6. HUGGING THE COAST
KHRUSHCHEV
Cosmonaut Alexei A. Leonov grasped the hatch and opened it carefully. Outside, the jet black sky surrounded him like a velvet hood. Below rolled the glowing horizon of the world, speeding past at over 17,000 miles per hour.
With a grunt Leonov pulled himself through the hatch, pushing off from the Voskhod spacecraft to slowly drift fifteen feet away. He was floating more than one hundred twenty miles above the earth’s surface, his only link to the space capsule a thin twenty-foot tether. “I didn’t experience fear. There was only a sense of the infinite expanse and depth of the universe.”104
It was March 18, 1965, and Leonov had become the first human being to walk in space.
For ten minutes he pirouetted about, waving and smiling at Pavel Belyaev, his commander who was watching from inside Voskhod. Below him the Black Sea rolled by, followed by the Ural Mountains of Russia. Then Belyaev told him that with only forty-five minutes of oxygen left, it was time to come back inside.
Only now Leonov had trouble squeezing himself back through the hatch. The camera that had filmed his adventure kept getting in his way, and his spacesuit had swelled when its internal air pressure pushed against the vacuum of space. For eight minutes he struggled, pushing and pushing again and again in a vain attempt to force his body through the hatch. Finally, with his oxygen supply quickly disappearing, he took a desperate chance and partly depressurized his spacesuit. The release reduced the size of the suit enough so that he could slide in, slamming the hatch behind him.105
Once again the Soviets had struck first, beating the Americans in space. “The so-called system of free enterprise is turning out to be powerless in competition with socialism in such a complex and modern area as space research,”106 proclaimed an article in Pravda. Not only did this first human spacewalk take place just five days before the first launch of the American Gemini space program, the Soviets proudly trumpeted the second success of what they called their new Voskhod spacecraft.
Khrushchev’s daring, boisterous, and relentless style of leadership demanded these increasingly dangerous space stunts. For Khrushchev, the Soviet Union had to stay ahead, no matter what. Knowing that in December 1957 the first American satellite would launch, he had pushed for a launch of Sputnik 1 in October. Knowing that Alan Shepard’s mission was scheduled for May 1961, he had Yuri Gagarin sent up in April. Knowing that the Americans planned to attempt a rendezvous in space, he had Nikolayev and Popovich launched on their group flight in August 1962.
In 1964 he demanded that his space engineers accomplish two more stunts to beat the Americans. They were to fly a three man space capsule, and have a cosmonaut leave the capsule to walk in space.
More than Leonov’s spacewalk, the October 1964 flight of Voskhod 1 epitomized the demands that Nikita Khrushchev put on the Soviet space program.
To do what their ruler demanded, the Soviet engineers took incredible risks. Using the same tiny Vostok capsule that had put Yuri Gagarin in space, they removed its ejector seats and escape tower. Then they eliminated spacesuits, and had the crew sit sideways to the control panel. Then they put this all on top of a brand new rocket that had been tested just once.107
The flight was so risky that one of the ship’s designers, Konstantin Feoktistov, insisted on flying himself. He said he couldn’t ask others to go if he wasn’t willing to go himself.108
On October 12th, 1964, five months before Leonov’s spacewalk and the first American two-man mission, Voskhod 1 took off from Baikonur. For a little over one day designer Feoktistov, test pilot Vladimir Komarov, and doctor Boris Yegorov orbited the earth in their cramped quarters, once again proclaiming to the world that communism under Khrushchev could do it better. In fact, Khrushchev spoke with the cosmonauts while they were in orbit, wishing them health and telling them that their work would “glorify our homeland, our peoples, our party, and the idea of Marxism-Leninism [by] which our state stands and [by] which we achieve all the things we have.”109
When Voskhod landed on October 13th, however, the Soviet Union was no longer under Khrushchev’s rule. In a sudden coup, a political faction led by Leonid Brezhnev had taken control of the government. Khrushchev’s freewheeling style had finally done him in. Without mentioning his name, a Pravda editorial condemned Khrushchev’s “hare-brained schemes, immature conclusions and hasty decisions and actions divorced from reality, bragging and phrase-mongering, commmandism, [and] unwillingness to take into account the achievements of science.”110
His continuous interference with the space program in order to achieve short-term propaganda victories had contributed significantly to his ouster.111 Unbeknownst to NASA and the rest of the world, the new Soviet leadership had decided that, after Leonov’s spacewalk five months hence, manned flights would stop for a few years in order to give the space program time to refocus. No longer would its missions be planned merely as solitary stunts to upstage the West. Now the Soviets were going to establish a carefully thought-out program for beating America to the moon.
GEMINI
Imagine you and a co-worker sit in the front seat of a small compact car. You close the doors and proceed to live in that confined space non-stop for the next fourteen days. You cannot leave to go to the bathroom, to eat, or to shower. Imagine that you have radio headsets on and that every word you say is being recorded by an army of doctors. Imagine also that those doctors have attached sensors to numerous places on your body. They have many different questions to ask you, and you have no choice but to try to answer them.
Imagine as well that the car’s air conditioning doesn’t work very well, the car is sitting in the hot sun, and you have to wear a heavy, insulated jumpsuit. The temperature rises and there is nothing you can do.
And finally, imagine that though the car’s engine is in gear and running and the car is in motion, the steering column is turned all the way to the right, and for the entire two weeks you continually go around in circles, watching the same scenery go by again and again and again, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
This is the experience that began for Frank Borman and Jim Lovell on December 4, 1965 at 1:30 PM (C.S.T.). At that moment they lay on their backs on top of a one-hundred-twenty-foot-tall raging behemoth. The Titan rocket on which their Gemini capsule sat had just ignited, and though it was only a third the size of the Saturn 5, it was a significantly rougher ride. Spewing out 430,000 pounds of thrust, twice as much as a Boeing 747 at takeoff, the Titan felt like a bucking bull at a rodeo.112
It was the first space flight for both men, and in as many ways as possible Gemini 7 illustrated the unpleasant and miserable side to human exploration. Their mission was to prove that a human being could survive fourteen days in space, and for two weeks they went around and around and around and around the earth, completing two hundred six orbits and seeing as many sunrises and sunsets.
For the first two days of Gemini 7, the rules required that Borman and Lovell stay in their spacesuits, which they found hot and uncomfortable. After that, if one astronaut was in shirtsleeves, the other had to be in his suit. The original plan called for them to switch places each day, with Jim Lovell in his longjohns on the third day, and Frank Borman out of the suit on the fourth, and so on.113 As it turned out, Lovell asked if he could stay unsuited on the second night, and Commander Borman made the decision that since his crewmate was a larger man and had greater difficulty getting out of the suit, he would stay suited and let Lovell remain in his underwear. “I didn’t have the heart to follow the twenty-four hour exchange arrangement,” Borman wrote later.114
Gemini 7 lifts off, December 4, 1965.
For the next four days Borman sweated in his suit, resisting mission control’s repeated requests that he trade places with Lovell so that the doctors could get better data. Instead, Borman argued that there was no reason for either man to wear his suits, and that they should both be allowed to fly suitless.
Because this was the first lon
g duration flight in space, almost doubling the previous mission length, the medical experiments took precedent over the comfort of the astronauts. On the mission’s sixth day, with the capsule’s internal temperature now at 85 degrees, Flight Director Chris Kraft ordered Borman to switch places with Lovell. In his next rest period Borman slept for six straight hours, and woke up telling ground control that he “felt like a million dollars!”115
There were other unpleasant aspects of their mission. The astronauts urinated into condoms which were sealed in a plastic bag and then dumped overboard. On the fifth day the plastic bag broke in Borman’s hands, and little globs of urine floated all over the capsule.116
Both men found their noses stuffed and their skin flaking due to the one hundred percent oxygen atmosphere. In order to simplify the capsule’s design, NASA engineers had eschewed recreating the earth’s normal atmosphere of about three-quarters nitrogen and one quarter oxygen. Instead, the Gemini spacecraft used oxygen alone, at a pressure of 5.5 pounds per square inch. A mixed atmosphere required additional pumps, tanks, and valves, weighed more, and cost money and time to build. Two weeks of astronaut discomfort, however, cost nothing in time, labor, or weight.
The dehydrated food the astronauts ate was at best boring, and at worst horrible. “The worst items were the beef and egg bites,” Borman recalled later. “Terribly dry and leaving a bad taste in the mouth and a coating on the tongue.”117
On the eighth day of the mission, NASA finally attempted to match the Soviet accomplishment of three years earlier: putting two manned spacecraft in orbit at the same time.
Gemini 6, manned by Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, had originally been scheduled to launch in October. First NASA would launch an unmanned target craft. Then the Gemini capsule would follow it into space, chase it down, and link up. To prove such maneuvers possible was essential for any mission to the moon. Unfortunately, when the target rocket exploded six minutes into its flight, Schirra and Stafford were left without anything to rendezvous with, and so the plan was scrubbed.
To salvage the mission, NASA improvised. Why not combine the two week long endurance mission of Gemini 7 with Gemini 6’s rendezvous goal? Eight days after Borman and Lovell reached orbit, Gemini 6 would blast off from the now-renamed Cape Kennedy and, using the Gemini 7 capsule as their target vehicle, track it down.
So, while Borman and Lovell sweated and squirmed through their first week in orbit, ground crews scrambled to repair and prep the launchpad for Gemini 6’s flight. In less than two days, the Titan rocket was prepped and ready to go.
In the early hours of December 12th, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford entered the capsule. As with every other American launch, hundreds of newsmen gathered at the Cape to report the story. All the television networks preempted normal schedules to show the launch. The tension built as the clock wound down. At T minus ten seconds, Paul Haney, public affairs officer, began counting down the last seconds, then announced that the engines had ignited. On the launchpad smoke billowed out from under the rocket, the roar built -- and then stopped.
A strange silence descended on the pad. Gemini 6 sat there, unmoving. Haney announced, “We’ve got -- we’ve got a shutdown! No liftoff! The engines have shut down!”
In the capsule Commander Wally Schirra sat tensed, his hand holding the emergency ejection system release cord. According to the rules he should now pull it, sending the astronauts flying away from what was over one hundred fifty tons of explosive fuel. Instead, he looked at the spacecraft’s internal timer and noted aloud to mission control, “My clock has started.”
Gemini flight director Chris Kraft cut in, “No lift off, no lift off.” Without ordering them to do so, Kraft desperately wanted Schirra to pull the cord before the Titan rocket exploded.118
Schirra held firm. Like all the astronauts, he had an amazing instinct for knowing when to abandon his ship. Ejection not only would have destroyed any chance of Gemini 6 ever making orbit, it held the real risk of injuring him and Stafford. If the Titan rocket was still locked on the pad, nothing would happen, and once the ground technicians got the rocket fuel under control they could just reset the clocks and start over.
Schirra’s gamble paid off. An hour and a half later the two astronauts climbed from their Gemini capsule. At the same time, ground crews swarmed over the rocket, trying to discover why its engines had cut off.
Meanwhile, Borman and Lovell continued to circle the globe. To pass the time, they sang an old country song over and over again. “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone, let’s pretend that you and I are all alone. . .”
They had already set a new endurance record, orbiting the earth over one hundred twenty times. Each new day brought them sixteen new sunrises and sunsets. Their first sunrise had filled both astronauts with silent awe. As the sun climbed through the earth’s atmosphere, its light was split into vivid reds and blues and yellows. To Borman it appeared as if he was “looking into a huge cave with a red mouth, yellow roof, and blue outer rim.”119
After more than a week, however, the sunrises and sunsets, while still beautiful, had become commonplace. Both men had lost weight, felt dirty, and were tired of the food. And now the much-anticipated rendezvous was delayed for at least three more days.
As a reward for their new endurance record, the ground finally relented and allowed both men to strip to their longjohns. “Hallelujah!” Lovell responded, immediately shedding his suit.
In Houston, Susan Borman and Marilyn Lovell were in many ways as uncomfortable as their husbands. Susan had taken her kids to Cape Kennedy to watch the launch, and had found the experience very frightening. Unlike military jets, which Frank could pilot and control, the Titan rocket looked more like a missile with her husband instead of a bomb in the nose cone. Worse, she and the children had always been insulated from Frank’s test flights. When he flew a experimental jet she couldn’t actually see him do it. He went to work and came home when the job was done. Here the violence and danger of his work was almost shoved in her face.
Gemini 7 lifted upward, its engines spitting fire and smoke and the roar engulfing the Borman family. Fred Borman, then only fourteen, gripped his mother’s hand and asked, “Mom, why didn’t you tell us it would be so difficult?”120 Susan Borman held him tighter, not only to comfort him but to keep her own fears under control, knowing that all around them news cameras were clicking away. To the public she had to remain the supportive, excited wife.
Susan Borman, with Ed on left and Fred on right, watch launch of Gemini 7.
Marilyn Lovell had also wanted to go to the Cape to watch her husband’s first launch, but unexpected circumstances intervened. She had become pregnant. The Lovells already had three children, and hadn’t planned on any more. Suddenly, in the late spring, with Jim already assigned to Gemini 7, Marilyn realized that she was going to have another baby, and would give birth either during Gemini 7 or immediately after. She decided to tell no one about it. She worried that NASA might take Jim off the flight because of her.
Of course, keeping this secret wasn’t possible for long. When Jim and NASA found out, however, they did nothing. Jim stayed on the mission, and Marilyn prayed that news photographers would only photograph her from the neck up -- which they did. Nonetheless, being nine months pregnant, the idea of traveling to Florida to see that rocket blast off seemed a very bad idea. Marilyn watched everything from her home.
Also watching from Houston was Bill Anders. After trying unsuccessfully for three years to become a test pilot, he had found a way to become an astronaut instead. One Friday afternoon in 1962 he was driving his V.W. bus home from work when he heard on the radio that NASA was now accepting applications for its third class of astronauts. Anders listened with casual interest. Up until now, all astronauts had been test pilots, and since he’d never even been to test pilot’s school, becoming an astronaut seemed hardly a possibility.
The announcer began checking off the requirements. “Two thousand hours total je
t time.”
I got that, Anders thought.
“A masters degree in engineering.”
I got that, Anders thought. “A military career.”
I got that, Anders thought.
Anders waited for him to mention test pilot training, but the announcer instead went on to describe how one obtained an application. To Anders’s delight he suddenly realized that NASA no longer required its astronauts to be test pilots. Instantly he pulled to the side of the road so that he could write down the address for getting his application. When he got home he looked at Valerie and in his soft-spoken manner said, “Boy, wouldn’t it be great to go to the moon?” He then told her he was going to become an astronaut.
Valerie’s first reaction was “What?” She didn’t oppose it, she just hadn’t even considered the idea. She, like Bill, had assumed that test pilots’ school had to be his next career step.
Her second reaction was “It’ll be better than Vietnam.” Already they knew men who had fought and died in Southeast Asia. Flying in space was a safer occupation. The goals of the space program also seemed far more worthwhile for both the country and for Bill, compared to the quagmire that even in 1962 Vietnam appeared to be.
Her third reaction was “Wow, that’s really exciting!” Though she had always know that her husband had an adventurous spirit, flying to the moon was much farther than she had ever expected him to go.
Bill applied, and on his thirtieth birthday, October 17th, 1963, was accepted to NASA’s third class of astronauts, fourteen members strong. The class included Buzz Aldrin, Mike Collins, Dave Scott, Dick Gordon, Gene Cernan, and Al Bean, all of whom flew to the moon in later years.
Bill Anders and Mike Collins on jungle survival training in the Panama
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