Blue Gemini

by Mike Jenne

  “I did, sir. You asked me to photograph activities at a playground. In Walnut Hills. On Saturday morning.” Henson pointed his hand at several prints in turn; the photos obviously had been snapped from about ten to twenty feet and depicted gleeful children playing on swings, slides, monkey bars, and other playground apparatus. “Is this not what you wanted?”

  “And these, Mr. Henson?” asked Grau, gesturing at several other photos. One depicted a grinning Henson seated at a picnic table brimming with food; Henson’s ebony face was in stark contrast to the smiling white faces of the family packed in around him on the bench. Another showed a smiling white man perched on a wooden extension ladder, using an oilcan to lubricate the chain pivots of a swing set.

  “It’s kind of difficult to explain, sir,” answered Henson. “You see, I went out there to shoot pictures of the kids, and after a while the whole thing just evolved into a neighborhood cookout and block party. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Here, this picture is of me and the Smiths. Here’s Harry and Bob working on the teeter-totters. That wood there was a little worn and warped, so we replaced it with an eight-by plank Bob had spare in his garage. Here are the guys cleaning the rust off the slide. Steel wool is a natural for that. That one there is me and the Coopers. She has cancer, you know, and won’t be with us much longer. I think Jack Cooper already has his eye on that brunette divorcee that lives around the corner on Polk Street.”

  “Hah. I see your point, Henson,” muttered Grau. “You passed your assignment, but there are more than a hundred pictures here, and you were only required to take two rolls of film. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you’re aware that you’re not drawing any extra money when yours runs out, right?”

  “Certainly. I only had two rolls when I went out there. These people bought the extra film, and they gave me money to buy some more developing chemicals. I told them that shooting the pictures was a hobby, and they just wanted some copies of what I shot. Plus I took several family portraits. That’s not a problem is it, Mr. Grau? You don’t mind, do you?”

  Admiring one of the photographs, Grau smiled ever so slightly and shook his head. “So, enlighten me, Mr. Henson. How did you do this?”

  Henson grinned and replied, “I guess that some mysteries are better left unspoken, Mr. Grau, but the easiest explanation would be that I listened to you and just did as you said.”

  Grau sat silently for several seconds, as if he was waiting for something, and finally spoke. “Well, Mr. Henson? Isn’t this the opportune moment when you shift into your best shuck and jive Br’er Rabbit impersonation and gloat about putting one over on all those dumb white folks?”

  Shaking his head, Henson pondered Grau’s comment. “No, sir,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that. To be honest, Mr. Grau, that was the best time I’ve had in several months. We had an awkward start, but these people made me feel welcome, and I felt like I belonged there. Yeah, maybe I went out there to deceive them, at least just enough to do my assignment, but events sure took a turn I didn’t expect. Thanks for sending me to Walnut Hills.”

  Grau flipped up his eye patch and scratched his empty socket. “You’re more than welcome. Excellent work, Mr. Henson. I must say, you are by far my favorite pupil. You are free to go.”

  Simulator Facility, Aerospace Support Project

  4:25 p.m., Friday, August 30, 1968

  It had been another agonizingly long day, and Gunter Heydrich was both weary and famished; he longed to plop down in front of a heaping plate of his wife’s sauerbraten, red cabbage and spatzel. With no simulations scheduled for the weekend, he looked forward to the indescribable luxury of a full night’s sleep. They probably could have ended the day with the last scenario, but Carson insisted on yet another full-blown launch-to-orbit run. This was their fifth for the afternoon; hopefully, it would be their last.

  Heydrich stubbed out his cigarette in his overflowing aluminum ashtray, took a sip of stale coffee, and dropped two Alka-Seltzer tablets in a glass of tap water. As the white tablets dissolved, he studied the six controllers seated at the first two rows of consoles. To a man, uniform in their rumpled white short-sleeve shirts and dark ties, they looked like they were stretching their last frayed nerve.

  Like a quarterback addressing an exhausted huddle in a last-ditch goal line stand, Heydrich said, “Okay, launch-to-orbit, one more time. We’re hitting them with incident twenty-three, second stage ignition failure. Everyone set?” He waited for each to acknowledge with at least a faint nod or slight gesture of affirmation. Confident that his controllers were ready, he keyed the intercom switch and spoke. “Okay, let’s run through the pre-launch from the top, gentlemen.”

  “Got it, Gunter,” replied Carson. By this time, he knew the procedures by rote and had scarce need to refer to a checklist or guide. “Abort Control handle is in Normal position. Maneuver controller is stowed. Altimeter is set to 28.52.”

  “Confirm altimeter set to 28.52,” said the CAPCOM—the Capsule Communicator—a jittery young Air Force captain from Omaha.

  Carson continued in a rapid-paced monotone: “IVI is zeroed. Sequence panel telelights are extinguished. Abort lights are extinguished. Att Rate, Guidance, Engine One, Engine Two lights are extinguished. Left panel top three rows of circuit breakers all set to closed position. Boost-Insert and Retro Rocket Squib set to Arm. Retro and Landing switches are set to Safe.

  “Initiating gyro run-up,” stated Carson, at a relentless rapid-fire pace, like a machine gun knocking down row after row of a human wave attack. “Aligning platform. Conducting computer checkout. Sequence Panel telelights are functioning correctly. Main Batteries switches to On. Retro Rocket Squib batteries switches to On.”

  Moments passed before the CAPCOM announced: “Launch vehicle is transferring to internal power. Stand by for engine gimballing.”

  “Standing by for gimballing,” replied Carson, obviously primed for the simulated launch.

  “T-minus one minute,” stated the CAPCOM. He covered his mouth, stifling a yawn. “Stage 2-P valves coming open in five . . . T-minus forty seconds . . . T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four . . . first stage ignition . . . two, one, zero. Hold-down bolts fired. Lift-off.”

  “The clock is started,” announced Ourecky.

  Carson’s angry voice boomed over the intercom. “Stop the simulation! Switching off VOX!”

  The controllers let out a collective groan. Frustrated, Heydrich buried his head in his hands. Would this day ever end? The intercom loop went silent as Carson switched it off to have a private conversation with Ourecky.

  Inside the simulator, Carson punched Ourecky’s left shoulder. “I call the clock, Ourecky. Do you understand ? The Command Pilot reports the clock starting. Always. No exceptions. Got it?”

  “Ow! I didn’t know if you saw it,” replied Ourecky sheepishly, rubbing his shoulder. “I just wanted to make sure . . .”

  “I call the clock, Ourecky. Me. The Command Pilot. Do you understand?”

  “I understand, sir. You call the clock.”

  “If you understand that, Ourecky, maybe we can put this train back on the rails. But from now on, stick to the procedures the way they’re written. Period.” Carson reached up and re-set the communications switches. “We’re okay in here. Resume the count at T-minus ten, please.”

  “Restarting the clock at T-minus ten seconds at my mark,” stated Heydrich. His tired voice reflected his exasperation. “Mark. Start the clock.”

  The CAPCOM repeated his countdown: “T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four . . . first stage ignition . . . two, one, zero. Hold-down bolts fired. Lift-off.”

  “Roger liftoff. The clock is running,” said Carson.

  With the clock re-started, the simulation ran smoothly for the next two minutes. “Engine One indicators are red,” reported Carson. That was normal; the change reflected that staging—a literal passing of the flame from the first booster stage to the second stage—was imminent.

  “BECO,” stated O
urecky, announcing Booster Engine Cutoff.

  Just a few seconds later, Carson stated, “We have an Engine Two underpressure indicator. Abort indicator. We have an Abort indicator.”

  “Pilot confirms Abort indicator,” added Ourecky, glancing at the ominous red light.

  “Executing Mode Two abort,” declared Carson. His voice reflected slightly more stress than before. He reached down with his left hand and shoved the abort handle from the Normal setting to the Shutdown position and then immediately cycled it to the Abort position.

  The gesture, much like manually shifting a sports car, would result in a shutdown of the malfunctioning second stage rocket engine, followed by a systematic activation of a series of line-cutting guillotines and pyrotechnic charges to separate the spacecraft from the booster rocket. “Abort. Abort. Abort,” he reported. “Retros firing in salvo mode.”

  Just a few minutes later, the simulation was concluded. Carson and Ourecky climbed out of the Gemini mock-up and headed for the locker room. Sticking to his traditional routine whenever he emerged from the Box, Carson paused briefly at the soft drink machine to grab a cold bottle of Coca-Cola; Ourecky followed suit.

  “Major Carson, one thing keeps bothering me. Is there any reason that they haven’t thrown a Mode One abort at us yet?” asked Ourecky, opening his locker. Mode One was the first of four possible Gemini abort protocols that required immediate action by the crew; the abort modes available to them varied according to the altitude at which an emergency occurred.

  “Mode One abort? Like where the rocket is blowing up on the pad?” asked Carson, pulling off his boots and stripping out of his flight suit. He hung the damp garment in his locker before pulling out a pair of khaki chinos and a powder blue Ban-Lon knit shirt. He sprayed his armpits with Right Guard deodorant, and then quickly sniffed them before donning his shirt.

  “Yeah. They’ve hammered us with just about every conceivable glitch so far, so I figured that a Mode One pad abort must be coming up soon.” Ourecky pulled the top of the flight suit down to his waist and examined the fresh knuckle-shaped bruise on his left shoulder.

  Carson laughed. “And just what would you do in a pad abort situation, Captain Ourecky?”

  “Well, sir, I guess we wouldn’t have any alternative other than to fire the ejection seats and blast out of there. The procedures manual is pretty clear on the protocols.”

  “True,” observed Carson, pulling up his chinos. “But you’re reading the NASA manual. There won’t be any ejection seats on our version of the spacecraft. If the booster blows up on the pad, then we’ll be vaporized in a reddish-orange cloud of rapidly burning fuel. Correction: we won’t be vaporized, I’ll be vaporized. You’ll probably be watching my demise from a safely distant blockhouse.”

  “No ejection seats?” asked Ourecky incredulously. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope,” replied Carson, tugging on his Ban-Lon shirt. “Not in the least. In order to do the intercept mission, we’re obligated to haul a lot of extra weight to orbit: new computer, bigger radar, more batteries, extra survival equipment, and other stuff. So some really smart engineers realized that the ejection seats weighed 154 pounds apiece and occupied a considerable amount of cockpit volume.”

  Tucking his shirt into his trousers, Carson continued. “So, they stripped them out. When the final version of the Gemini-I is delivered, it’ll have lightweight seats configured for low-velocity ejection. They’ll only be good for post-reentry scenarios, in case the paraglider doesn’t deploy. Granted, we won’t have the full-blown Weber ejection seats, but on the plus side we’ll have a bit more room, plus we’ll have a lower equipment bay below the seats.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that you’ll be riding a ballistic rocket with no means of escape?”

  “Not really.” Carson studied his face in a shaving mirror hanging inside his locker door. He pulled a pocket comb through his thick brown hair and then smoothed his moustache with his fingers. “Look, the ejection seats were only good for certain phases of the flight. On the launch sequence, they were viable from the pad to—”

  “Seventy-five thousand feet,” said Ourecky. “Roughly one hundred seconds into flight.”

  “Correct,” noted Carson. “The ejection seats can be used up to seventy-five thousand feet, but as the command pilot I can also elect to abort by firing the retro rockets once we’re above fifteen thousand feet, which is—”

  “Fifty seconds into flight.”

  “That’s right. So those seats are really most useful for the first fifty seconds of flight. And I can almost assure you that if the rocket decides to spontaneously detonate on the pad, the ejection seats aren’t going to be particularly useful. Besides, I don’t think any of the NASA astronauts really trusted the seats anyway.”

  “Really?” asked Ourecky. “I never knew that.”

  “Do you know very much about ejection seats?” asked Carson, threading his belt through his belt loops.

  “No, other than what they showed me during egress training.”

  “Well, let me tell you, I’ve punched out twice, for real, but that doesn’t make me any kind of expert,” explained Carson. “Look, an ejection seat is a very serious piece of engineering. It has to blast you out of a malfunctioning aircraft but at the same time not kill you in the process. That’s tough enough for a supersonic aircraft, but even that doesn’t hold a candle to ejecting a guy clear of a malfunctioning rocket on the pad.”

  “Why?”

  “Because rockets explode, that’s why. I talked with one of the NASA engineers who worked on the Gemini ejection seat design. That seat not only had to be designed to blast an astronaut clear of the spacecraft, but also clear of the explosion fireball as well. And even beyond that, it had to throw him far enough away from the pad so there wasn’t any danger of his parachute melting from the heat.”

  Carson continued. “Needless to say, you’re talking about a seat that’s exerting an enormous amount of G-forces on the human body. The engineers weren’t even entirely convinced that the astronauts would survive the ride, and the NASA Gemini astronauts damned sure weren’t that confident in the seats.

  “Look at what happened on Gemini 6 with Wally Schirra. He and Tom Stafford were sitting on top of a Titan II that fizzled, and by all rights, if they had followed their procedures, Wally should have pulled the eject handle and fired them out of there. Schirra kept cool and elected to stay put.

  “As it turned out, the situation wasn’t nearly as bad as what they had thought, and they were able to fix the Titan and launch a few days later. Now, had they ejected, it would have been a totally different ball game. Of course, everyone painted Schirra out to be a hero for saving the vehicle, and he certainly was an exceptionally cool customer for a Navy guy, but the chances are good that he knew that they probably wouldn’t have survived the ejection seat ride, even in the best of circumstances. Personally, I think he was aware of that, and that’s why he didn’t pull the D-ring. Of course, he never said that, and there’s really no way of knowing what goes through a man’s mind in the split-second it takes to make that kind of decision.”

  Carson took a sip from his Coca-Cola. “Ourecky, you have to look at it from my perspective. Yeah, I don’t particularly like it that I won’t have any means of escape if my rocket blows up, but I also know that an ejection seat only grants me just the slightest margin of survival anyway.”

  He sat crossways on a bench and dusted his toes lightly with foot powder. As he pulled on his socks, he added, “I suppose that the ejection seats were more of a feel-good public relations device than anything else. NASA launched their Gemini spacecraft in broad daylight in full view of the world. From a PR perspective, they couldn’t put guys up there without some sort of safety net. Hence, the ejection seats. But our launches will be far from the public eye, and a couple of anonymous Air Force pilots are a lot more expendable than high profile NASA astronauts.”

  “I just can’t ever imagine going up on a rocket
without an escape tower or an ejection seat,” said Ourecky, shaking his head. “It just seems too much like suicide. After I went through egress training, I was deathly afraid of ever having to eject, but I sure would like to retain the option.”

  “Yeah, there’s an engineer’s perspective for you,” observed Carson, slipping into his shoes. “You engineers are pragmatic enough to yank out the ejection seats because they weigh too much, provided someone else has to take the ride.”

  “I suppose you’re right, Major. It really doesn’t bother you that you won’t have one?”

  “Honestly, no. If there’s even the slightest chance for me to go into space, I’m going. No hesitation, no reservations. If going to space requires that I ride a rocket that has a fifty percent chance of blowing up and incinerating me to a crisp, then I’m willing to accept that risk.” Carson slid his wallet in his pocket. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Captain Ourecky, I’ve got a hot date.”

  21

  WAKING UP

  Aerospace Support Project

  3:00 a.m., Friday, September 13, 1968

  Mark Tew switched on his gooseneck desk lamp, slipped on his reading glasses, selected a black leatherette binder from the shelves behind his desk, and resumed reading. At present, the shelves strained under the weight of eighty-seven identical three-inch black Government Issue binders, painstakingly cataloged and indexed, bulging with reports, memorandums and other documents that described every minute detail and nuance of Blue Gemini.

  If they ever went operational, each mission would be a hugely complex undertaking that would require the tightest synchronization to ensure that every single piece was functioning properly at the right place and at the right time. Information in the binders described the production schedule for the Gemini-I spacecraft, as well as the refurbishment plan to refit each spacecraft after it was returned from a mission, so that it would be ready for a successive mission.