"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today (13 page)

For the first six weeks, preparations to fly the Gemini went without a hitch until one morning Alan awoke feeling nauseated. Well, just not nauseated. He was so dizzy, and the room was spinning so fast, he couldn’t focus, and he found himself on the floor. He got up clinging to the wall and did his best to get his face in the commode before he vomited.

The sickness left as quickly as it came, and he was off to Deke’s office to report what had happened. The two chalked it up to some bad hooch, and Alan went about his work without a problem until the fifth day. Just as suddenly as the nausea had appeared before, it came back.

Alan checked in with the flight surgeons. “You’ve got a serious problem with your left inner ear,” they told him. “You have what is called Ménière’s syndrome.”

“Never heard of it,” Alan shot back.

The doctors gathered around. “Certain people who are driven, motivated, will occasionally develop this problem,” they explained. “Fluid pressure builds up in your inner ear, and it makes the semicircular canals, the motion detectors, extremely sensitive. This results in
disorientation, dizziness, and nausea. You also have glaucoma. That’s just another indication that as an individual you’re highly hyper.”

America’s first astronaut listened patiently to the diagnosis and said, “I have one question.”

“Shoot.”

“You going to pull my wings?”

“Yep.”

A dispirited Alan Shepard sat down with Deke for a heart-to-heart. “Deke, we’ve got to beat this crap,” he said as a promise.

“Yep,” Deke nodded. “But until you do, I have a job for you.”

Deke was being moved up to a newly created post called chief of flight crew operations. He slid Alan into his old job as chief astronaut.

“Hang in there with me, buddy,” he winked. “We’ll figure out a way to get our asses back in space.”

Alan laughed. “You got it, partner.”

They shook hands and moved Shepard and Stafford’s backups, astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young, into the first Gemini’s seats.

Meanwhile the Russians were busy. A cosmonaut was about to shake the world again. Aleksei A. Leonov pushed himself gently through the hatch, and the first human satellite drifted away from the Russian ship. He was stunned by the sight of Earth below and he turned and tumbled and slowly rolled about, careful not to look directly into the blinding sun. A small camera attached to the top of the Voshkod spaceship’s airlock captured the smiling, laughing Leonov as he sprightly leapt and skipped.

The date was March 18, 1965, and for the ten minutes allotted, Leonov walked three thousand miles through orbit, flinging out his arms in rapturous joy as he floated, turned, and somersaulted. Below, Earth rolled by at 17,400 miles per hour.

He would later tell me he had no fear—no worry about falling. He knew he was a human satellite fixed in his own orbit around Earth. “There was only a sense of the infinite expanse and depth of the universe,” he said.

When it was time for him to return to the Voshkod, Leonov took a final look at the beautiful, blue planet rolling beneath him and slid into
the airlock, feet first. Suddenly he could not move. He was jammed in the opening. Pavel Belyaev, his commander inside, informed him he was running low on oxygen. That got his attention. Leonov studied the situation. Outside in total vacuum, his spacesuit had expanded and he was caught like a cork in a bottle. Let out some pressure, he ordered himself. Slowly, he depressurized the suit, and using his athletic strength, he pulled himself back into the airlock.

The first EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) was history.

The day after the spacewalk, trouble revisited the Voshkod crew. When it came time to fire the retro-rockets for reentry, the automatic stabilization system failed. The cosmonauts went through the proper contingency maneuvers and Belyaev took over manually. This took time, and they delayed firing the retros in orbit. When Belyaev triggered the braking rockets, he did a magnificent flying job through the harrowing reentry, but the extra orbit pushed their new landing site nearly a thousand miles off target.

The Voshkod crashed in the thick forest near Perm in the Ural Mountains, coming down to wedge itself tightly between two large fir trees. Leonov and Belyaev remained inside their crippled ship, unable to open their hatch.

During the freezing night, a recovery helicopter arrived dropping warm clothes, but the clothes fell into the higher branches, out of reach. The next morning, a rescue crew entered the thick stand of firs on skis and wrestled the Voshkod free, releasing the freezing cosmonauts for hot food and warm clothes.

Leonov and Belyaev skied out of the forest to a waiting helicopter. And now that the two cosmonauts were okay and on their way to Moscow, Soviet officials began putting a positive spin on the flight. They emphasized the importance of the world’s first spacewalk and trumpeted the new Voshkod as a spaceship capable of carrying three men to the moon.

A
Pravda
headline read, “SORRY, APOLLO!”

F
ive days after the two Russian cosmonauts crashed in snow-covered trees, the first countdown for Gemini was underway. Days before, Gus Grissom had created some management discomfort. He had never been able to shake off whispers that the sinking of the
Liberty Bell Seven
was due to his screwup rather than a technical mistake in the hatch. So Grissom named
Gemini 3
“
Molly Brown,
” as in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

Well, we guys in the media loved it, and everyone else thought it was fun stuff except Washington. These NASA suits, looking for recognition of their authority, were not pleased. Orders were issued. No more names. We reporters extended our middle fingers and on the airways and in print,
Molly Brown
stayed.

Grissom and John Young closed
Molly Brown
’s hatches and roared off the new
Titan II
pad. The big rocket easily pushed the first Gemini into orbit, where Grissom and Young were told to stay for three trips around Earth. There they would wring out the new ship by testing
Molly Brown
’s systems. They fired its onboard rocket thrusters. The rocket blast moved them into a higher orbit, and then they lowered the Gemini into another, and just for the fun of it, they changed their orbital plane.
These were not only maneuvers essential for going to the moon, they were essential for rendezvous and docking with other spacecraft.

Gus Grissom and John Young board
Molly Brown,
the first
Gemini
spacecraft.
(NASA).

The Russians hadn’t done any of this stuff yet.

The new Mission Control in Houston wouldn’t be up and running until the next Gemini launch.
Gemini 3
was flying under the direction of Mercury Control at Cape Canaveral, and it came out of orbit with its crew bragging, “Man, does this baby handle right!”

Molly Brown
made a perfect splashdown on the Atlantic, where Grissom, taking his title as commander seriously, changed the landing plans. He kept
Gemini 3
’s hatches closed until navy frogmen
secured the bobbing spaceship with a flotation collar. He was to have opened the hatches for fresh sea air, but there was no way he was going to let water into this baby. The delay took time, and Grissom paid for his decision. The Gemini was a great spaceship, but it wasn’t worth a damn as a boat. It pitched and rolled, and Young, the naval aviator, laughed. Gus, the air force flyboy, was green, and John handed him the barf bag.

Finally recovery was over and though Grissom was still sick, his
spacecraft didn’t sink, and Young was his usual charming self. He was now the seventh American to fly in space, the first not from the Mercury ranks, and—possibly more important in some quarters—Young gave Wally Schirra a run for his money when it came to high-skilled pranks.

Most any lunchtime you could find John in the Cocoa Beach Jewish delicatessen named Wolfie’s. It was his daily rendezvous with a corned beef sandwich.

Jewish delicatessens are what I love most about New York City, and Wolfie’s was as close as you could get in Cocoa Beach. The night before
Gemini 3
’s launch I was in Wolfie’s, listening to a fun ruckus in the kitchen. Naturally, my nose for news led me through the kitchen door, where some secret tests were underway. Certain members of the astronaut corps were concerned about crumbs gumming up the works in
Gemini 3
’s cockpit. Several corned beef sandwiches were taken to the top of a tall ladder and dropped on sandwich paper on the floor. The sandwich that held together the best without crumblin
g during “free fall” was sealed tightly into a package and given to the care of astronaut Wally Schirra. Wally smuggled it into John Young’s spacesuit pocket before
Molly Brown
headed for orbit.

A couple of hours into the flight, when the mission was under control, John brought out the tasty surprise, sharing it with Gus. Gus laughed, and
Gemini 3
’s crew enjoyed its Wolfie’s picnic in space.

Not a crumb was dropped, but when NASA’s medical teams heard about the great corned beef caper, they went ballistic. “Eating the sandwich in flight ruined our tests,” said one doctor. Engineers agreed. Any crumbs floating about in weightlessness could have fouled up any of the spaceship’s equipment and electronic systems.

Seeing a chance to get their faces on television, some members of Congress leaped into the fray, shouting, “NASA has lost control of its astronauts.”

Deke Slayton was caught between that old rock and hard place. His astronauts were aerospace engineers as well as pilots and were as concerned about the machines they flew as they were about their own persons. Besides, he had been told about the sandwich gag before liftoff
and as long as it was packaged properly, and knowing the pressure his
Gemini 3
pilots were under, he judged it a great way of relieving the tension.

Jay Barbree and Gus Grissom laugh about the great corned beef sandwich caper. (Barbree Collection).

So now he had to diffuse the brouhaha. He had to come to Gus and John’s rescue. He told the brass he had known about the sandwich and approved it, and then he wrote a new order: “The attempt to bootleg any item on board a flight without my approval will result in appropriate disciplinary action.” Whatever that is, Deke smiled. The prank was forgotten.

I
n Houston, the new Manned Spacecraft Center was nearing completion, with workers bolting down the last of the all-new Mission
Control Center’s equipment. The mouthpiece for the astronauts in those days was a lovable pilot named Bob Button from New Jersey. He tried to live that down, but what the hell—someone had to be from New Jersey, and we reporters and astronauts loved him. Bob was the one kid who played well with all the others in the sandbox, and he loved to spend his off time around the local airport, where he’d created the Gemini Flying Club.

One of Button’s flying buddies was a pilot named Neil Armstrong. Armstrong wasn’t only an astronaut and one of NASA’s ace test pilots, he was an elite glider driver as well.

One day Button and Armstrong and colleague Jack Riley, from NASA’s Public Affairs office, decided to take a Piper Tri-Pacer up for some night flying. They just wanted to bore some holes in the black sky. Button took the pilot’s seat and Armstrong slid into the copilot’s chair, while Riley got in back and went to sleep.

The weather was CAVU (Ceilings And Visibility Unlimited), with none of those low cumulus clouds that always seemed to hover around Houston like fat moths, and as they passed five thousand feet Armstrong was watching the blackness grow darker. They were headed out over the Gulf of Mexico.

“We flew this way in almost total silence for about an hour,” Button told me. “We kept the lights of Houston barely in sight on the northern horizon.”

Then, Armstrong broke his silence. “Okay, let’s head back.”

“By now,” Button continued, “we were topping ten thousand feet and it was a long way down for the little Tri-Pacer. So, in order not to build up ice in the carburetor while coasting downward, I reached for the carburetor heat, pulled it out. SILENCE! The engine quit. I had pulled the wrong knob, the mixture control, and starved the engine of fuel.

“Riley bounced awake and nearly put his head through the fabric roof of the Tri-Pacer. ‘What happened?’ he yelled. I’m slapping the instrument panel, pushing any knob that’s sticking out, trying to get the mixture back into full rich. The engine comes back to life with a roar; Riley settles down. Neil was his usual cool self. He never uttered a word. Just gave me a half grin. I had done a really dumb thing!

“We shed altitude down to the traffic pattern and I turned on final and made one of my better landings. Having screwed up once, I wanted the landing to be a grease job.”

I looked at Button, who was now laughing heartily at himself. “Do you realize you almost killed the man destined to first step on the moon?”

“That’s me,” Button continued laughing. “But Neil was great about it.”

Neil Armstrong and Bob Button sign flight logs following the loss of their aircraft engine power over the Gulf of Mexico. (Button Collection).

“What did he say?”

“He smiled and said, ‘Bob, I don’t mean to kibitz, but you might want to keep in mind what they teach at test pilot school: When you flip a switch or pull a knob, hang on to it until the airplane does what you told it to do. You might not be able to find it a second time.’”

O
n June 3, 1965, the
Gemini 4
crew, James McDivitt and Edward White, roared into space for four days. On their fourth trip around Earth, White opened his hatch and stepped into space over the blue Pacific between Hawaii and New Mexico. America’s first spacewalk was underway. White took a deep breath to relax. He gripped a handheld gun armed with pressurized oxygen and fired it in timed spurts. It pushed him in the direction he wished to go. This steering jet, right out of the science-fiction comics, did its job. He could maneuver his body to the limits of his twenty-five-foot tether.

The beauty of Earth rolling by beneath him was incredible, and White somersaulted, floated lazily on his back, and pirouetted, grinning like a kid enjoying a summer swim. He could “fly,” and he witnessed one of the strangest satellites ever launched. A thermal glove he had left on his seat drifted up and away to begin its own orbit.

White and McDivitt were so taken by what was happening that the twelve minutes planned for the spacewalk passed quickly. It was time for White to get back inside while they still had daylight. Gus Grissom was the CapCom, the astronaut assigned to talk to the
Gemini 4
crew from the new Mission Control south of Houston. He knew that the euphoria White was showing was akin to the dangerous “raptures of the deep” that scuba divers experienced.

Ed White was still frolicking in space, and Grissom called in his best command voice, “
Gemini 4
, get back in.”

McDivitt repeated the order: “They want you to get back in now.”