, who were taken with other VIPs to the Cape Kennedy viewing stands by a NASA bus. A NASA protocol officer was constantly at senior Armstrongs’ side, as was their daughter June and her husband, Dr. Jack Hoffman, and son Dean, and Dean’s wife, Marilyn. The in-laws of both Neil’s siblings (Florida residents) attended, as did Janet’s mother, Louise Shearon, and Janet’s sister Carolyn Trude and her husband. “My heart was in my throat the whole time,” Viola Armstrong remembered years later. “I was speechless, but my thoughts were with God.”
Neil himself experienced a “counterbalance” to the buildup of anxiety and anticipation in that “most times in airplanes when you’re going to go fly, you go fly. But in spacecraft a lot of times you go to the launchpad and just sit for a couple of hours and then get out of the spacecraft and go back to your quarters. It happened so often that it was always a surprise when you really launched. You didn’t really expect it” until you felt the rocket’s anchoring bolts shear off for breakaway.
Inwardly, Armstrong definitely felt the excitement, his heart rate climbing during launch to a maximum of 146 beats per minute. During liftoff, Dave Scott’s heart rate peaked at 128. Neil has always interpreted his higher heart rate as a positive and not as a sign of physical stress. Aeromedical investigations done in association with the X-15 program discovered that what at first appeared to be excessive heart rates in a pilot “should be considered as norms, forming a baseline for pilot response.” Rather than indicating any inherent physiological problem, most of the increase in heart rate happened in anticipation of what a pilot knew would have to be an elevated performance on his part and thus reflected a “keying up” rather than a direct physical stress. If Armstrong’s heart rate rose higher than that of fellow pilots and astronauts in such situations, perhaps it was because Neil was only more intent on preparing himself mentally for what he was about to do.
11:40 a.m. T-20 seconds and counting. Fifteen, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero, we have ignition, and we have liftoff [at 11:41:02 a.m.] . . . Neil Armstrong reports the clock has started. Roll program is in, Armstrong says. Twenty seconds into the flight and Armstrong says the pitch program is in . . . Everything looks good. . . . Flight dynamics says we are “go” for staging. . . . The spacecraft is now about fifty-two miles downrange and Armstrong says we have staging and that the second stage has ignited. Armstrong said they noted the staging and saw a little fireball behind them. . . . Jim Lovell, the CapCom [capsule communicator] at Mission Control who is in communication with the spacecraft, has just advised Armstrong that he is “go” from the ground . . . Six minutes and five seconds into the flight and Armstrong advises they have completed their burn. They are free of the second stage.
“When the Atlas/Agena went on time,” Armstrong recalls, “that was a great sign. Then we went precisely on time with our Titan as well, which was a good sign, too, because it meant that our rendezvous schedule was going to be just like we’d practiced for.
“The Titan II was a pretty smooth ride,” Neil remembers, “a lot smoother than the first phase of the Saturn V would be in Apollo. The launch was very definite; you knew you were on your way when the rocket lit off. You could hear the thrust from the engines, at least at low altitudes, but the noise did not interfere with communications. It was really quite acceptable. The g levels got to be pretty high in the first stage of the Titan—something like seven g.”
At four minutes and eleven seconds elapsed time following liftoff, Scott said to his commander, “Hey, how ’bout that view!?” “That’s fantastic!’ Armstrong answered. “They were right, weren’t they?!” Dave exclaimed. “Boy, oh boy!” Neil replied. “Here we go!”
From the nearly forty-mile height he had reached in his X-15 flight of April 1962, Armstrong had gotten a good look at the Earth’s curvature, but that view was nowhere nearly as stunning as that which he and Scott experienced as the Titan II shot their spacecraft up to the 161 miles that became its orbital apogee. According to Neil: “First, all you see is blue sky and then as you get into the pitch-over program—you’re upside down and you’re pitching so that your feet are going up towards the sky and you see the horizon coming down through the top of the window. It’s quite a spectacular sight because you’re going over the Caribbean and you see all those blues and greens and occasionally an island here and there. . . . It would be nice to enjoy the view, but you’re too worried about the engine keeping running.”
Intermittent voice communications with Gemini VIII happened a few minutes at a time as the spacecraft circled the globe on its easterly path. Relaying between the cockpit and Houston was a worldwide tracking network with stations on Ascension, a British island in the South Atlantic; at Tananarive in the Malagasy Republic, on the island of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa; at Carnarvon, in western Australia; at Kauai, the northern-most Hawaiian Island; and at Guaymas, in Mexico on the Gulf of California.
Not until the astronauts were over Hawaii did they try to do much sightseeing. Armstrong, who was familiar with the Hawaiian Islands from his days in the navy and his sojourn at the Kauai tracking station during Cooper’s Mercury flight and Gemini III, was able to make out Molokai, Maui, and the big island of Hawaii, but a bank of storm clouds obscured his view of Oahu and Kauai itself. Approaching the Baja, Neil set his eyes on his old navy base in San Diego and exclaimed, “Oh! Look at all those ships!” Both men then started looking for the shoreline of Texas, hoping to see Houston and to pinpoint the location of their homes just east of the Manned Spacecraft Center. But the demands of the mission quickly interrupted the scenic interlude. The job at hand was to chase down the Agena, presently some 1,230 miles away from Gemini VIII and moving in a separate, higher orbit.
The first task Armstrong needed to perform was aligning the spacecraft’s inertial platform, a fixed base, or “stable table,” that measured angles—and thus directions—in the void of space where all directions (up-down, right-left) are relative. In the Gemini spacecraft, the inertial platform consisted of three gyroscopes mounted at right angles to one other. As the spacecraft moved relative to the gyroscopes, the inertial measuring unit fed pitch, roll, and yaw angles to the onboard computer tracking the Agena via radar. Three accelerometers mounted in tandem with the gyroscopes measured the spacecraft’s reaction to thruster firings.
A five-second burst of Gemini VIII’s forward thrusters would slow the Gemini spacecraft into a position where its orbital inclination—that is, the angle between the plane of its orbit and that of the equator—matched up precisely with the Agena’s. This critical moment came shortly before 1:15 P.M., at one hour and thirty-four minutes elapsed time into the mission, just as Armstrong and Scott crossed over the Texas coastline for the first time and headed out over the Gulf of Mexico.
“A fundamental requirement of rendezvous,” Armstrong explains, “is to get your orbit into the same plane as the target’s orbit, because if you’re misaligned by even a few degrees, your spacecraft won’t have enough fuel to get to its rendezvous target. So the plan is to start off within just a few tenths of a degree of your target’s orbit. That is established by making your launch precisely on time, to put you in the same plane under the revolving Earth as is your target vehicle.” But no matter how precisely the two launches are timed, the angles of inclination in the resulting orbits of the two spacecraft invariably prove to be slightly askew. In the case of Gemini VIII, a .05-degree difference between its inclination and that of the Agena’s needed to be burned off.
Even under ideal circumstances, chasing down a target in space required unusually keen piloting. Armstrong’s Apollo 11 crewmate Michael Collins was himself introduced to the dark mysteries of rendezvous while training for his own Gemini X flight of July 1966: “The pilot sees the Agena’s blinking light out the window, points the nose of the Gemini at it, and fires a thruster to move toward the Agena. For a short time all seems well, and the Agena grows in size. Then a strange thing happens: the Agena begins to sink and disappear under the Gemini’s nose. Then minutes later it reappears from below, but now it is going faster than the Gemini and vanishes out front somewhere. What has happened? When the Gemini fired its thruster to increase its velocity, it also increased its centrifugal force, causing its orbit to become larger. As it climbed toward its new apogee, it slowed down, so that it began to lose ground compared to the Agena. The Gemini pilot should have fired a thruster to move away from the Agena, causing him to drop down below it into a faster orbit, and begin to overtake it.” Complicate those tricky maneuvers by throwing in orbits of different shapes, or orbits not in the same plane, or difficult rendezvous lighting conditions, or the need to bring the orbits of the two spacecraft together in a great hurry—in other words, any number of real-world complications of spaceflight—and the demands of rendezvous grew exceedingly stringent.
Without extensive simulator time, it is doubtful that any astronaut could ever have been truly ready to perform a space rendezvous. “Rendezvous simulation in Gemini was really quite good,” Armstrong notes. “We achieved fifty to sixty rendezvous simulations on the ground, about two-thirds of which were with some sort of emergency. That means that some part of the equipment was either malfunctioning or inoperative during the rendezvous. We completed the rendezvous in all of them but two. But in the two that we missed there were unplanned malfunctions of the simulation experiment, so we never really missed . . . What the ground simulations could not do well was simulate the visual field we would be experiencing. It was okay at night: the star field was pretty good and the relative motion against the stars was pretty good. But when the target was in daylight, it couldn’t do a very good job of reproducing that.”
A guidance computer was needed to compute the location of the two spacecraft, to define the best transfer arc into the GATV’s orbit, and, during the final phases of rendezvous, to solve precise mathematical problems based on radar lock-on with the Agena. Built for NASA by Federal Systems Division of IBM in Oswego, New York, the Gemini guidance computer was among the world’s first computers to use digital, solid-state electronics for the purpose of assisting with the real-time guidance, navigation, and control of a flying machine. “This was a teeny-tiny computer,” Armstrong relates. Measuring nineteen inches long and weighing fifty pounds, the computer fit inside the front wall of the spacecraft. Within this compact unit, tiny doughnut-shaped magnets comprising the computer’s core memory stored 159,744 bits of binary information—less than 20,000 bytes—far less than even the very moderate storage capacity of the very first eight-inch floppy disks developed in the early 1970s, which was some 130,000 bytes. Adding only slightly to this capacity was a tape drive by which the astronauts could put alternate programs into the computer. Gemini VIII was the first space mission to benefit from the alternate-tape system. Even with what was then the most current computer technology, it was incumbent on the mission planners to reduce the complexities of rendezvous.
Mathematical models, simulations, and early Gemini flight experiences determined that the optimal altitude difference between the two spacecraft was fifteen miles, and that the ideal transfer angle—the angular distance the Gemini spacecraft needed to traverse during its rise to the higher orbit of the Agena—was 130 degrees rather than the 180 degrees (or halfway around the globe) called for by the so-called Hohmann transfer. This was the classical method of transferring from one circular orbit to another circular orbit with the greatest efficiency, as suggested by German engineer Walter Hohmann (1880–1945) in his 1925 book Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (The Attainability of Celestial Bodies). Employing the Hohmann transfer, as Armstrong explains, “you maneuver to perigee, your lowest point in an orbit, accelerate the vehicle, and then climb for half an orbit, arriving at the orbit of the target vehicle with essentially zero vertical velocity. That sounds good, but the disadvantage of the Hohmann transfer is that when you arrive at the target orbit, there is a lot of motion between your target and the stars in the background. You’re looking at the target and everything is moving behind it, so it’s difficult for you to know exactly how to control your own vehicle to make sure that you’re on the proper approach. What our mission planners worked out was an approach path that allowed us to arrive at the Agena when it appeared to be a great big star fixed in the middle of the background and things weren’t all going every which way. This technique used a little more fuel, but it gave us the advantage of having a much easier approach to our target vehicle, because we didn’t have the background moving on us. With our target frozen against the star background, we could know we were on the right path. It automatically told us something important if the target started moving; it told us that we had a velocity component that we needed to take out.” As for the best lighting conditions, it was found through analysis and simulation that the Sun should be behind the Gemini spacecraft during its braking phase to rendezvous. From these stipulations, the mission planners worked backwards to design launch times, ascent trajectories, and orbital parameters that set up the optimum conditions for Gemini’s terminal phase of rendezvous leading to docking.
From the time of the spacecraft’s first burn at one hour and thirty-four minutes into the mission (a period when the onboard computer operated in “catch-up mode”) to the point in time that the spacecraft began terminal phase (when the astronauts manually switched the computer back to “rendezvous mode”), it took approximately two hours and fifteen minutes. Armstrong and Scott then decided to eat what turned out to be their only meal in space. Some six hours had passed since they had eaten their prelaunch breakfast (filet mignon, eggs, toast with butter and jelly, coffee, and milk) back in crew quarters at the Cape. Schirra and Stafford in Gemini VI had not taken the time to eat early enough in their mission, leaving them hungry and in need of energy by the time they rendezvoused with Borman and Lovell in Gemini VII.
Inside the meal packet labeled Day 1/Meal B was a freeze-dried chicken and gravy casserole. But a call from CapCom Jim Lovell in Houston, relayed through the tracking station at Antigua in the British West Indies, told the crew to get ready for their next burn—a phasing adjustment, or slight in-plane repositioning, requiring another platform alignment. Taking advantage of weightlessness, Armstrong and Scott used patches of Velcro to stick their packaged food on the ceiling of their spacecraft until the burn was complete. Retrieving their food half an hour later, the astronauts found the casseroles still dry in spots. Washing NASA’s humble entrée down with fruit juice, Armstrong next tried a package of brownies, only to have crumbs float all over the cabin.
The next maneuver, a plane-change burn, came over the Pacific Ocean just before completing a second orbit, at 2:45:50 elapsed time. Punching the aft thrusters, Armstrong produced a horizontal velocity change of 26.24 feet per second, which brought Gemini VIII’s nose down, perhaps imprecisely:
2:46:27 |
Armstrong: |
I think we overdid it a bit. |
Not until the spacecraft was over Mexico was Neil’s gut feeling confirmed. Lovell told him from the remote site line at Guaymas to add two feet per second to his speed by making another very short burn. As Scott later said, “It was . . . a pretty quick loose burn . . . without much preparation.”
Armstrong explains how he and Scott brought Gemini VIII to the verge of the rendezvous: “We had gotten in plane and into an orbit where we were below the target vehicle so that we were traveling faster around the Earth than the target was, so we were catching him. Then we waited until we got to about one hundred thirty degrees behind the Agena. At that point we added some velocity and got into a transfer arc that was to take us up to the GATV orbit. When we got to this point we started making computations of our range and range rate to assure ourselves that we were on the right transfer arc. We did that both with the computer and manually with charts and also with the ground—all three ways. At intermediate points, we made small corrections based on the computations to improve our transfer arc, because it was impossible to get it exactly right. If we were off just a little bit, the errors got bigger. So we took the errors out and restarted the calculating. Knowing that it was inevitable that we would get a little bit out of plane (meaning that we would be going sideways when we got to the terminal phase of rendezvous), we made a number of fine adjustments on the way so we could hopefully arrive at the target with the target having zero relative motion against the stars and with us approaching at a reasonable rate that had us using a minimum amount of fuel in decelerating for final approach.”
The terminal phase could not begin until Gemini VIII had a solid radar lock-on with the Agena. On the Agena was a transponder that answered the inquiring signal sent out by the Gemini spacecraft. The computer on board Gemini VIII measured the time it took for this signal to make a round-trip to the Agena and back. From this measurement, the Gemini computer twice calculated the range between the two vehicles, comparing the two transit times to deduce how quickly the spacecraft was closing on its target. Commander Armstrong kept range and range rates constantly in mind so as not to overshoot the target by closing in on it too fast.
At 3:08:48 elapsed time, while over the United States and in direct communication with Houston, Armstrong reported, “We’re getting intermittent lock-on with the radar.” Thirty-five minutes later, with the spacecraft over Africa, Neil reported a solid radar lock:
2:20 P.M. This is Gemini Houston Control. About two minutes ago, Neil Armstrong called in over Tananarive and he was able to confirm at that time that radar lock had been established. . . . He said the range was 158 nautical miles. This is an all-important element of a rendezvous mission—the establishment of that radar link. The pilots say that if they had to lose any of the several things involved in a rendezvous mission—that is, the platform, the computer, or the radar—the one they would rather not lose is the radar.
While still over Madagascar, Armstrong needed to perform another burn. The transfer arc in which Gemini VIII had been moving for the past couple of hours in order to catch up with the Agena had been elliptical, the pathway that was dictated, as Johannes Kepler explained, by the gravitational field of one body. At 3:40:10 after the launch, Armstrong nosed down his spacecraft and applied the aft thrusters. The burn resulted in a velocity change of 59 feet per second, which circularized Gemini VIII’s orbit and put it more precisely in plane with the Agena.
It took a while before the crew could see its target. “It’s hard to do at night,” Armstrong explains. “We had the radar information giving us range, range rate, and position. At some point we knew we would see the target. But we had to be pretty close. According to the mission plan, what we wanted to do is be in the dark throughout 130 degrees of the transfer arc—or at least 125 degrees or so. Then at roughly ten miles out, the target would go into daylight. At that point it lit up like a Christmas tree. We could see it against that dark sky just like a gigantic beacon. When that happened, the star background became less important because we would be on a good trajectory, so we could make the final adjustments visually.”
At 4:40 elapsed time, while over the Houston tracking station, Scott radioed the crew’s sighting of an object seventy-six miles distant that was gleaming in the sunlight. They assumed it was the Agena. Busy preparing for maneuvers necessary for Terminal Phase Initiation (TPI), Armstrong did not comment on the sighting of the target for another three and a half minutes:
4:44:17 |
Armstrong: |
Advise at seventy-six miles we’ve got what appears to be the Agena, and also we have a visual on another object, which, at this time is approximately twelve degrees above the Agena and appears to be in plane with it. It’s possible that it could be a planet. . . . Oh, listen, Dave, I’ve got to align. |
With the Agena located ten degrees above Gemini VIII, Armstrong needed to align the inertial platform once again, in preparation for one of his last translation maneuvers. In it Neil would pitch up the spacecraft’s nose some thirty degrees and cant the vehicle roughly seventeen degrees to the left. When that maneuver was completed successfully, he had time to take another look at the Agena:
4:47:33 |
Armstrong: |
Okay, we have a good solid visual on the Agena at fifty-six miles. I’m taking a second look at it with the sextant. |
A few minutes later, the Agena vanished from view as it entered twilight, soon to reappear for the astronauts when the acquisition lights on the target vehicle, by command from Gemini VIII, blinked on:
5:02:18 |
Armstrong: |
Going into darkness at—let’s see, 05:02. We lost a visual on the Agena, and I had the ACQ light up right away. Range was forty-five miles. It’s very hard to see, but it looks like a sixth-magnitude star, I’d say. |
“Once we completed our transfer arc,” explains Armstrong, “we had to make final adjustments that would get us exactly into the same position and to the same speed as the Agena, so that we would be flying in formation. From that point, we did what was called ‘station keeping.’ This meant we stayed about one hundred fifty feet apart. We flew around the target but never got very far away from it. We had to stay in the same orbit as the Agena, because if we went astray by even just a little bit, the errors propagated. So we had to fly essentially in formation. Unlike with flying in formation with aircraft, where you fly in the same direction as the target and have the nose of your airplane pointed just like the nose of the airplane with which you are in formation, that was not required in space.”
High over the tracking ship Coastal Sentry Quebec (CapCom James R. Fucci), which was positioned near the Caribbean island of Antigua, the crew of Gemini VIII prepared to apply the brakes to their spacecraft so that it would not close too quickly on the Agena and fly right by it. Delicately, Armstrong handled the braking by intermittently firing his aft thrusters in very short bursts, while Dave Scott called out Gemini VIII’s range and rate:
5:42:52 |
Armstrong: |
Okay, I’m going to start braking down a little bit very shortly because we’re at 15K [15,000 feet or 2.84 miles away]. We’re inside 15K and I’d like to . . . |
5:43:04 |
Scott: |
Yes, we’re inside 15K. |
5:43:08 |
Armstrong: |
How about if I brake off? |
5:43:09 |
Scott: |
Yes, I agree. |
5:43:25 |
Armstrong: |
Okay. Now give me a digital range for the remainder of twenty seconds. |
5:43:37 |
Scott: |
Okay. You’re at 10,000 feet. |
5:43:40 |
Armstrong: |
Okay. And range rate? |
5:43:41 |
Scott: |
Forty-four feet per second, but let me get you another readout on that. |
5:43:44 |
Armstrong: |
Okay. I’m reading. |
5:43:47 |
Scott: |
Ready. |
Two minutes and twenty-one seconds later came the glare of the Agena’s lights. Edging ahead at the glacial pace of five feet per second, a pace by which it would have taken a track athlete twenty-four seconds to run forty yards, Gemini VIII bore down on the Agena.
At this critical point in the rendezvous, Houston reported that, “all in all, the pilots are acting extremely ‘ho-hum,’ ” and that the crew had to be “urged to say a bit more about their situation.” The news from Mission Control was misleading, as Armstrong’s excitement was clearly evident:
5:52:32 |
Scott: |
You’re 900 feet. |
5:52:35 |
Scott: |
Five feet per second. |
5:53:01 |
Armstrong: |
That’s just unbelievable! Unbelievable! |
5:53:08 |
Armstrong: |
I can’t believe it! |
Scott: |
Yes, I can’t either. Outstanding job, Coach! [Starting in training, Dave often called Neil “Coach” or “Chief.”] |
|
5:53:13 |
Armstrong: |
Way to go, partner! |
5:53:16 |
Scott: |
You did it, boy! You did a good job! |
5:53:17 |
Armstrong: |
It takes two to tango. |
5:53:20 |
Scott: |
Say again? |
5:53:21 |
Armstrong: |
It takes two of us. |
5:53:25 |
Scott: |
Okay, we’re at . . . |
5:53:27 |
Armstrong: |
Back off. |
5:53:32 |
Scott: |
Okay, We’re 700 feet. Eleven feet per second. Let me redo that one. I like seven. You buy seven feet per second? |
5:53:52 |
Armstrong: |
Yes. |
5:53:56 |
Scott: |
Boy! Look at that sucker! That’s beautiful! |
Two minutes later, CapCom Lovell, who had kept quiet so as not to bother Armstrong and Scott during the critical braking phase, broke in and asked the crew for an update on the rendezvous. Dave Scott knew that Armstrong deserved center stage:
5:56:19 |
Scott: |
You tell them. |
5:56:23 |
Armstrong: |
Flight Houston. This is Gemini VIII. We’re station keeping on the Agena at about 150 feet. |
With relative velocity between the two vehicles canceled out, rendezvous—only the second ever made in the brief history of the Space Age—had been achieved.
Station keeping posed no particular problem for Armstrong: “The Gemini VII/VI combination flight had reported that it was quite easy to fly very close and maintain station keeping without worrying about bumping into the other spacecraft inadvertently. Schirra and Borman had indicated that it was very easy to do once they got in the proper position, and I found that to be true also. It was very easy to fly close. We flew around the vehicle and took pictures of the Agena from different perspectives, in different lighting.”
Armstrong always used the term “we” when it came to flying any aircraft or spacecraft, but the requirements of the Gemini mission were too serious for him to share any of the piloting responsibilities with Scott, at least not yet:
6:03:52 |
Armstrong: |
Man, it flies easy! I’d love to let you do it, but . . . |
6:03:56 |
Scott: |
Oh, no! |
6:03:57 |
Armstrong: |
I think I better get my practice while I can. |
6:03:59 |
Scott: |
Man, I’ll have my chance! |
6:04:00 |
Armstrong: |
Get yours later. Okay? |
6:04:04 |
Scott: |
Yes. I wouldn’t even take it if you gave it to me. It’s up to you to stick with it. The more you get now, the better you’re going to be when . . . |
6:04:52 |
Armstrong: |
Man, this is easy! |
6:04:53 |
Scott: |
Is it really? |
6:04:54 |
Armstrong: |
This station keeping, there’s nothing to it. |
Even after this exchange, Armstrong planned to let Scott fly the spacecraft sometime later in the mission: “I was going to have him fly it, but not then. I thought it would be much better to do it later. We were coming up on darkness, and we needed to get this job done. I had a lot of stuff I was supposed to practice in order to get the docking done, and I decided that he could fly the spacecraft after we undocked or after he did his EVA, one of the other times when we were still going to be around the Agena. I thought there would be another time for him to get his chance.”
Armstrong and Scott kept their rendezvous station across most of that “day,” knowing that the plan was to proceed with the docking before they moved into the next “night,” when docking conditions would be far from optimal. In the orbit they were in, daylight lasted for about forty-five minutes.
The rendezvous began just west of Hawaii. The press noted the irony that Schirra and Borman, the command pilots for Gemini VI and VII, were at that very moment in an airplane also heading eastward for Honolulu, closing out a goodwill tour to the Far East. Earlier in the day, Schirra and Borman had tried to contact Gemini VIII via a radio transmission—call sign “Gemini 7/6”—sent by UHF to the Kauai station. Armstrong and Elliot See had made the same sort of friendly call to Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad early in the latter’s Gemini V flight.
Gemini VIII’s location at daylight put it in the vicinity of USS Rose Knot Victor (CapCom Keith K. Kundel), tracking the spacecraft from off the northeastern coast of South America, at the very moment Armstrong was easing the spacecraft toward the docking at the barely perceptible closing rate of three inches per second:
6:32:21 |
Armstrong: |
Okay, we’re sitting about two feet out . . . |
6:32:22 |
CapCom: |
Go ahead. |
6:32:23 |
Armstrong: |
. . . we’ll go ahead and dock. |
6:32:25 |
CapCom: |
Roger. Stand by for a couple minutes here. |
6:32:42 |
CapCom: |
Okay, Gemini VIII . . . You’re looking good on the ground. Go ahead and dock. |
6:32:50 |
Armstrong: |
Okay. We’re going to go ahead and dock. |
6:33:40 |
CapCom: |
Okay, Gemini VIII. It looks good here from the ground. We’re showing CONE RIGID. Everything looks fine for the docking. |
6:33:52 |
Armstrong: |
Flight, we are docked! Yes, it’s really a smoothie. |
Celebration broke loose in Mission Control for a few mad seconds.
6:34:01 |
CapCom: |
Roger. Hey, congratulations! This is real good. |
6:34:07 |
Scott: |
You couldn’t have the thrill down there that we have up here! |
6:34:10 |
CapCom: |
Ha! Ha! Ha! |
6:34:24 |
Armstrong: |
Okay. Just for your information, the Agena was very stable and at the present time we are having no noticeable oscillations at all. |
6:34:37 |
CapCom: |
Roger. Copy. Agena very stable and no noticeable oscillations. |
It came as a surprise to no one that both the crew and the flight controllers in Mission Control focused, during the first minutes of the docking, on the performance of the Agena, given how riddled with problems the GATV had been. Houston had difficulty verifying that the Agena was receiving and storing the commands uplinking for an upcoming yaw maneuver. Flight also wondered why the Agena’s velocity meter did not seem to be operating. These two mysteries suggested to Flight Director John Hodge and his team of controllers a malfunction in the Agena’s attitude control system:
6:55:38 |
CapCom: |
. . . If you run into trouble and the attitude control system in the Agena goes wild, just send in the Command 400 to turn it off and take control with the spacecraft. Did you copy that? |
6:55:58 |
Scott: |
Roger. We understand. |
6:56:01 |
CapCom: |
Roger. Okay. Stand by. |
Six minutes and seven seconds after this warning reminder, the Tananarive tracking station lost the spacecraft’s signal as it moved into a dead zone in the worldwide tracking network, across the waters of the Indian Ocean. For the next twenty-one minutes, there would be absolutely no communications with Gemini VIII, now coupled in flight with the Agena as one integrated spacecraft.
Then came the next chilling words from Gemini VIII:
7:17:15 |
Scott: |
We have serious problems here. We’re . . . we’re tumbling end over end up here. We’re disengaged from the Agena. |
Armstrong recalls the sequence of events leading to the in-flight emergency, the first potentially fatal one ever experienced in the U.S. space program: “We had gone into night just shortly after the docking was made. You didn’t see a lot on the night side. You saw stars up above, and down below you might see lights from a city or lightning areas embedded in thunderstorms, but you didn’t see much down below. I don’t remember exactly what I was doing at the time, but Dave noticed from the ball indicator, and called to my attention, that we were not in level flight like we were supposed to be but rather in a thirty-degree bank angle.”
As their spacecraft had moved into nighttime conditions, the astronauts had turned up the lights in their cockpit as far as they could go, making it almost impossible to detect any changes in their horizon line unless they were looking directly at instruments: “I made some efforts to reduce the bank angle, mainly by triggering short bursts from the Orbit Attitude and Maneuvering System [OAMS]. Then the banking started to go again, so I asked Dave to shut off the controls to the Agena. Dave had all the controls for the Agena on his side of the spacecraft.”
To no avail, Scott commanded the target vehicle to turn off its attitude control system; he jiggled the target vehicle switches and cycled them on and off again; he energized and deenergized the entire Agena control panel. Armstrong relates, “I really believed that we wouldn’t have any trouble with the docking, based on the simulations we did,” but no one had conjured a simulation in which a coupled Gemini-Agena experienced such deviant motions. “If we had been able to practice in such a situation,” Armstrong feels, “I’m sure we would have figured it out much more quickly.
“We had a couple of flights in the Gemini program under our belt by this point,” Armstrong notes. “So it was natural to suspect that if there were a problem or mistake, it would come from the Agena, which had had quite a few problems in its development.”
Reinforcing the bias against the Agena was the warning that Jim Lovell had issued, just moments prior to docking, that at any sign of trouble Armstrong and Scott were to get off the Agena and take control of their own spacecraft. “This was probably an unnecessary comment at this point in the flight, given all the prior concerns about the performance of the Agena,” Armstrong notes, “but I’m sure somebody at Mission Control told Jim to remind us not to mess around if anything started acting up.”
Neil simply said to his crewmate, “We’re going to disengage and undock,” and Dave Scott immediately agreed.
“Go,” Armstrong said to Scott. “We disengaged successfully,” Neil explains, “but I was a bit concerned because I didn’t want to have a reimpact immediately afterwards with the Agena. So I pulled away sharply hoping I could increase the distance before one of us rotated back into the other one. That worked fine. We then immediately tried to get control of our own spacecraft, which we found we couldn’t do. Immediately it was obvious that the problem was not the Agena’s. It was ours.”
The real villain was one of Gemini VIII’s OAMS thrusters—specifically, thruster number eight, a small rocket with twenty-three pounds of thrust used to roll the aircraft. Apparently sometime while Armstrong had been using the OAMS to maneuver the Gemini-Agena combination, a short circuit stuck the thruster open.
“I didn’t know at the time,” relates Armstrong, that “you only hear the thruster when it fired; you didn’t hear it when it was running steadily.”
Gemini VIII was spinning dangerously out of control. According to Armstrong, “The rate of rotation kept increasing until it reached the point where the motions began to couple. In other words, the problem became not just a precariously high rate of roll but also the coupling of pitch and yaw,” in engineering terms, the same sort of control dilemma as the inertial roll coupling that had so plagued the design of early supersonic aircraft.
“Our spacecraft turned into a tumbling gyro, the fastest motion of which was our roll rate. Our roll rate indicators only went up to twenty degrees per second, and all the roll rate indicators had shot up against the peg, so we were clearly beyond twenty degrees per second in all axes—although sometimes they mysteriously came swinging back all the way across.” When the revolutions surpassed over 360 degrees per second, “I became very concerned that we might lose our ability to discriminate accurately,” Armstrong recalls. “I could tell when I looked up above me to the controls for the rocket engine that things were getting blurry. I thought I could, by holding my head at a certain angle, keep the controls in focus, but I knew we were going to have to do something quickly to make sure that we could work on the problem without losing our vision or our consciousness.”
Armstrong found his options narrowed to one, “to stabilize the spacecraft in order to regain control. The only way I could do that was to engage the spacecraft’s other control system.” This was the reentry control system (RCS), which was up in the nose of the spacecraft. As the RCS had two individual rings that were coupled, “its propellant tanks were not normally pressurized until shortly before their normal use. There was a single pushbutton switch that energized pyrotechnic valves that allowed high-pressure gas to pressurize the UMDH/N204 propellant tanks. Once the tanks were pressurized, each redundant ring (A and B) could be operated individually using electrical switches. Once we blew the squib valves, we used both rings to regain control. Then we shut off one of the rings to save its propellant for the entry phase. Mission rules dictated that once the squibs were blown, we were obliged to land at the next available landing site.
“We turned off the other control systems, the ones in the back end, and stabilized the spacecraft with only the front-end system,” Neil relates. “It didn’t take an awful lot of reentry control fuel to do that, but it took enough.”
With the spacecraft now stabilized thanks to his firing of the RCS, Armstrong energized the thrusters, one by one. When he hit the switch for thruster number eight, Gemini VIII immediately started to roll again. “We found the culprit,” Armstrong notes, “but we didn’t have a lot of fuel in the back-end system left available to us at that point.
“Murphy’s law says bad things always happen at the worst possible times,” Armstrong says with a smile. “In this case, we were in orbits that didn’t go over any tracking stations. We were out of radio contact almost all of the time, and for the short stretches when we were in contact, it was over the Rose Knot Victor or the Coastal Sentry Quebec. These ships at sea had limited ability to communicate back with Mission Control or to transmit data to Houston.
“By the time we went over a tracking station or two and were able to convey the nature of our problem so [Mission Control] knew what was going on, there wasn’t any way they could help much at that point.”
7:17:15 |
Scott: |
We have serious problems here. We’re . . . we’re tumbling end over end up here. We’re disengaged from the Agena. |
7:17:22 |
CapCom: |
Okay. We got your SPACECRAFT FREE indication here. |
7:17:26 |
Scott: |
Say again. |
7:17:28 |
CapCom: |
We’re showing your SPACECRAFT FREE. What seems to be the problem? |
7:17:35 |
Armstrong: |
We’re rolling up and we can’t turn anything off. Continuously increasing in a left roll. |
7:17:45 |
CapCom: |
Roger. |
7:18:22 |
CSQ (Fucci): |
Gemini VIII, CSQ. |
7:18:25 |
Armstrong: |
Stand by. |
7:18:33 |
Scott: |
We have a violent left roll here at the present time and we can’t turn the RCSs off, and we can’t fire it, and we certainly have a roll . . . stuck hand control. |
7:18:45 |
CapCom: |
Roger. |
7:20:05 |
Scott: |
Okay. We’re regaining control of the spacecraft slowly, in RCS Direct. |
7:20:11 |
CapCom: |
Roger. Copy. |
7:21:12 |
Armstrong: |
We’re pulsing the RCS pretty slowly here so we don’t control roll right. We’re trying to kill our roll rate. |
CapCom: |
Okay. Fine. Keep at it. |
|
7:22:35 |
CSQ: |
VIII, CSQ. How much RCS have you used and are you just on one ring? |
7:22:41 |
Armstrong: |
That’s right. We are on one ring, trying to save the other ring. We started with two rings, but we are now on one ring. |
7:22:48 |
CapCom: |
Roger. What about RCS usage? |
7:22:51 |
Armstrong: |
Now okay. We’re down to 1,700 pounds right now on RCSB. |
7:22:57 |
CapCom: |
Roger. |
7:22:58 |
Armstrong: |
We have about 2,350 on A. |
7:23:01 |
CapCom: |
Okay. Copy. |
7:23:35 |
CSQ: |
VIII, CSQ. How are you doing? |
7:23:39 |
Armstrong: |
We’re working on it. |
7:23:40 |
CapCom: |
Okay. Relax. Everything’s okay. |
Finally having put a stop to the maverick spinning, Armstrong took his first chance to explain what had happened, and Houston had its first chance to inquire into the fate of the Agena:
7:23:51 |
Armstrong: |
The spacecraft-Agena combination took off. Yaw and roll, and we had ACS off. . . . |
7:24:01 |
CapCom: |
Roger. Understand. Can you see the Agena now? |
7:24:04 |
Armstrong: |
We turned the spacecraft system on, tried to stabilize, and, in so doing, we may have burned out our lower left thrusters. |
7:24:13 |
CapCom: |
Okay. I copy. Can you . . . Do you have visual sighting of the Agena right now? |
7:24:17 |
Scott: |
No. We haven’t seen the Agena since we undocked a little while ago. |
Armstrong recalls of his decision to start up the reentry control system: “I knew what the mission rules were . . . Once we energized the RCS and the integrity gets broken in both RCS rings, we had to land—and land at the next convenient opportunity.
“I had to go back to the foundation instincts, which were ‘save your craft, save the crew, get back home, and be disappointed that you had to leave some of your goals behind.’ ”
6:44 P.M. This is Gemini Houston Control. We are eight hours and three minutes into the flight of Gemini VIII. And in view of the trouble encountered at seven hours into the flight as reported earlier, the Flight Director [John Hodge] has determined to terminate the flight in the 7-3 area. We plan to bring the flight down on the seventh orbit in what we call the third zone, which is approximately 500 miles east of Okinawa. It’s in the far west Pacific. Our situation out there is as follows. A destroyer named the USS Leonard Mason is about 160 miles away at this time. It is proceeding towards the point, and it should take that destroyer probably five to six hours to reach it, which should come very close to the . . . Well, it may be a little delayed and get there after the landing itself . . .
Out of communication with the ground, Neil expressed his frustration about having to land, especially in such a remote area:
9:31:21 |
Armstrong: |
Do you have the coordinates for the landing point? |
9:32:38 |
Scott: |
It’s right where they said it would be. |
9:32:43 |
Armstrong: |
Seven-three comes right there in the middle. That was minus three. That was the third choice, remote areas. |
9:32:58 |
Scott: |
Roger. |
9:36:20 |
Armstrong: |
Okinawa. |
9:36:24 |
Scott: |
Pardon? |
9:36:25 |
Armstrong: |
Okinawa. Well, I’d like to argue with them, about the going home, but I don’t know how we can. |
9:37:55 |
Scott: |
Yes. |
9:38:02 |
Armstrong: |
I hate to land way out in the wilderness. |
Armstrong and Scott knew that rescues on open ocean did not always happen quickly. Even on land and with modern communications, it was hard to find something as small as a space capsule. Stories had circulated in NASA that it sometimes took the Russians forty-eight hours to find their astronauts after their parachuting down into places like Kazakhstan or Siberia.
As for arguing with Mission Control, “I was sure that, if there were a way, they would keep us up. I wanted to stay up. I was also sure, if it was reasonable to do so, there were people arguing that view on the ground. I didn’t have to get into the fray.”
The two astronauts had much to do to prepare for emergency reentry and splashdown: “Dave and I understood that we probably had several hours to get ready. From the ground we were given the retrofire location time, which was over Africa and on the night-side of Earth, so we prepared for retrofire activity. We were flying over the tracking station in Kano, Nigeria, when Houston started giving us the countdown for the retrofire time. We lost communication with the ground midway through that count so they didn’t really know if the retro had come off or not. But the retrofire was stable and our readings of the retro change in velocity—that is, the amount of slowing down that we had done—was proper for the target that we wished to hit. Our guidance system seemed to be working properly, so we steered a course for Okinawa.”
8:47 P.M. This is Gemini Houston Control. The pilots were counted down in the blind via the Kano station, and Neil Armstrong, while he said nothing leading up to the point of retrofire, came back with a very reassuring, “We have all four retros. All four have fired.” A cheer went up here in the Control Center, and I’m sure everyone can understand why. . . . We want to emphasize again that there is practically no communication expected now for some time. We are going to try to reach them via the Coastal Sentry Quebec on high frequency after they emerge from blackout, but that signal will be marginal. Probably our first authoritative information will come via one of the C-54 aircraft maneuvering in the area east of Okinawa . . .
As Gemini VIII came into daylight, “We appeared to be dropping at a prodigious rate,” Neil recalls. “We could almost see those big mountains [Himalayas] coming up at us.” The spacecraft’s main chute deployed on time, orienting them with their view up rather than down, so “there was a mirror that we used, a small flight pocket mirror, and by looking into that I could look down over the side and see that we were, thankfully, over water.”
Armstrong: |
Do you have water out there? |
|
10:40:09 |
Scott: |
All I see is haze. Oh yes, there’s water! It’s water. |
“Being an old navy guy, I much preferred coming down in the water to coming down in Red China,” Armstrong remembers with a smile.
While they were coming down under the chute, Neil was the first to hear the sound of propeller airplanes in the vicinity. “We assumed it was friendly.”
The splashdown itself turned out to be, in Neil’s words, “not too bad.” A C-54 rescue plane arrived quickly and dropped navy frogmen into the rough waters to attach a big flotation collar around the spacecraft. Nothing remained but to wait for the destroyer Leonard Mason. The wait turned into a nauseous ordeal.
“The Gemini was a terrible boat,” Neil explains, “a good spacecraft, but not a good boat.” Much to their regret, neither Armstrong nor Scott took their tablets of meclizine, used to avoid motion sickness. “So both of us really got seasick in due course,” Neil admits. Fortunately, they were on a low-residue diet and did not have much in their systems to regurgitate.
After more than two hours, the frogmen, themselves queasy from inhaling the stench from Gemini VIII’s burnt heat shield, opened the space-craft’s hatches, and the astronauts climbed out. For former sailor Armstrong, getting up and on board the destroyer happened much quicker and easier than it did for Scott. Dave, an air force pilot and untested on a Jacob’s ladder, struggled up the rigid chain links and nearly fell back in the water. At the top, while tangled up in some rungs, the massive hand of an African-American seaman reached down and pulled him onto the ship. By that time, Neil was already well on board, reluctantly accepting handshakes from the crew.
Neil did not feel like shaking hands with anyone: “I was very depressed at this point. We had not completed all the things we wanted to do. We’d lost Dave’s chance to do all those EVA marvelous jobs. We’d spent a lot of taxpayers’ money, and they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth out of it. I was sad, and I knew Dave was, too. It was one of those bad days. The guys on the ship fixed a marvelous big dinner for us, but I could hardly eat a bite.”
It took about fourteen hours for the ship to get them to Okinawa. In the party of VIPs at the dock stood Wally Schirra. Immediately after arriving in Hawaii with Frank Borman from their Far Eastern trip, NASA sent Wally back to Okinawa to help the assigned medical doctor and State Department protocol officer bring back his fellow astronauts without incident. “Our job was to protect Armstrong and Scott. We were to prevent people from washing out their minds and diluting information they had to report.”
The ship’s arrival at Buckner Bay in Okinawa caused more of a stir than anyone planned. Armstrong recollects the unfolding comedy: “The ship had been directed to proceed at flank speed and get us there with the recovered spacecraft as soon as possible. The captain of the destroyer was running his engines at full throttle, and he didn’t have a chance to reballast the ship because he was burning off fuel at a great rate and was riding real high in the water. There was a big welcoming party on the dock. There was a band and people with signs and big banners. The ship approached the dock, the band was playing, and all the people were waving signs and yelling. An offshore wind caught the ship and just pushed it right away from the dock. So the captain turned away from the dock and made a new approach. The band stopped, the banners came down, and everybody milled around. When the ship came around and pulled towards the dock for the second time, the band started playing again and the banners went up and the people started yelling. But then out went the ship again! The wind took it right back out again!”
“If she doesn’t make it this time,” Schirra heard a crusty three-star admiral say, “I’ll get a gun and sink her!” Finally, the humiliated captain of the Leonard Mason figured out his problem and made the necessary corrections to get his ship docked. By then, some of the banner carriers had left, and the oom-pah-pahs of the band had grown weak. Even in his depressed state, Armstrong found the incident “very humorous,” but not as much as Schirra, a good-natured navy veteran, who was barely able to hold back his chuckles while standing at attention on the dock.
After a good night’s sleep in Okinawa, the astronauts were flown in a C-141 jet transport to Hawaii. Not even that flight went without incident, as the plane lost oil pressure in its number two engine about 800 miles west of the islands. At Tripler Hospital, an army facility located on Oahu just west of Honolulu, they underwent a complete medical exam. They arrived back at Kennedy Space Center on March 19, three days after launching from the Cape. Reporters were kept away pending completion of a preliminary round of debriefings.
“Essentially every aspect of the operation was reviewed. We went through a number of discussions with different people [flight controllers, astronauts, launch operation, recovery systems, control systems], each of whom had a special interest, wanting to find out how his system worked or didn’t work and what recommendations we had to improve it. We tried to tell them everything we knew.”
Not until March 25 did Armstrong and Scott return to their homes in Houston. The next day NASA convened the crew’s first post-flight press conference. Even several days of talking over technical matters with his associates did not alleviate Neil’s depression: “It was a great disappointment to us, to have to cut that flight short. I’m sure I expressed the fact to the media that Dave and I were really disappointed that we didn’t get to do everything we hoped to do and that we hoped to get another chance to do something equally good in a future flight.”
International media paid a great deal of attention to the unprecedented spaceflight ordeal of Gemini VIII. All the networks in the United States broke into their regular evening programming with emergency news bulletins. (ABC’s interruption of an episode of its immensely popular Batman series was rewarded with more than one thousand phone calls from complaining viewers.) At the Scott and Armstrong homes in Texas, additional camera crews joined the others already camped out in the front yards. The next morning’s New York Daily News carried the banner headline “A Nightmare in Space!” Even staid Life, with its exclusive contract, elevated the events into melodrama.
Initially, the magazine positioned its coverage as “Our Wild Ride in Space—By Neil and Dave,” but Armstrong put a stop to it. He called Hank Suydam, a Life writer assigned to Houston. Suydam wired his boss, Edward K. Thompson, Life’s editor-in-chief:
I JUST HAD A PHONE CALL FROM NEIL ARMSTRONG WHO WAS VERY UPSET AT THE ADVANCE BILLING IN THIS WEEK’S MAGAZINE WHICH READ “OUR WILD RIDE IN SPACE.” HE ASKS THAT THE HEADLINES YOU USE WITH THEIR ACTUAL PIECE NOT CONCENTRATE SOLELY ON THE EMERGENCY AND NOT BE PHRASED IN WHAT HE CONSIDERS AN OVERLY JAZZY WAY. I TOLD HIM WE APPRECIATE HIS POINT. I EXPLAINED, HOWEVER, THAT WE DO HAVE TO USE HEADS TO CRYSTALLIZE THE ESSENCE OF VARIOUS PHASES OF THE STORY. I GAVE HIM A GENERAL ASSURANCE THAT WE WOULDN’T REPEAT THE ONE IN THE BILLING AND WOULD PROBABLY UTILIZE, FOR THE MOST PART, QUOTES FROM THEIR OWN PIECE.
The editor at Life obliged, but only partway. He toned down the piece, took the astronauts’ byline off it, and changed its title to “High Tension Over the Astronauts.”
Life went on to run articles on Gemini VIII in its next two weekly issues. For the second article, a version of the title that Neil had resisted reappeared as “Wild Spin in a Sky Gone Berserk.” The third article, entitled “A Case of ‘Constructive Alarm,’ ” gave the astronauts their bylines, as the story was, in fact, based on first-person pieces written by Neil and Dave, through their words were so heavily edited that Armstrong again complained. In particular, Neil was upset at the cut of his final quote: “I think we’d put this almost identically, so I’ll speak for both of us. We were disappointed that we couldn’t complete the mission, but the part we did have, and what we did experience, we wouldn’t trade for anything.”
Editor-in-chief Ed Thompson addressed a personal letter to both Neil and Dave: “I know that you were not entirely satisfied with the result and I think we’ve thought up an approach for the future which will cause less bleeding on your part and on the part of Life. We shouldn’t show you unedited copy; we should process it here, taking into account the space we have, etc., and then clear it with the Astronauts and NASA. That would eliminate a lot of misunderstandings. As in the past, we will pay the maximum attention to what you think of the edited result [and] will take the factual corrections you suggest. . . . As a friend I will personally be available on almost every closing to pour a little oil on troubled waters in case you want to call me. With the maximum of goodwill on everyone’s part I think we can come to a meeting of minds somewhat easier and earlier.”
While Life’s editors hyped the drama of the astronauts’ personal stories, other media mined the ways that technology had failed Gemini VIII. “What Went Wrong?” headlined the New York World-Telegram on the morning after the flight. Some investigative journalists looked for scapegoats, but the great majority of the American press took its lead from President Lyndon Johnson’s words on March 17: “From [the astronauts’] skill and strength, we all take heart, knowing that the personal qualities of all the astronauts and their colleagues will ultimately prevail in the conquest of space. We are very proud of them.”
If the press had known that, in the hallways and men’s rooms of the Manned Spacecraft Center, a few fellow astronauts were privately suggesting that the crew of Gemini VIII had handled their emergency improperly, thereby forcing NASA to terminate their mission early, the tone of the editorials might have grown negative.
According to astronaut Gene Cernan, “It didn’t take long for some of the guys around the Astronaut Office to criticize Neil’s performance. ‘He’s a civilian pilot, you know, and maybe he has lost some of the edge. Why didn’t he do this, or why not do that? Wouldn’t have gone in the spin if he would have stayed docked with the Agena!’ ” Astronauts who had been on the ground while Neil and Dave were fighting to survive in space were brutal. “Screwing up was not acceptable in our hypercompetitive fraternity,” Cernan has admitted, “and if you did, it might cost you big-time. Who knew if the criticism might reach Deke’s ears and change future crew selections in favor of the person doing the bitching? Nobody got a free ride when criticism was remotely possible. Nobody.”
Armstrong never heard any of the second-guessing firsthand, and very few of the astronauts have ever gone on record with any negative thoughts about the Gemini VIII crew’s performance. In his 2002 autobiography, We Have Capture, Gemini VI (and Apollo 10) astronaut Tom Stafford asserted simply, without explanation, that Neil’s undocking from the Agena “turned out to be the wrong thing to do.” The most candid critic, Walter Cunningham, had served at the Cape during the launch as capsule communicator for the flight crew—a position known (for some unknown reason) as the “Stoney.” There it had been Cunningham’s job to “call the liftoff” by counting backwards from ten and hollering “Liftoff!” Walt had not yet made a spaceflight of his own by March 1966. He never served on a Gemini crew; his first and only mission came on Apollo 7 in October 1968. Yet neither that relative inexperience nor the fact that he was in no position to observe any of the Gemini VIII flight (since he, Bill Anders, and their wives left on a nine-hour flight in a Cessna 172 back to Houston from the Cape immediately after liftoff) stopped Cunningham from opining. “After docking with the Agena,” Cunningham reiterated in his 1977 autobiography, The All-American Boys, “a runaway thruster began rotating the vehicles. Malfunction procedures had been written and practiced by the flight crews for just such an eventuality, but at the onset of the problem improvisation seemed to be the rule of the day. When the excitement was over, the spacecraft was undocked and once more facing the Agena in space, but the crew had unnecessarily activated a backup control system.”
The great majority of the astronauts never expressed or supported this harsh, inaccurate opinion. For one thing, malfunction procedures did not cover “just such an eventuality.” It is true that, had the Gemini VIII crew been able to correctly diagnose the problem while docked and allowed the Agena to stabilize the combined spacecraft, they would not have had to energize the reentry control system. It is also true that the crew had practiced what to do when a spacecraft thruster stuck open. But they had not practiced such an emergency when the spacecraft was docked with the Agena. Contrary to what Cunningham (and some other critics) thought, it was also not possible to energize just one ring of the reentry control system, leaving the other one intact for reentry. When the astronauts energized the RCS, both rings were pressurized, which invoked the mission rule.
“I didn’t hear any of the criticism,” stated Frank Borman, who along with Schirra accompanied the Gemini VIII crew back to Hawaii after greeting them in Okinawa following their rescue. “I wouldn’t have participated in that crap if there was. I think Neil and Dave did a good job. I don’t think anybody realizes how close that came to utter disaster. In retrospect, that was probably as dangerous as Apollo 13. Not as time consuming, but if they had run out of reaction control fuel in stopping their spinning, they would have been dead.” Wally Schirra felt the same way about it: “The decisions that Neil and Dave made were all good decisions.”
“Everybody second-guessed everybody,” recalled astronaut Alan Bean, who was backing up John Young and Mike Collins on Gemini X with crewmate Clifton C. Williams at the time. “Don’t forget, you’re dealing with really competitive people. You almost had to find something wrong in the other guy’s performance. It was part of the way it was.”
Jim McDivitt, the commander of Gemini IV, was sitting in the viewing section of Mission Control when Dave Scott’s alarming words reached Houston. Scott later flew with McDivitt on Apollo 9 (along with Rusty Schweickart), so Jim heard a lot about what had happened during Gemini VIII. “There was always the thought,” McDivitt remarked, “that Neil could have done this or could have done that or he could have done something else, but when you are going around in circles up there. . . . I think he did fine. He and Dave got it figured out.”
During the crisis, Dick Gordon rubbed elbows with CapCom Jim Lovell, as did his Gemini VIII backup crewmate Pete Conrad. “I’m sure there were people who said their training should have allowed Neil and Dave to do it differently,” Gordon has noted. “But Dave and Neil were real close to it, on the verge of disaster. They did what they had to do to get out of it.”
Mike Collins was at his home in Nassau Bay but drove over to Mission Control as soon as he heard about the problem. “Given the rapidity of events, and given the red herring of everyone thinking the trouble would be with the Agena, I thought that they certainly responded more than adequately. There was Monday morning quarterbacking on everything at NASA, but I don’t remember Neil and Dave, either officially or unofficially, being subject to a lot of criticism. I don’t think they deserved a lot of criticism.”
Buzz Aldrin, who was then preparing as backup pilot for Gemini IX, in retrospect has agreed that it is only with twenty-twenty hindsight that anyone can criticize anything that Neil did during the emergency. On the other hand, Aldrin has offered the following false conjecture: “I think there may have been a slim chance that they could have avoided activating one ring of their reentry system. [Again, it was not possible to energize the RCS rings individually.] It’s very good that they didn’t activate both of them. [Actually, they did.].”
John Glenn had left the space program well before Gemini VIII, but he followed the mission closely. The first American to orbit the Earth considers any criticism of Armstrong’s performance in Gemini VIII to be nonsense: “You’ll never hear it from me. I don’t think anybody was as experienced a pilot as Neil was at that time. He assessed when it was getting beyond his control, and he assessed it right.”
After the Gemini VII/VI missions, Chris Kraft had reluctantly turned over his duties as flight director in Mission Control to John Hodge and Gene Kranz, men he had trained, so that he could focus on the upcoming Apollo flights. Limited to the role of director of flight operations for Gemini VIII, he found himself sitting nervously on a step behind the back row of consoles at Mission Control during the Gemini VIII emergency. There he feverishly conferred with his old friend from NACA Langley, Bob Gilruth, the MSC director. In Kraft’s estimation, “Armstrong’s touch was as fine as any astronaut’s,” an impression totally reinforced by what Kraft had observed that evening as Neil gingerly piloted Gemini VIII to the world’s first-ever spacecraft docking. When communications with the spacecraft resumed over Hawaii, Kraft remembered hearing Neil’s voice, “amazingly calm,” telling them that Gemini VIII was rolling to the left and he couldn’t get the thrusters turned off. Only later did Kraft and the rest of Mission Control learn that Armstrong and Scott were being tossed around and beginning to suffer from grayed-out vision. “It was clearly a life-threatening situation in space,” Kraft has acknowledged, “the worst we’d ever encountered.
“Gilruth and I, we said, ‘My God, Neil must be having trouble with the stick!’ It never occurred to us that he had a stuck thruster. 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!’ ”
Gene Kranz was just taking over as flight director from John Hodge during a shift change in Mission Control when Scott’s urgent report came in over the radio. In retrospect, according to Kranz, “It would have been tough for the controller in a very dynamic situation to track that the solid-on one was the problem. But he might have done it.
“Then again,” Kranz conceded, “we were talking about a rookie Flight Control team that hadn’t flown many missions, and this was our first Agena mission. I think we would have picked up on the fact that the Agena was not the source of the problem. If so, we could have told the crew that we believed we had a ‘hard-on’ jet. But it would have taken a while to do that. I don’t know if we would have been able to help the crew materially.”
Rather than blaming the crew for any measure of failure, Kranz places the blame on himself and on the other flight directors and planners in Houston: “I was damn impressed with Neil, as was virtually everyone that had anything to do with the program.” In the debriefing he gave to his flight controllers after the Gemini VIII mission, Kranz asserted: “The crew reacted as they were trained, and they reacted wrong because we trained them wrong. We failed to realize that when two spacecraft are docked they must be considered as one spacecraft, one integrated power system, one integrated control system, and a single structure. . . . We were lucky, too damned lucky, and we must never forget this mission’s lesson.” In retrospect, treating docked spacecraft as a single system was, in Kranz’s judgment, one of the most important lessons to come from the entire Gemini program: “It had a profound effect on our future success as flight controllers.” It was a lesson that proved invaluable when the second potentially fatal in-flight emergency happened, in 1970 during Apollo 13.
In total agreement with Kranz about where the fault lay, Chris Kraft has asserted, “We tricked the astronauts on that one. I think Neil and Dave did absolutely what I would have had them do. As for criticizing them afterwards for doing that? I guess maybe a few astronauts might have said, ‘I’m better than that.’ But they’re only fooling themselves.”
No one was ever a tougher, more honest critic of his technical piloting performance than Armstrong was himself: “I always felt as though if I had been a little smarter I would have been able to figure out the right diagnosis and been able to come up with something more quickly than I did. But I didn’t. I did what I thought I had to do and recognized the consequence of that. You do the best you can.”
Following his return to Houston, he found that, just a day or two before their launch, there had been a problem with the environmental control system in the spacecraft. This resulted in technicians pulling out the system to replace one or two parts. Curiously, the wiring for the damaged control system was part of the same cable that operated what turned out to be the faulty rocket. “So my guess,” says Neil, “was that, sometime during that process, the technicians did something that put a nick in that cable, which allowed it to short. To my knowledge, they were never able to isolate that problem. Of course, the back end of the spacecraft—the adapter—did not come back to Earth with you. So if it really had been something in the back section of Gemini VIII, we never had a chance to examine it.”
Much more vigorously than Neil, Dave Scott has defended the wisdom of what he and his commander did in space: “There was never any doubt in my mind that we had done everything right. Otherwise we would never have survived.”
NASA “would have pored over the telemetry records they had from every station,” Armstrong speculates. “It’s conceivable that what happened to us would forever have remained a mystery.” Dave Scott concurs, “They wouldn’t have known what happened because they wouldn’t have gotten any downlink. They wouldn’t have known it was the Gemini because they never would have gotten any data, because it would have been turning too fast.”
Such a mysterious tragedy “would have caused a big glitch in the program,” especially coming so soon after the deaths of Bassett and See, Chris Kraft has speculated. “It would have taken us a long time to figure out what happened, if we ever would have.” Without knowing what happened and why, it would have been very difficult to proceed on into the Apollo program. Then, if the Apollo fire, too, had still occurred, just ten months later, killing three more astronauts, national support for the manned space program would likely have vanished, along with prospects for a Moon landing. As Dave Scott has said, “If we had not recovered from the spin, it could have been a showstopper.”
Turning out as well as it did, the broader political repercussions of the Gemini VIII flight were minor. “In the flight, both of them came across as being pretty much what we thought of them before,” Mike Collins has explained. “There was certainly nothing in the aftermath that affected their crew assignments, absolutely not. And there would have been if they’d screwed up big-time.” Astronaut Bill Anders, whose first mission was to be Apollo 8’s historic circumlunar flight in December 1968, agreed: “Not only was Neil quick-thinking, he certainly wasn’t shy about doing things that well could have worked against him.” According to Chris Kraft, the way Armstrong handled himself during the emergency gave NASA “even greater confidence in Neil’s abilities.”
Two weeks after the flight, the Gemini VIII Mission Evaluation Team “positively ruled out” pilot error as a factor in the emergency. In revealing the team’s findings, Bob Gilruth commented, “In fact, the crew demonstrated remarkable piloting skill in overcoming this very serious problem and bringing the spacecraft to a safe landing.” There was no question that Armstrong would be given another assignment as a mission commander.
Most NASA people felt that Armstrong and Scott deserved the approbation, though Walt Cunningham would later issue a disgruntled statement: “Of course, Neil and Dave received the usual medals . . . Scott’s career as the fair-haired boy of the third group of astronauts was unaffected. Both performed well over the remainder of their careers, but at the same time their very progress ignored the fact that their peers—and many others at the space center—felt they had botched their first mission.” Most unfairly, Cunningham complained that Neil “parlayed a busted Gemini VIII flight into the Buck Rogers grand prize mission, the first lunar landing.”
As for the medals the two men received, NASA did, indeed, present both with its Distinguished Service Medal. From the air force Dave also received a Distinguished Flying Cross, a lesser honor than the service’s Distinguished Service Medal, which could have been presented to him. Major Scott also received a promotion to lieutenant colonel, whereas Neil received a $678 raise that brought his salary to $21,653, making him, thanks to his twelve years in the civil service system, the highest paid astronaut. Still, there was no ticker-tape parade or dinner with the wives at the White House, as there had been for some of the Mercury Seven or for Gemini IV’s Jim McDivitt and Ed White.
As depressed as he was about his mission being cut short, Armstrong himself could not be so sure about his prospects: “I think if it had turned out that we, in fact, had made a mistake—a little one or a big one—that would have been a serious issue. Dave and I couldn’t identify serious mistakes that we made, but we recognized that maybe we did make some. So I’m sure there was a concern that it might affect us someway in the future.”
Like any pilot who loved to fly, Neil would have liked to have jumped in a spacecraft and gone back up again as soon as possible. All he could do was, as he put it, “get right back into the cycle.” On March 21, 1966, just two days after he arrived back from Gemini VIII, NASA named him the backup commander and William Anders the backup pilot for Gemini XI, a rendezvous and docking flight made by Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon six months later.
It would be his last crew assignment prior to Apollo.