Designfax weekly eMagazine

Subscribe Today!

Archives

View Archives

Partners

Manufacturing Center
Product Spotlight

Modern Applications News
Metalworking Ideas For
Today's Job Shops

Tooling and Production
Strategies for large
metalworking plants

55 Years Ago: First rendezvous in space faces multitude of challenges

By John Uri, NASA Johnson Space Center

The primary goals of Project Gemini included proving the techniques required for the Apollo Program to fulfill President John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s. Paramount among those techniques was rendezvous and docking necessary to implement the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous method NASA chose for the Moon landing missions.

Additional goals of Gemini included proving that astronauts could work outside their spacecraft during spacewalks and ensuring that spacecraft and astronauts could function for at least eight days, considered the minimum time for a roundtrip mission to the Moon.

In March 1965, Gemini 3 completed the first crewed test flight of the new spacecraft, and conducted the first orbital maneuvers. Gemini 4 in June demonstrated the feasibility of spacewalking, and Gemini 5 in August remained in space for eight days. The next two missions planned to demonstrate rendezvous and docking and complete a 14-day stay in space, respectively.

The McDonnell Aircraft Corporation built the Gemini spacecraft at its St. Louis plant, while the Martin-Marietta Corporation assembled the Titan-II rocket in Baltimore. For the Gemini 6 mission, NASA named Mercury veteran Walter M. "Wally" Schirra the command pilot and space rookie Thomas P. Stafford the pilot. Mercury and Gemini veteran Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom served as the back-up command pilot, and Gemini 3 veteran John W. Young as the back-up pilot.

The original Gemini 6 mission plan involved completing a rendezvous and docking with an Agena target vehicle launched 101 minutes before their own liftoff. On Oct. 25, 1965, an Atlas-Agena rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Pad 14, just a few miles from Pad 19 where Schirra and Stafford sat inside their Gemini capsule atop its Titan booster. However, within six minutes, it was clear that something had gone wrong. In fact, the Agena's engine had exploded, and the vehicle did not reach orbit.

Schirra and Stafford had no target to chase and climbed out of their spacecraft. NASA management decided to proceed with the next mission, the 14-day Gemini 7 in early December, and use it as a rendezvous target for Gemini 6. Workers replaced the Gemini 6 Titan rocket on Pad 19 with the rocket for Gemini 7, stacking that rocket on Oct. 29. Engineers developed procedures to ensure that a second rocket could be stacked on the pad within a few days following the launch of the first, allowing the rendezvous to take place within the 14 days that Gemini 7 would be in orbit.

On July 1, 1965, NASA selected Frank Borman as the command pilot and James A. Lovell as the pilot for the 14-day Gemini 7 endurance flight. Although both were making their first spaceflight, they had served as the back-up crew for Gemini 4. Gemini 4 veteran and first American spacewalker Edward H. White and rookie Michael Collins served as the back-up crew.

To aid in their comfort during the lengthy flight, Borman and Lovell wore lightweight suits that they could easily remove, roll up, and stow under their seats. The suits had no hard helmet or neck ring, with the visor held in place with a zipper. The cramped spacecraft created a challenge for stowage of all the necessary equipment for a two-week mission, including the required food, and then for the garbage the crew generated.

Unlike previous crews in which one astronaut always kept watch, Borman and Lovell coordinated their sleep-work cycles. During the flight, Borman and Lovell were to conduct 20 experiments, eight of them medical to evaluate their responses to long-duration weightlessness, more than any previous flight.

Following a nearly flawless countdown, Gemini 7 took to the skies on Dec. 4, 1965. Shortly after reaching orbit, they turned their spacecraft around and attempted to station-keep with their Titan rocket's spent second stage, a task made difficult by its venting of excess fuel. That activity completed, Borman and Lovell began their experiment program and settled in for their 2-week stay in space.

Two days into the flight, Lovell took off his suit, greatly increasing his comfort level, while Borman remained warm and uncomfortable in his suit. It took another two days for mission managers to relent and allow him to remove his suit as well, following which he felt much more comfortable. The pair continued their suite of experiments and took photographs of the Earth, awaiting the arrival of Gemini 6.

Launch Pad 19 suffered minimal damage from the Gemini 7 liftoff, and workers erected Gemini 6's Titan rocket the next day. On Dec. 12, Gemini 7's ninth day in space, Schirra and Stafford strapped into their spacecraft for a second launch attempt. The countdown clock ticked down to zero, and the Titan's first-stage engines ignited. They shut off after just 1.2 seconds, resulting in the first on-the-pad abort of the U.S. space program. Although the mission clock aboard the spacecraft had started, the rocket had not lifted off, and Schirra made the split-second decision not to eject himself and Stafford from the spacecraft.

Engineers traced the cause of the abort to a dust cap inadvertently left in the engine compartment. After workers took care of that issue, Schirra and Stafford tried to launch again on Dec. 15, and the third time proved to be the charm. When they reached orbit, for the first time in history, four people were in space simultaneously.

Over the next six hours, Schirra and Stafford aboard Gemini 6 conducted a series of orbital maneuvers to catch up with Borman and Lovell awaiting them aboard Gemini 7. At a distance of 270 miles, Gemini 6's rendezvous radar established a solid lock on Gemini 7. Once the distance between the two spacecraft had closed to 60 miles, Schirra could see Gemini 7, exclaiming, "My gosh, there is a real bright star out there!"

At a distance of 3,000 feet, Schirra began braking his spacecraft to slow the approach. He halted the approach at a distance of 130 feet, with no relative velocity between the two spacecraft, accomplishing the world's first space rendezvous. Flight controllers in the Mission Control Center at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), now NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, erupted in cheers while managers lit celebratory cigars.

For the next three orbits around the Earth, the two spacecraft stayed at ranges of 300 feet to as close as one foot from each other, with Gemini 6 doing most of the maneuvering for station-keeping, fly-arounds, formation flying, and parking the spacecraft in specific relative positions. As the astronauts' sleep period approached, Schirra backed away to a safe overnight position about 10 miles away.

Early the next morning, the following exchange took place among the two spacecraft and astronaut Elliott M. See as the capsule communicator (Capcom) in Mission Control in Houston:

Gemini 6: We have an object. It looks like a satellite going from north to south, up in a polar orbit. He's in a very low trajectory, traveling from north to south. It has a very high [fineness] ratio. It looks like it might be [inaudible]. It's very low; it looks like he might be going to re-enter soon. Stand by, One. It looks like he's trying to signal us. [Stafford and Schirra play "Jingle Bells"].

Gemini 7: We got him, too! [Laughter].

Gemini 6: That was live, Seven, not taped.

Houston (See): You're too much, Six.

If you listen to the audio of the conversation, you can hear the sounds of an 8-note Hohner "Little Lady" harmonica and a handful of small bells, the first musical instruments played in outer space. Both are on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

With the rendezvous successfully completed, it was time for Gemini 6 to come home. Schirra called to Gemini 7, "Really good job, Frank and Jim. We'll see you on the beach." He jettisoned the spacecraft's equipment section and fired the retrorockets to drop them from orbit. After a nominal entry into the Earth's atmosphere, the spacecraft deployed first its drogue parachute at 45,000 feet in altitude and then its main parachute at 10,000 feet.

Gemini 6 splashed down eight miles from its target point in the western Atlantic Ocean southeast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, and within view of the prime recovery ship, the USS Wasp (CVS-18). Gemini 6 had completed 16 revolutions around the Earth in a flight lasting 25 hours and 16 minutes. Schirra elected to remain inside the capsule as recovery team members lifted it out of the water and onto the carrier's deck, where a throng of cheering sailors greeted them. By the next day, Schirra and Stafford had returned to crew quarters at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC).

In orbit, Gemini 7 astronauts Borman and Lovell still had three more days to go before their own homecoming. They continued with their experiment program and dealt with minor issues with some of the spacecraft's thrusters and an errant fuel cell. On their last day in space, they packed up and tidied up the capsule that had been home for two weeks, often described as having as much room as the front seat of a Volkswagen Beetle.

On Dec. 18, Borman jettisoned the spacecraft's instrument section and fired its retrorockets. Re-entry and parachute deployments took place as expected with no issues, and Gemini 7 splashed down southeast of Cape Canaveral, about seven miles from the target point. They had orbited the Earth 206 times and spent a record-setting 13 days, 18 hours, and 35 minutes in space, a mark that stood for more than four years.

Helicopters from the USS Wasp, performing its second crew recovery in two days, retrieved Lovell and Borman from the sea and delivered them to the deck of the carrier. A little shaky after two weeks in weightlessness, they were otherwise in good health, although both had lost weight.

Sailors retrieved the capsule from the sea and, two days later, offloaded both spacecraft at Mayport Naval Station near Jacksonville, Florida. Borman and Lovell reunited with Schirra and Stafford at KSC's crew quarters the day after splashdown. After a few days of post-mission debriefings, the crews returned to Houston and gave an overview of their historic mission to reporters at MSC on Dec. 30.

On Feb. 15, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he was sending Schirra and Borman on a three-week, eight-country goodwill tour to promote the scientific, technological, and educational values of the U.S. space program. Accompanied by their wives Jo Schirra and Susan Borman, they departed on Feb. 21 aboard a presidential jet. Their itinerary took them to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand.

As they were leaving Taipei, Taiwan, on March 1, they learned of the deaths the previous day of Elliot M. See and Charles A. Bassett, the prime crew for the upcoming Gemini 9 mission, in an airplane crash in St. Louis. Upon their arrival in Hawaii on March 16, they learned of the aborted Gemini 8 mission. Schirra traveled to Okinawa, Japan, to escort fellow astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and David R. Scott back to the U.S. after their harrowing spaceflight, first landing at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu before returning to KSC.

The Gemini 6 and 7 spacecraft can be viewed at the Stafford Air and Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma, and the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, respectively.

Learn more about the NASA Gemini missions at www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/gemini/index.html.

Published December 2020

Rate this article

[55 Years Ago: First rendezvous in space faces multitude of challenges]

Very interesting, with information I can use
Interesting, with information I may use
Interesting, but not applicable to my operation
Not interesting or inaccurate

E-mail Address (required):

Comments:

Type the number: