First Man

by James R. Hansen

  The Gemini V team of Cooper, Conrad, Armstrong, and See, as well as the later Gemini VIII crew of Armstrong, Scott, and their backups (Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon), grew into closely knit units. “All of the teams I was on were pretty close, but my sense is that the Gemini teams were more closely knit than the Apollo ones,” Neil relates. Part of the reason was that the Gemini teams involved just four astronauts whereas the Apollo teams involved six. “That was part of it,” Neil states. “Another part of it was that the splitting of duties in Apollo did not get you to spend nearly as much time together. With Gemini we’d all four of us be [at McDonnell] for three days or four days at a time. So we just spent an enormous amount of time together—and we worked pretty well.”

  Gemini V launched on Saturday, August 21, 1965. The Titan II rocket shot the spacecraft aloft from Launchpad LC-19 just a few seconds before 9:00 A.M. EST, following a two-day hold due to weather conditions at the Cape and because of problems loading the cryogenic fuel. Gordon Cooper remembered: “Ours was the first spacecraft to go into space with a fuel cell: an on-site photochemical generator that produced its own energy. Previous spacecraft had relied on batteries, which would be too cumbersome and heavy given the amount of electronics the more advanced spacecraft were now carrying. In Gemini V, for example, we were taking into space the first onboard radar, and first computer, both of which drew substantial electric power. Proving we could fly with a fuel cell was paramount.” For the engineers responsible for making sure that the “newfangled contraption” was reliable, notably MSC’s Charles W. Matthews, head of the Gemini Project Office, the very idea of a problematic fuel cell literally produced nightmares.

  Following backup crew member procedure, Armstrong and See were at the Cape for the launch, then returned to the Manned Spacecraft Center. “We actually talked to the spacecraft on VHF as it went overhead on our way back in our T-38,” Armstrong recalls. “We landed back in Houston and immediately went to Mission Control and made ourselves available to help with the flight. Certainly in all the various problems that they bumped into on that flight, we were very much involved.”

  As Cooper later wrote, the fuel cell “nearly cost us our mission.” On their third orbit, in the middle of one of their seventeen planned experiments, Conrad noticed that the oxygen pressure in the fuel cell had dropped for some unknown reason from 800 to 70 pounds per square inch, just when “we’d released a rendezvous pod, had it on radar, and were just getting ready to intercept it—an experiment designed to provide crucial information about never-before-attempted space rendezvous.”

  The pressure in the fuel cell eventually recovered, but by then the chance to demonstrate a rendezvous had passed. The flight of Gemini V ended one day short of “eight days or bust,” splashing down a considerable distance (ninety miles away) from its rescue ship because someone on the ground had sent up incorrect navigation coordinates (involving the Earth’s rotation rate) to the onboard computer. The mission amassed impressive data on the physiological effects of weightlessness (it took two days for the cardiovascular systems of Cooper and Conrad to recover), but the disappointing rendezvous outcome underscored that aspect for the next Gemini flights.

  Three weeks after the splashdown of Gemini V, on September 20, 1965, NASA formally named the crew for Gemini VIII. Armstrong would serve as the command pilot, as he had in the backup crew for Gemini V. Rather than Elliot See, who had been with Neil on the Gemini V backup crew, Slayton paired Neil with Dave Scott, the first member of the third class of astronauts to get a flight assignment. Assigned as backup to Neil and Dave were Pete Conrad, the pilot of the just completed Gemini V, and Dick Gordon, who like Scott was new to the Gemini program.

  Only by misunderstanding Slayton’s method of assigning crews does one conclude that Deke “replaced” Elliot See, who had seniority over Scott, on Neil’s crew. Some astronauts, in fact, believed this was the case, as did many journalists covering the space program. Tom Stafford, for one, went to Al Shepard for an explanation.

  “Deke’s position was,” states Armstrong, “small differences between crews should be just overwhelmed with other considerations. It should not be important.”

  Dave Scott’s assignment was partially motivated by changes in the Gemini schedule. Furthermore, Slayton was concerned that See was not physically strong enough to do the ambitious EVA that was scheduled for Gemini VIII. The only EVA ever done by an American astronaut was Ed White’s space walk in Gemini V, just three months earlier, in June 1965. Not even the athletic White could finish his twenty-two-minute space walk without his normally slow pulse shooting up to 180 beats per minute. With sweat in his eyes and a fogged-up visor, White struggled to rejoin commander Jim McDivitt, who in a worst-case scenario would have had to cut the umbilical cord, close the hatch, leave his mate to die floating in space, and head home.

  Together, these circumstances moved See into a left-seat assignment on Gemini IX, where he would not have to make a difficult EVA. “Gemini VIII was a rendezvous and a long EVA flight—a big-time EVA flight,” Neil explains. “Dave[’s] flight experience was good. At MIT some of his [graduate] studies had been with rendezvous. He was big and strong—no question about his ability to physically handle the stuff. …I thought Dave was an excellent choice.”

  Not for a minute did Armstrong think that somehow he was abandoning See by accepting Scott as his crewmate: “No, I didn’t think about that at all. That’s partially because I worked with Deke. We also talked about strategies for moving people through the system. I had some concept of what was in Deke’s mind.” Others might not have understood it as well, but “There were so many other examples of people who changed out of crews, for all different reasons,” cites Neil.

  With his assignment in September 1965 to command Gemini VIII, the first phase of Armstrong’s career as an astronaut came to an end. For the next six months, until the launch of Gemini VIII on March 16, 1966, Armstrong and Scott trained almost without interruption for their first spaceflight, the most complex ever tried to that point in the American space program—and one that almost cost them their lives.

  CHAPTER 19

  Gemini VIII

  Cape Kennedy, Florida. 9:41A.M. EST, Wednesday, March 16, 1966. This isGemini Launch Control. We are T minus 114 minutes for Gemini VIII onPad Nineteen and nineteen minutes away from the Atlas/Agena liftoff onPad 14. Prime pilots for the mission, Astronauts Neil Armstrong and DavidScott, 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.

  9:58A.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 NeilArmstrong 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. A
lso 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 1963 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.

  10:00A.M. We’ve got liftoff of the Atlas-Agena. Our network controller advises that liftoff was three seconds after the hour…. The flight dynamicsplot 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 a161-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.”

  10:08A.M. The astronauts have been busy in the spacecraft at LaunchComplex 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 advisedArmstrong 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 go
od 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.”