Much has been said recently about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, but next to nothing is remembered about his only other trip into space, the near-disastrous and controversial Gemini 8 mission in January of 1966. Gemini was a black 2-man space capsule designed to test key concepts and procedures needed for subsequent Apollo lunar missions. It came attached to a large, tapered, white adapter section behind it that carried most of the fuel and oxygen for each flight. Gemini 8 was the first flight to make use of the Agena target vehicle. The crew's main goal was to track down the unmanned Agena, dock with it, and practice flying the Gemini and Agena while coupled together. Later flights would make use of extra fuel in the Agena to reach extremely high orbits. On their first day in space, the crew had no trouble finding the Agena, approaching carefully, and docking. It was a short time later, over the Indian Ocean, in total darkness, and out of radio contact with Houston, that things rapidly went to hell. It was Neil Armstrong who first noticed on his instruments that they were rotating slowly on their axis. Several attempts to correct this accomplished nothing. Switching the Agena's remote controls completely off made no difference. Distrustful of the untested Agena, the crew decided to release it and back away quickly in their Gemini spacecraft, which had established a reputation of being highly reliable. That was not a good move. Without the stabilizing mass of the Agena, the spin accelerated rapidly. Within seconds, centrifugal force was making the crew dizzy as the rotation exceeded 60 RPM. If they blacked out, death in space would be certain, and no one on earth would ever know what happened to them. Neil made a gut decision. He turned off control power to the white adapter module and turned on the control system for the small steering rockets in the nose of the black Gemini re-entry capsule. Quickly, he was able to put an end to the rolling motion. By now, radio contact with NASA had been re-established. A quick diagnostic procedure established that one small control rocket in the adapter section was stuck on, burning continuously whenever the adapter's controls were powered up. That had caused the roll. Now they had another problem. Once the Gemini's re-entry controls had been turned on and its fuel tanks pressurized, they only had a few hours to land safely. Also, any further maneuvers in space would further deplete the fuel supply needed to keep the heat shield at the proper angle during re-entry of the atmosphere. The rest of the mission would have to be canceled. The aircraft carrier that was scheduled to pick them up in a few days was still in port, so a destroyer would have to suffice. As their bad luck continued, a long wait for the ship's arrival made them quite seasick, and the next day's C-141 flight from Okinawa to Hawaii involved an engine failure that slowed their cruising speed. Neil Armstrong landed in Hawaii on the 4th anniversary of the death of his daughter, who had died at age 2 with an inoperable brain tumor. NASA's ruling was that Neil took appropriate action in dealing with the crisis, but several other astronauts disagreed. They pointed out that if the adapter module's controls had been turned off before the Gemini separated from the Agena, then the Agena's control rockets could have been used to stabilize the assembly, and the mission could have continued in this mode for several days. They also pointed out that undocking and backing away from a vehicle with a questionable control system could have fatally damaged the nose of the Gemini spacecraft. NASA, on the other hand, said that Neil had been told not to place too much faith in the untested Agena, and that he took quick and decisive action that seemed most likely to work, in a situation where there was little time to spare. Three years later, Neil Armstrong received quite possibly the greatest historical gift ever given to a human being, when he had the privilege of being the first to step onto the surface of the moon. It was as if Christopher Columbus had sent someone else to discover the Western Hemisphere for him, or the Wright brothers had selected a local guy from Kitty Hawk to make the first flight in their airplane. If some former astronauts go to their graves believing that they were more deserving of the ultimate honor and privilege in the realm of space exploration, I can understand why. I see both sides of this issue. But Neil did the job, and he did it well. A Hip Forums extra: Buzz Aldrin was the first man to piss on the moon.
Interesting story. This reminds me of how in the early days of space flight, the astronauts had campaigned for more autonomy and control of the missions by the pilots themselves and less from the ground. They were still in the mental mode of earlier days in aviation, where the success of missions was more a matter of pilot skill than in control from the ground.
