With relative velocity between the two vehicles canceled out, rendezvous—only the second ever made in the brief history of the Space Age—had been achieved.
Station keeping posed no particular problem for Armstrong: “The Gemini VII/VI combination flight had reported that it was quite easy to fly very close and maintain station keeping without worrying about bumping into the other spacecraft inadvertently. Schirra and Borman had indicated that it was very easy to do once they got in the proper position, and I found that to be true also. It was very easy to fly close. We flew around the vehicle and took pictures of the Agena from different perspectives, in different lighting.”
Armstrong always used the term “we” when it came to flying any aircraft or spacecraft, but the requirements of the Gemini mission were too serious for him to share any of the piloting responsibilities with Scott, at least not yet:
Even after this exchange, Armstrong planned to let Scott fly the spacecraft sometime later in the mission: “I was going to have him fly it, but not then. I thought it would be much better to do it later. We were coming up on darkness, and we needed to get this job done. I had a lot of stuff I was supposed to practice in order to get the docking done, and I decided that he could fly the spacecraft after we undocked or after he did his EVA, one of the other times when we were still going to be around the Agena. I thought there would be another time for him to get his chance.”
Armstrong and Scott kept their rendezvous station across most of that “day,” knowing that the plan was to proceed with the docking before they moved into the next “night,” when docking conditions would be far from optimal. In the orbit they were in, daylight lasted for about forty-five minutes.
The rendezvous began just west of Hawaii. The press noted the irony that Schirra and Borman, the command pilots for Gemini VI and VII, were at that very moment in an airplane also heading eastward for Honolulu, closing out a goodwill tour to the Far East. Earlier in the day, Schirra and Borman had tried to contact Gemini VIII via a radio transmission—call sign “Gemini 7/6”—sent by UHF to the Kauai station. Armstrong and Elliot See had made the same sort of friendly call to Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad early in the latter’s Gemini V flight.
Gemini VIII’s location at daylight put it in the vicinity of USS Rose Knot Victor (CapCom Keith K. Kundel), tracking the spacecraft from off the northeastern coast of South America, at the very moment Armstrong was easing the spacecraft toward the docking at the barely perceptible closing rate of three inches per second:
Celebration broke loose in Mission Control for a few mad seconds.
It came as a surprise to no one that both the crew and the flight controllers in Mission Control focused, during the first minutes of the docking, on the performance of the Agena, given how riddled with problems the GATV had been. Houston had difficulty verifying that the Agena was receiving and storing the commands uplinking for an upcoming yaw maneuver. Flight also wondered why the Agena’s velocity meter did not seem to be operating. These two mysteries suggested to Flight Director John Hodge and his team of controllers a malfunction in the Agena’s attitude control system:
Six minutes and seven seconds after this warning reminder, the Tananarive tracking station lost the spacecraft’s signal as it moved into a dead zone in the worldwide tracking network, across the waters of the Indian Ocean. For the next twenty-one minutes, there would be absolutely no communications with Gemini VIII, now coupled in flight with the Agena as one integrated spacecraft.
Then came the next chilling words from Gemini VIII:
Armstrong recalls the sequence of events leading to the in-flight emergency, the first potentially fatal one ever experienced in the U.S. space program: “We had gone into night just shortly after the docking was made. You didn’t see a lot on the night side. You saw stars up above, and down below you might see lights from a city or lightning areas embedded in thunderstorms, but you didn’t see much down below. I don’t remember exactly what I was doing at the time, but Dave noticed from the ball indicator, and called to my attention, that we were not in level flight like we were supposed to be but rather in a thirty-degree bank angle.”
As their spacecraft had moved into nighttime conditions, the astronauts had turned up the lights in their cockpit as far as they could go, making it almost impossible to detect any changes in their horizon line unless they were looking directly at instruments: “I made some efforts to reduce the bank angle, mainly by triggering short bursts from the Orbit Attitude and Maneuvering System [OAMS]. Then the banking started to go again, so I asked Dave to shut off the controls to the Agena. Dave had all the controls for the Agena on his side of the spacecraft.”
To no avail, Scott commanded the target vehicle to turn off its attitude control system; he jiggled the target vehicle switches and cycled them on and off again; he energized and deenergized the entire Agena control panel. Armstrong relates, “I really believed that we wouldn’t have any trouble with the docking, based on the simulations we did,” but no one had conjured a simulation in which a coupled Gemini-Agena experienced such deviant motions. “If we had been able to practice in such a situation,” Armstrong feels, “I’m sure we would have figured it out much more quickly.
“We had a couple of flights in the Gemini program under our belt by this point,” Armstrong notes. “So it was natural to suspect that if there were a problem or mistake, it would come from the Agena, which had had quite a few problems in its development.”
Reinforcing the bias against the Agena was the warning that Jim Lovell had issued, just moments prior to docking, that at any sign of trouble Armstrong and Scott were to get off the Agena and take control of their own spacecraft. “This was probably an unnecessary comment at this point in the flight, given all the prior concerns about the performance of the Agena,” Armstrong notes, “but I’m sure somebody at Mission Control told Jim to remind us not to mess around if anything started acting up.”
Neil simply said to his crewmate, “We’re going to disengage and undock,” and Dave Scott immediately agreed.
“Go,” Armstrong said to Scott. “We disengaged successfully,” Neil explains, “but I was a bit concerned because I didn’t want to have a reimpact immediately afterwards with the Agena. So I pulled away sharply hoping I could increase the distance before one of us rotated back into the other one. That worked fine. We then immediately tried to get control of our own spacecraft, which we found we couldn’t do. Immediately it was obvious that the problem was not the Agena’s. It was ours.”
The real villain was one of Gemini VIII’s OAMS thrusters—specifically, thruster number eight, a small rocket with twenty-three pounds of thrust used to roll the aircraft. Apparently sometime while Armstrong had been using the OAMS to maneuver the Gemini-Agena combination, a short circuit stuck the thruster open.
“I didn’t know at the time,” relates Armstrong, that “you only hear the thruster when it fired; you didn’t hear it when it was running steadily.”
Gemini VIII was spinning dangerously out of control. According to Armstrong, “The rate of rotation kept increasing until it reached the point where the motions began to couple. In other words, the problem became not just a precariously high rate of roll but also the coupling of pitch and yaw,” in engineering terms, the same sort of control dilemma as the inertial roll coupling that had so plagued the design of early supersonic aircraft.
“Our spacecraft turned into a tumbling gyro, the fastest motion of which was our roll rate. Our roll rate indicators only went up to twenty degrees per second, and all the roll rate indicators had shot up against the peg, so we were clearly beyond twenty degrees per second in all axes—although sometimes they mysteriously came swinging back all the way across.” When the revolutions surpassed over 360 degrees per second, “I became very concerned that we might lose our ability to discriminate accurately,” Armstrong recalls. “I could tell when I looked up above me to the controls for the rocket engine that things were getting blurry. I thought I could, b
y holding my head at a certain angle, keep the controls in focus, but I knew we were going to have to do something quickly to make sure that we could work on the problem without losing our vision or our consciousness.”
Armstrong found his options narrowed to one, “to stabilize the spacecraft in order to regain control. The only way I could do that was to engage the spacecraft’s other control system.” This was the reentry control system (RCS), which was up in the nose of the spacecraft. As the RCS had two individual rings that were coupled, “its propellant tanks were not normally pressurized until shortly before their normal use. There was a single pushbutton switch that energized pyrotechnic valves that allowed high-pressure gas to pressurize the UMDH/N204 propellant tanks. Once the tanks were pressurized, each redundant ring (A and B) could be operated individually using electrical switches. Once we blew the squib valves, we used both rings to regain control. Then we shut off one of the rings to save its propellant for the entry phase. Mission rules dictated that once the squibs were blown, we were obliged to land at the next available landing site.
“We turned off the other control systems, the ones in the back end, and stabilized the spacecraft with only the front-end system,” Neil relates. “It didn’t take an awful lot of reentry control fuel to do that, but it took enough.”
With the spacecraft now stabilized thanks to his firing of the RCS, Armstrong energized the thrusters, one by one. When he hit the switch for thruster number eight, Gemini VIII immediately started to roll again. “We found the culprit,” Armstrong notes, “but we didn’t have a lot of fuel in the back-end system left available to us at that point.
“Murphy’s law says bad things always happen at the worst possible times,” Armstrong says with a smile. “In this case, we were in orbits that didn’t go over any tracking stations. We were out of radio contact almost all of the time, and for the short stretches when we were in contact, it was over the Rose Knot Victor or the Coastal Sentry Quebec. These ships at sea had limited ability to communicate back with Mission Control or to transmit data to Houston.
“By the time we went over a tracking station or two and were able to convey the nature of our problem so [Mission Control] knew what was going on, there wasn’t any way they could help much at that point.”
Finally having put a stop to the maverick spinning, Armstrong took his first chance to explain what had happened, and Houston had its first chance to inquire into the fate of the Agena:
Armstrong recalls of his decision to start up the reentry control system: “I knew what the mission rules were…Once we energized the RCS and the integrity gets broken in both RCS rings, we had to land—and land at the next convenient opportunity.
“I had to go back to the foundation instincts, which were ‘save your craft, save the crew, get back home, and be disappointed that you had to leave some of your goals behind.’”
6:44 P.M. This is Gemini Houston Control. We are eight hours and three minutes into the flight of Gemini VIII. And in view of the trouble encountered at seven hours into the flight as reported earlier, the Flight Director [John Hodge] has determined to terminate the flight in the 7-3 area. We plan to bring the flight down on the seventh orbit in what we call the third zone, which is approximately 500 miles east of Okinawa. It’s in the far westPacific. Our situation out there is as follows. A destroyer named the USS Leonard Mason is about 160 miles away at this time. It is proceeding towards the point, and it should take that destroyer probably five to six hours to reach it, which should come very close to the…Well, it may be a little delayed and get there after the landing itself…
Out of communication with the ground, Neil expressed his frustration about having to land, especially in such a remote area:
Armstrong and Scott knew that rescues on open ocean did not always happen quickly. Even on land and with modern communications, it was hard to find something as small as a space capsule. Stories had circulated in NASA that it sometimes took the Russians forty-eight hours to find their astronauts after their parachuting down into places like Kazakhstan or Siberia.
As for arguing with Mission Control, “I was sure that, if there were a way, they would keep us up. I wanted to stay up. I was also sure, if it was reasonable to do so, there were people arguing that view on the ground. I didn’t have to get into the fray.”
The two astronauts had much to do to prepare for emergency reentry and splashdown: “Dave and I understood that we probably had several hours to get ready. From the ground we were given the retrofire location time, which was over Africa and on the night-side of Earth, so we prepared for retrofire activity. We were flying over the tracking station in Kano, Nigeria, when Houston started giving us the countdown for the retrofire time. We lost communication with the ground midway through that count so they didn’t really know if the retro had come off or not. But the retrofire was stable and our readings of the retro change in velocity—that is, the amount of slowing down that we had done—was proper for the target that we wished to hit. Our guidance system seemed to be working properly, so we steered a course for Okinawa.”
8:47 P.M. This is Gemini Houston Control. The pilots were counted down in the blind via the Kano station, and Neil Armstrong, while he said nothing leading up to the point of retrofire, came back with a very reassuring, “We have all four retros. All four have fired.” A cheer went up here in the ControlCenter, and I’m sure everyone can understand why…. We want to emphasize again that there is practically no communication expected now for some time. We are going to try to reach them via the Coastal Sentry Quebec on high frequency after they emerge from blackout, but that signal will be marginal. Probably our first authoritative information will come via one of theC-54 aircraft maneuvering in the area east of Okinawa…
As Gemini VIII came into daylight, “We appeared to be dropping at a prodigious rate,” Neil recalls. “We could almost see those big mountains [Himalayas] coming up at us.” The spacecraft’s main chute deployed on time, orienting them with their view up rather than down, so “there was a mirror that we used, a small flight pocket mirror, and by looking into that I could look down over the side and see that we were, thankfully, over water.”
“Being an old navy guy, I much preferred coming down in the water to coming down in Red China,” Armstrong remembers with a smile.
While they were coming down under the chute, Neil was the first to hear the sound of propeller airplanes in the vicinity. “We assumed it was friendly.”
The splashdown itself turned out to be, in Neil’s words, “not too bad.” A C-54 rescue plane arrived quickly and dropped navy frogmen into the rough waters to attach a big flotation collar around the spacecraft. Nothing remained but to wait for the destroyer Leonard Mason. The wait turned into a nauseous ordeal.
“The Gemini was a terrible boat,” Neil explains, “a good spacecraft, but not a good boat.” Much to their regret, neither Armstrong nor Scott took their tablets of meclizine, used to avoid motion sickness. “So both of us really got seasick in due course,” Neil admits. Fortunately, they were on a low-residue diet and did not have much in their systems to regurgitate.
After more than two hours, the frogmen, themselves queasy from inhaling the stench from Gemini VIII’s burnt heat shield, opened the spacecraft’s hatches, and the astronauts climbed out. For former sailor Armstrong, getting up and on board the destroyer happened much quicker and easier than it did for Scott. Dave, an air force pilot and untested on a Jacob’s ladder, struggled up the rigid chain links and nearly fell back in the water. At the top, while tangled up in some rungs, the massive hand of an African-American seaman reached down and pulled him onto the ship. By that time, Neil was already well on board, reluctantly accepting handshakes from the crew.
Neil did not feel like shaking hands with anyone: “I was very depressed at this point. We had not completed all the things we wanted to do. We’d lost Dave’s chance to do all those EVA marvelous jobs. We’d spent a lot of taxpayers’ money, and they hadn’t gotten their money�
��s worth out of it. I was sad, and I knew Dave was, too. It was one of those bad days. The guys on the ship fixed a marvelous big dinner for us, but I could hardly eat a bite.”
It took about fourteen hours for the ship to get them to Okinawa. In the party of VIPs at the dock stood Wally Schirra. Immediately after arriving in Hawaii with Frank Borman from their Far Eastern trip, NASA sent Wally back to Okinawa to help the assigned medical doctor and State Department protocol officer bring back his fellow astronauts without incident. “Our job was to protect Armstrong and Scott. We were to prevent people from washing out their minds and diluting information they had to report.”
The ship’s arrival at Buckner Bay in Okinawa caused more of a stir than anyone planned. Armstrong recollects the unfolding comedy: “The ship had been directed to proceed at flank speed and get us there with the recovered spacecraft as soon as possible. The captain of the destroyer was running his engines at full throttle, and he didn’t have a chance to reballast the ship because he was burning off fuel at a great rate and was riding real high in the water. There was a big welcoming party on the dock. There was a band and people with signs and big banners. The ship approached the dock, the band was playing, and all the people were waving signs and yelling. An offshore wind caught the ship and just pushed it right away from the dock. So the captain turned away from the dock and made a new approach. The band stopped, the banners came down, and everybody milled around. When the ship came around and pulled towards the dock for the second time, the band started playing again and the banners went up and the people started yelling. But then out went the ship again! The wind took it right back out again!”
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