First Man

by James R. Hansen

  “If she doesn’t make it this time,” Schirra heard a crusty three-star admiral say, “I’ll get a gun and sink her!” Finally, the humiliated captain of the Leonard Mason figured out his problem and made the necessary corrections to get his ship docked. By then, some of the banner carriers had left, and the oom-pah-pahs of the band had grown weak. Even in his depressed state, Armstrong found the incident “very humorous,” but not as much as Schirra, a good-natured navy veteran, who was barely able to hold back his chuckles while standing at attention on the dock.

  After a good night’s sleep in Okinawa, the astronauts were flown in a C-141 jet transport to Hawaii. Not even that flight went without incident, as the plane lost oil pressure in its number two engine about 800 miles west of the islands. At Tripler Hospital, an army facility located on Oahu just west of Honolulu, they underwent a complete medical exam. They arrived back at Kennedy Space Center on March 19, three days after launching from the Cape. Reporters were kept away pending completion of a preliminary round of debriefings.

  “Essentially every aspect of the operation was reviewed. We went through a number of discussions with different people [flight controllers, astronauts, launch operation, recovery systems, control systems], each of whom had a special interest, wanting to find out how his system worked or didn’t work and what recommendations we had to improve it. We tried to tell them everything we knew.”

  Not until March 25 did Armstrong and Scott return to their homes in Houston. The next day NASA convened the crew’s first post-flight press conference. Even several days of talking over technical matters with his associates did not alleviate Neil’s depression: “It was a great disappointment to us, to have to cut that flight short. I’m sure I expressed the fact to the media that Dave and I were really disappointed that we didn’t get to do everything we hoped to do and that we hoped to get another chance to do something equally good in a future flight.”

  International media paid a great deal of attention to the unprecedented spaceflight ordeal of Gemini VIII. All the networks in the United States broke into their regular evening programming with emergency news bulletins. (ABC’s interruption of an episode of its immensely popular Batman series was rewarded with more than one thousand phone calls from complaining viewers.) At the Scott and Armstrong homes in Texas, additional camera crews joined the others already camped out in the front yards. The next morning’s New York Daily News carried the banner headline “A Nightmare in Space!” Even staid Life, with its exclusive contract, elevated the events into melodrama.

  Initially, the magazine positioned its coverage as “Our Wild Ride in Space—By Neil and Dave,” but Armstrong put a stop to it. He called Hank Suydam, a Life writer assigned to Houston. Suydam wired his boss, Edward K. Thompson, Life’s editor-in-chief:

  I JUST HAD A PHONE CALL FROM NEIL ARMSTRONG WHO WAS VERYUPSET AT THE ADVANCE BILLING IN THIS WEEK’S MAGAZINE WHICHREAD “OUR WILD RIDE IN SPACE.” HE ASKS THAT THE HEADLINESYOU USE WITH THEIR ACTUAL PIECE NOT CONCENTRATE SOLELYON THE EMERGENCY AND NOT BE PHRASED IN WHAT HECONSIDERS AN OVERLY JAZZY WAY. I TOLD HIM WE APPRECIATEHIS POINT. I EXPLAINED, HOWEVER, THAT WE DO HAVE TO USEHEADS TO CRYSTALLIZE THE ESSENCE OF VARIOUS PHASES OF THESTORY. I GAVE HIM A GENERAL ASSURANCE THAT WE WOULDN’TREPEAT THE ONE IN THE BILLING AND WOULD PROBABLY UTILIZE, FOR THE MOST PART, QUOTES FROM THEIR OWN PIECE.

  The editor at Life obliged, but only partway. He toned down the piece, took the astronauts’ byline off it, and changed its title to “High Tension Over the Astronauts.”

  Life went on to run articles on Gemini VIII in its next two weekly issues. For the second article, a version of the title that Neil had resisted reappeared as “Wild Spin in a Sky Gone Berserk.” The third article, entitled “A Case of ‘Constructive Alarm,’” gave the astronauts their bylines, as the story was, in fact, based on first-person pieces written by Neil and Dave, through their words were so heavily edited that Armstrong again complained. In particular, Neil was upset at the cut of his final quote: “I think we’d put this almost identically, so I’ll speak for both of us. We were disappointed that we couldn’t complete the mission, but the part we did have, and what we did experience, we wouldn’t trade for anything.”

  Editor-in-chief Ed Thompson addressed a personal letter to both Neil and Dave: “I know that you were not entirely satisfied with the result and I think we’ve thought up an approach for the future which will cause less bleeding on your part and on the part of Life. We shouldn’t show you unedited copy; we should process it here, taking into account the space we have, etc., and then clear it with the Astronauts and NASA. That would eliminate a lot of misunderstandings. As in the past, we will pay the maximum attention to what you think of the edited result [and] will take the factual corrections you suggest…. As a friend I will personally be available on almost every closing to pour a little oil on troubled waters in case you want to call me. With the maximum of goodwill on everyone’s part I think we can come to a meeting of minds somewhat easier and earlier.”

  While Life’s editors hyped the drama of the astronauts’ personal stories, other media mined the ways that technology had failed Gemini VIII. “What Went Wrong?” headlined the New York World-Telegram on the morning after the flight. Some investigative journalists looked for scapegoats, but the great majority of the American press took its lead from President Lyndon Johnson’s words on March 17: “From [the astronauts’] skill and strength, we all take heart, knowing that the personal qualities of all the astronauts and their colleagues will ultimately prevail in the conquest of space. We are very proud of them.”

  If the press had known that, in the hallways and men’s rooms of the Manned Spacecraft Center, a few fellow astronauts were privately suggesting that the crew of Gemini VIII had handled their emergency improperly, thereby forcing NASA to terminate their mission early, the tone of the editorials might have grown negative.

  According to astronaut Gene Cernan, “It didn’t take long for some of the guys around the Astronaut Office to criticize Neil’s performance. ‘He’s a civilian pilot, you know, and maybe he has lost some of the edge. Why didn’t he do this, or why not do that? Wouldn’t have gone in the spin if he would have stayed docked with the Agena!’” Astronauts who had been on the ground while Neil and Dave were fighting to survive in space were brutal. “Screwing up was not acceptable in our hypercompetitive fraternity,” Cernan has admitted, “and if you did, it might cost you big-time. Who knew if the criticism might reach Deke’s ears and change future crew selections in favor of the person doing the bitching? Nobody got a free ride when criticism was remotely possible. Nobody.”

  Armstrong never heard any of the second-guessing firsthand, and very few of the astronauts have ever gone on record with any negative thoughts about the Gemini VIII crew’s performance. In his 2002 autobiography, We Have Capture, Gemini VI (and Apollo 10) astronaut Tom Stafford asserted simply, without explanation, that Neil’s undocking from the Agena “turned out to be the wrong thing to do.” The most candid critic, Walter Cunningham, had served at the Cape during the launch as capsule communicator for the flight crew—a position known (for some unknown reason) as the “Stoney.” There it had been Cunningham’s job to “call the liftoff” by counting backwards from ten and hollering “Liftoff!” Walt had not yet made a spaceflight of his own by March 1966. He never served on a Gemini crew; his first and only mission came on Apollo 7 in October 1968. Yet neither that relative inexperience nor the fact that he was in no position to observe any of the Gemini VIII flight (since he, Bill Anders, and their wives left on a nine-hour flight in a Cessna 172 back to Houston from the Cape immediately after liftoff) stopped Cunningham from opining. “After docking with the Agena,” Cunningham reiterated in his 1977 autobiography, The All-American Boys, “a runaway thruster began rotating the vehicles. Malfunction procedures had been written and practiced by the flight crews for just such an eventuality, but at the onset of the problem improvisation seemed to be the rule of the day. When the excitement was ove
r, the spacecraft was undocked and once more facing the Agena in space, but the crew had unnecessarily activated a backup control system.”

  The great majority of the astronauts never expressed or supported this harsh, inaccurate opinion. For one thing, malfunction procedures did not cover “just such an eventuality.” It is true that, had the Gemini VIII crew been able to correctly diagnose the problem while docked and allowed the Agena to stabilize the combined spacecraft, they would not have had to energize the reentry control system. It is also true that the crew had practiced what to do when a spacecraft thruster stuck open. But they had not practiced such an emergency when the spacecraft was docked with the Agena. Contrary to what Cunningham (and some other critics) thought, it was also not possible to energize just one ring of the reentry control system, leaving the other one intact for reentry. When the astronauts energized the RCS, both rings were pressurized, which invoked the mission rule.

  “I didn’t hear any of the criticism,” stated Frank Borman, who along with Schirra accompanied the Gemini VIII crew back to Hawaii after greeting them in Okinawa following their rescue. “I wouldn’t have participated in that crap if there was. I think Neil and Dave did a good job. I don’t think anybody realizes how close that came to utter disaster. In retrospect, that was probably as dangerous as Apollo 13. Not as time consuming, but if they had run out of reaction control fuel in stopping their spinning, they would have been dead.” Wally Schirra felt the same way about it: “The decisions that Neil and Dave made were all good decisions.”

  “Everybody second-guessed everybody,” recalled astronaut Alan Bean, who was backing up John Young and Mike Collins on Gemini X with crewmate Clifton C. Williams at the time. “Don’t forget, you’re dealing with really competitive people. You almost had to find something wrong in the other guy’s performance. It was part of the way it was.”

  Jim McDivitt, the commander of Gemini IV, was sitting in the viewing section of Mission Control when Dave Scott’s alarming words reached Houston. Scott later flew with McDivitt on Apollo 9 (along with Rusty Schweikart), so Jim heard a lot about what had happened during Gemini VIII. “There was always the thought,” McDivitt remarked, “that Neil could have done this or could have done that or he could have done something else, but when you are going around in circles up there…. I think he did fine. He and Dave got it figured out.”

  During the crisis, Dick Gordon rubbed elbows with CapCom Jim Lovell, as did his Gemini VIII backup crewmate Pete Conrad. “I’m sure there were people who said their training should have allowed Neil and Dave to do it differently,” Gordon has noted. “But Dave and Neil were real close to it, on the verge of disaster. They did what they had to do to get out of it.”

  Mike Collins was at his home in Nassau Bay but drove over to Mission Control as soon as he heard about the problem. “Given the rapidity of events, and given the red herring of everyone thinking the trouble would be with the Agena, I thought that they certainly responded more than adequately. There was Monday morning quarterbacking on everything at NASA, but I don’t remember Neil and Dave, either officially or unofficially, being subject to a lot of criticism. I don’t think they deserved a lot of criticism.”

  Buzz Aldrin, who was then preparing as backup pilot for Gemini IX, in retrospect has agreed that it is only with twenty-twenty hindsight that anyone can criticize anything that Neil did during the emergency. On the other hand, Aldrin has offered the following false conjecture: “I think there may have been a slim chance that they could have avoided activating one ring of their reentry system. [Again, it was not possible to energize the RCS rings individually.] It’s very good that they didn’t activate both of them. [Actually, they did.].”

  John Glenn had left the space program well before Gemini VIII, but he followed the mission closely. The first American to orbit the Earth considers any criticism of Armstrong’s performance in Gemini VIII to be nonsense: “You’ll never hear it from me. I don’t think anybody was as experienced a pilot as Neil was at that time. He assessed when it was getting beyond his control, and he assessed it right.”

  After the Gemini VII/VI missions, Chris Kraft had reluctantly turned over his duties as flight director in Mission Control to John Hodge and Gene Kranz, men he had trained, so that he could focus on the upcoming Apollo flights. Limited to the role of director of flight operations for Gemini VIII, he found himself sitting nervously on a step behind the back row of consoles at Mission Control during the Gemini VIII emergency. There he feverishly conferred with his old friend from NACA Langley, Bob Gilruth, the MSC director. In Kraft’s estimation, “Armstrong’s touch was as fine as any astronaut’s,” an impression totally reinforced by what Kraft had observed that evening as Neil gingerly piloted Gemini VIII to the world’s first-ever spacecraft docking. When communications with the spacecraft resumed over Hawaii, Kraft remembered hearing Neil’s voice, “amazingly calm,” telling them that Gemini VIII was rolling to the left and he couldn’t get the thrusters turned off. Only later did Kraft and the rest of Mission Control learn that Armstrong and Scott were being tossed around and beginning to suffer from grayed-out vision. “It was clearly a life-threatening situation in space,” Kraft has acknowledged, “the worst we’d ever encountered.

  “Gilruth and I, we said, ‘My God, Neil must be having trouble with the stick!’ It never occurred to us that he had a stuck thruster. If we had heard about the problem when they were still docked, we would have told them to do exactly what they did, ‘Get off that thing!’”

  Gene Kranz was just taking over as flight director from John Hodge during a shift change in Mission Control when Scott’s urgent report came in over the radio. In retrospect, according to Kranz, “It would have been tough for the controller in a very dynamic situation to track that the solid-on one was the problem. But he might have done it.

  “Then again,” Kranz conceded, “we were talking about a rookie Flight Control team that hadn’t flown many missions, and this was our first Agena mission. I think we would have picked up on the fact that the Agena was not the source of the problem. If so, we could have told the crew that we believed we had a ‘hard-on’ jet. But it would have taken a while to do that. I don’t know if we would have been able to help the crew materially.”

  Rather than blaming the crew for any measure of failure, Kranz places the blame on himself and on the other flight directors and planners in Houston: “I was damn impressed with Neil, as was virtually everyone that had anything to do with the program.” In the debriefing he gave to his flight controllers after the Gemini VIII mission, Kranz asserted: “The crew reacted as they were trained, and they reacted wrong because we trained them wrong. We failed to realize that when two spacecraft are docked they must be considered as one spacecraft, one integrated power system, one integrated control system, and a single structure…. We were lucky, too damned lucky, and we must never forget this mission’s lesson.” In retrospect, treating docked spacecraft as a single system was, in Kranz’s judgment, one of the most important lessons to come from the entire Gemini program: “It had a profound effect on our future success as flight controllers.” It was a lesson that proved invaluable when the second potentially fatal in-flight emergency happened, in 1970 during Apollo 13.

  In total agreement with Kranz about where the fault lay, Chris Kraft has asserted, “We tricked the astronauts on that one. I think Neil and Dave did absolutely what I would have had them do. As for criticizing them afterwards for doing that? I guess maybe a few astronauts might have said, ‘I’m better than that.’ But they’re only fooling themselves.”

  No one was ever a tougher, more honest critic of his technical piloting performance than Armstrong was himself: “I always felt as though if I had been a little smarter I would have been able to figure out the right diagnosis and been able to come up with something more quickly than I did. But I didn’t. I did what I thought I had to do and recognized the consequence of that. You do the best you can.”

  Following his return to Houston
, he found that, just a day or two before their launch, there had been a problem with the environmental control system in the spacecraft. This resulted in technicians pulling out the system to replace one or two parts. Curiously, the wiring for the damaged control system was part of the same cable that operated what turned out to be the faulty rocket. “So my guess,” says Neil, “was that, sometime during that process, the technicians did something that put a nick in that cable, which allowed it to short. To my knowledge, they were never able to isolate that problem. Of course, the back end of the spacecraft—the adapter—did not come back to Earth with you. So if it really had been something in the back section of Gemini VIII, we never had a chance to examine it.”

  Much more vigorously than Neil, Dave Scott has defended the wisdom of what he and his commander did in space: “There was never any doubt in my mind that we had done everything right. Otherwise we would never have survived.”

  NASA “would have pored over the telemetry records they had from every station,” Armstrong speculates. “It’s conceivable that what happened to us would forever have remained a mystery.” Dave Scott concurs, “They wouldn’t have known what happened because they wouldn’t have gotten any downlink. They wouldn’t have known it was the Gemini because they never would have gotten any data, because it would have been turning too fast.”

  Such a mysterious tragedy “would have caused a big glitch in the program,” especially coming so soon after the deaths of Bassett and See, Chris Kraft has speculated. “It would have taken us a long time to figure out what happened, if we ever would have.” Without knowing what happened and why, it would have been very difficult to proceed on into the Apollo program. Then, if the Apollo fire, too, had still occurred, just ten months later, killing three more astronauts, national support for the manned space program would likely have vanished, along with prospects for a Moon landing. As Dave Scott has said, “If we had not recovered from the spin, it could have been a showstopper.”