by Jay Barbree
It would take years. Many years.
But Alan and Deke would do it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Space Walk
LEONOV NODDED TO BELYAEV. THEY checked their timers and instruments. They had been breathing pure oxygen. “We are free of nitrogen now,” Pavel I. Belyaev, commander of the Diamond (Voshkod 11) told his fellow cosmonaut. “Ready,” Alexei A. Leonov nodded.
Moments later their suits inflated to full pressure as the two men prepared for any emergencies.
Leonov released his restraint harness, turned for Belyaev to check his backpack. Leonov received all his power from a battery pack and oxygen bottles integrated within his suit. A large airlock extended from the side of the spacecraft. Leonov floated toward the airlock and sealed the hatch behind him. Now he depressurized the airlock itself, secured a safety tether to the airlock interior. When the gauges read zero pressure, he opened the upper hatch to the void of space.
Leonov floated, and then pushed himself gently through the hatch. “I’m getting out,” he radioed to Belyaev. His excited commander radioed the mission control center outside Moscow. “At this moment,” he called with unrestrained elation, “a man is floating free in space!”
The first human satellite drifted away from Voshkod, turning and tumbling slowly, weightless, stunned with the sight of the earth below. He rolled about to look into a “flow of blindingly bright sunlight, like an arc of electric welding.” He pulled gently on his lifeline and hurtled toward Voshkod’s hull. He quickly put out a hand to check himself and bounced into a spin. He had learned something about the fickle ways of force and reaction in the weightlessness and vacuum of space. A small camera attached to the top of the airlock captured the smiling, laughing cosmonaut as he cavorted in mankind’s first walk in space—the flight of the Diamond on March 18, 1965.
The flight plan called for ten minutes in space. For those ten minutes, across a distance of three thousand miles, the thirty-year-old lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Force, a skilled parachutist, fighter pilot, and world-class athlete, threw out his arms in rapturous joy as he floated and turned. Below him, passing 120 miles below, the earth rolled by at 17,400 miles an hour.
“I didn’t experience fear,” he explained later. “There was only a sense of the infinite expanse and depth of the universe.”
After ten minutes he turned for a final look at the beautiful planet rolling beneath him and then slid into the airlock, feet first. He became jammed in the opening. The minutes sped by, and Belyaev cautioned him that he was running low on his oxygen supply. Leonov breathed deeply and slowly, concentrating. He found the problem. His suit had expanded and he was caught like a cork in a bottle. Slowly and carefully, he partially depressurized the suit and, using his athletic strength, pushed himself back into the airlock. Opening the airlock’s inner hatch, he pushed himself back into the cabin. Belyaev dragged him to his seat, securing his harness. Both men checked the security of the inner hatch. “Let it go,” Belyaev said. They worked the panel controls and the airlock disconnected and drifted away from the Diamond.
The first EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) was now history. Belyaev studied Leonov. “He looks like a man who has just been reborn, a man who has just come back from another world.” In his excitement he banged a fist on Leonov’s shoulder and shouted, “Molodets!”
His voice carried to the control center. Hearing the cry of “Great show!” from Belyaev, controllers cheered and applauded.
While the world heralded this new, spectacular Soviet space feat, the flight of the Diamond suddenly became a misadventure and a classic example of how many serious things could go wrong on one brief flight.
Trouble loomed the day after the space walk when it came time to fire the retro-rockets for return to earth. The automatic stabilization system failed, and Belyaev and Leonov went through the proper contingency maneuvers for Belyaev to take over manual control of the spacecraft. This took time, and they delayed the retrofire one orbit. When the commander finally triggered the rockets, he did a magnificent job of guiding his ship through the harrowing reentry. But the extra orbit pushed their new landing site nearly a thousand miles east of where recovery forces waited, at the intended touchdown point.
The two cosmonauts caused the craft to overshoot the landing site by an additional two hundred meters when they had to leave their seats for visual confirmation of instrument and control settings while they aligned the craft for retrofire. This would have meant nothing if they still had had automatic altitude control. But they didn’t, and their movement slightly changed Diamond’s center of gravity. The craft crashed in the thick forests near Perm, in the Ural Mountains. Diamond was not equipped with Vostok-like ejection seats, and there were no personal parachutes on board. Only the spacecraft had parachutes. The cosmonauts were not able to escape the craft and remained inside as Diamond fired its landing rocket shortly before touchdown.
Official news stories stated that Diamond had landed in deep snow when, in fact, the spacecraft had crashed in the forest and had wedged itself tightly between two large fir trees.
Leonov and Belyaev remained inside the Voshkod, unable to open their hatch.
In the freezing night, the cabin fans were going at full blast, the electrical system so twisted that the cosmonauts were unable to shut down the whirling blades. Ironically, while the cooling fans worked, the heating system had failed.
A recovery helicopter arrived at the scene two and a half hours after the landing, and official Moscow expressed great relief that the embarrassing affair would soon be over. But the deep snow and thick forest cover made it impossible for the chopper to land safely.
The helicopter crew dropped warm clothes to the shivering men, but the clothes fell into the higher branches, out of the reach of the cosmonauts, who would have been unable to retrieve them had they dropped right next to the hanging capsule, as the men were trapped inside the ship.
So the clothes remained in the upper reaches of the trees, Diamond remained jammed between the two firs, and the cosmonauts huddled through a frigid night. The next morning, a rescue crew entered the thick Perm forest on skis and wrestled the spacecraft free of the trees, releasing the freezing cosmonauts from their overnight prison. Hot food and warm clothes soon restored Leonov and Belyaev, who then skied out of the forest to a waiting helicopter.
With confirmation that the two cosmonauts were on their way to Moscow, Soviet officials began putting a positive spin on the flight, emphasizing the importance of the world’s first space walk and downplaying the overshoot and the horrifying night in the forest. A government spokesman explained to the Russians, and the world, that walking in space must be mastered before great stations could be built to orbit the earth.
“But,” he added, “our immediate goal, the target before us, is the moon.”
A clear warning of the Soviet intention to get to the moon before Apollo.
That warning and the space walk galvanized Americans. Leonov’s space walk had clearly demonstrated the Soviets’ superiority in space. With commendable candor, NASA’s Chris Kraft complimented the Russians and admitted to the American public that the space walk “was a tremendous surprise, and coming just five days before our first Gemini flight, it caught us completely off guard.”
To make matters worse, the Russians trumpeted the new Voshkod as a spacecraft capable of carrying three men into space. They underscored that it would take at least another four years for the Americans to be able to launch three men within a single craft. One Pravda headline read, “SORRY, APOLLO!” and the accompanying article taunted NASA with the remark, “The gap is not closing, but increasing . . . . 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.”
The moment unquestionably belonged to the Russians, and in Washington there might have been more concern about the future had officials there known that cosmonaut Pavel Belyaev soon after his retu
rn began training for a circumlunar flight, a loop around the moon to be made in about two and a half years, in 1967. Nor were they aware that Alexei Leonov also had been assigned to the group training to go to the moon, would become commander of that program as well, and that Leonov and Oleg Makarov had been selected to make the first two-man circumlunar flight.
But the United States was not standing still. It no longer was stumbling in space, and its program was gathering steam and momentum. Schedules were set and were as much as possible to be met no matter what the effort demanded.
Gemini was next—the bridge between the fledgling Mercury and Project Apollo. Wernher von Braun and his team would sit out Gemini. They were busy perfecting the monster rockets for Apollo—Saturn I for earth orbit tests of the three-man spacecraft and Saturn V, the behemoth to carry astronauts to the moon. At North American Aviation in California, the moon craft was being developed, assembled.
America’s course was set.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Gemini: A Bridge to the Moon
FIVE DAYS AFTER BELYAEV AND Leonov jammed their spaceship between trees in the Perm Forest, Astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young roared off their Canaveral launch pad. They headed into orbit atop a Titan II rocket for a five-hour checkout of the new Gemini ship. Their job was to test their Gemini 3’s systems, operate its maneuvering thrusters, and bring the moon just a bit closer. For the first time they guided a manned space vehicle to higher and lower orbits and into a different orbital plane—maneuvers essential to going to the moon and ones that the Russians had not yet demonstrated—all the while calling Gemini a pilot’s delight as they came out of orbit with the machinery functioning as advertised.
Next off the pad was Gemini 4. The mission became one of the great steps in the history of spaceflight. NASA had not planned its first space walk until later in the year on Gemini 6 but, stung by the exhilarating performance of Leonov, NASA tightened its schedule, examined the risks and benefits, and Deke Slayton informed space rookies Jim McDivitt and Ed White that their Gemini 4 flight would feature America’s first space walk.
Everyone shifted into high gear. McDivitt and White were excellent choices as a crew. They were longtime close friends and former classmates at the University of Michigan, and they went into an immediate, crash-training course. Ed White would be the man to “step outside.”
On June 3, 1965, six weeks after Gus Grissom and John Young had wrung out Gemini 3, Gemini 4 went into orbit and on the fourth turn around the planet, White strapped an eight-pound pack of emergency oxygen to his chest. He attached a gold-tinted visor to his spacesuit helmet to protect him against the fierce sun glare. His suit had twenty-one layers of protective material that would insulate him from 250-degree temperatures when he was directly exposed to solar radiation and 150-degrees-below zero temperatures when he drifted into the spacecraft’s shadow. He checked his twenty-five-foot tether, the ultimate of leashes, which would provide him with a steady flow of oxygen, a communications link to McDivitt, and assure he would not drift away.
High over Australia, the astronauts began depressurizing their cabin. Unlike Voshkod and its cumbersome airlock, Gemini had twin cockpit hatches and, when the hatch on White’s side was swung open, both men would be fully exposed to space vacuum.
Over the Pacific Ocean, White opened his hatch. The earth rolled by beneath them and between Hawaii and Mexico, he gingerly eased into space.
It was an incredible, marvelous, exhilarating leap into the future as the astronaut gripped a hand-held gun filled with pressurized oxygen. Each time he fired it, it would propel him through the limits of the tether. With each spurt of pressure his body followed the ancient laws of Newton and moved in a direction exactly opposite.
That was the technical side. The human element was absolutely grand as the excited, buoyant Ed White somersaulted, floated lazily on his back, pirouetted, stood grinning like a kid on Gemini’s titanium hull. He could “fly” a distance of twenty-five feet in any direction, and he made the most of the reach of his golden tether. A touch of unreality entered the entrancing scenes when a thermal glove White had left on his seat drifted slowly up and away from Gemini into its own orbit.
The two astronauts were so intent on what was happening and White was in such euphoria that the twelve minutes scheduled for the space walk passed quickly. It was time for White to get back inside while they were still in bright sunlight. Gus Grissom was CapCom in Houston (this was the first operational flight for the new center), and he knew that the exhilaration White was showing could be dangerous. It was akin to “raptures of the deep” that scuba divers face, or that pilots find clouding their judgment at high altitudes.
“Gemini 4,” Gus called in a stern voice, “get back in.” McDivitt called to White, still frolicking outside. “They want you to get back in now.”
Ed White didn’t want to return to the cockpit. “This is fun!” he said exuberantly. “I don’t want to come back in, but I’m coming.”
As he moved toward the hatch, he found that maneuvering along a spacecraft is easier said than done. Without handholds or footholds, White found the return slow and difficult. He needed several extra minutes to work his way back into the cabin. McDivitt helped pull him down into his seat, he strapped in, and after some difficulty closing the hatch, they pressurized the ship. White had been outside twenty-one minutes.
“There was very little sensation of speed,” he reported to Mission Control. “The view from up here is something spectacular. I could see much greater detail than I can from an aircraft flying at forty thousand feet. . . . I could see the outlines of cities, roads. I could see the wakes of ships at sea.”
NASA was wildly enthusiastic about the mission. Medical teams confirmed the crew was healthy. Dr. Charles Berry, the astronauts’ flight surgeon, stated: “It was far, far better than anything we could have expected. We’ve knocked down an awful lot of straw men. We had been told we would have an unconscious astronaut after four days in weightlessness. Well, they’re not. We were told that the astronaut would experience vertigo, disorientation, when he stepped out of the spacecraft. We hit that one on the head.”
The Project Gemini team would dispel many, many more myths and unknowns in the months to come as one by one the techniques needed for Apollo were mastered and perfected. There were many problems along the way and some near-tragic happenings. But Gemini would get the job done.
Gemini 5 stretched long-duration flight to eight days and Gemini 7 to fourteen. After spending two weeks in space with Frank Borman in a cramped spacecraft, Gemini 7 crewman Jim Lovell remarked, “It was like spending fourteen days in a men’s room.”
The tediousness of their mission was broken on Day Eleven when they received a welcome visitor from Earth.
Steering by the constellation Orion and following the command signals of their onboard radar, Gemini 6 astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford tracked down and caught their Gemini 7 target in the first ever rendezvous of two manned spaceships.
“We’ve got company,” Lovell reported as he watched Schirra maneuver the final few yards.
“There’s a lot of traffic up here,” Schirra responded.
“Call a policeman,” suggested Borman.
For five hours the two Gemini spacecrafts flew together in formation, doing fly-arounds and circling each other in lazy pirouettes. Schirra reported he closed to a distance of six to eight inches between the two crafts, backed off, and came in again.
Schirra and Stafford returned to earth the next day. Borman and Lovell came home two days later after spending more time in space than all the Soviet cosmonauts who’d ever left earth. When they walked across the flight deck of the recovery carrier, they were a bit gimpy-legged after fourteen days in zero gravity, but doctors pronounced them in amazingly good physical shape.
The rendezvous between Gemini 6 and 7 had not been in NASA’s original plans. Schirra and Stafford were originally to have chased down and docked with an unmanned Agena satel
lite. But the Agena blew up on its way to orbit, and agency officials came up with the ingenious plan to launch Gemini 7 first and send Gemini 6 in pursuit.
Another milestone reached on the highway to the moon. But linking two ships in orbit still had to be proven. That job now fell to the Gemini 8 crew of Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott. Their Agena target satellite, boosted by an Atlas rocket and its own engine, shot into orbit on March 16, 1966, and they blasted off in pursuit ninety minutes later on what would become Gemini’s most harrowing mission.
Using the rendezvous lessons of Gemini 6, Armstrong and Scott caught up with the waiting Agena in only five hours. For more than a half hour, commander Armstrong circled and inspected the twenty-six-foot-long satellite to confirm its stability, then with consummate care nudged Gemini 8’s nose into a docking collar mounted on Agena. Clamps, electric motors, and connections clicked home, and the two craft were now as one.
“Flight, we are docked,” Armstrong announced to Mission Control. “It’s really a smoothie. No noticeable oscillations at all.”
Next would come the powered-up maneuvers of the docked vehicles, using the Agena engine to fly to a higher orbit and to shift the orbital plane. It was not to be. Over China and temporarily out of radio contact with ground stations, Scott studied the movement of their Gemini/Agena combination. To him the stability they found early in docking was fraying noticeably. “Neil, we’re in a bank,” he said. The words were barely spoken when the heavy, long spacecraft “took off in roll and yaw,” rolling around like a log in water, while the nose began to swing wildly.
In moments Armstrong and Scott had been thrust from a smooth flight into a struggle to survive what had swiftly and unexpectedly become the first real emergency in manned space flight.
They were terrifyingly alone, 185 miles out in space, out of touch with Mission Control and gyrating wildly with a powerful rocket loaded with four thousand pounds of deadly, volatile fuel. The Gemini/Agena had become literally a twisting, turning bomb waiting for the first chance to turn into a searing fireball.