Toward the Moon

Only three years ago, Astronaut John Glenn and his Friendship 7 capsule were the symbols of American adventure in space. Today, Glenn is a 43- year-old soft-drink company executive in Texas, and Friendship 7 is on display in the Smithsonian Institution. Both the man and his machine are honored relics of the infancy period of U.S. space travel.

That period is over--as proved by Astronauts James A. McDivitt and Edward H. White II in their Gemini 4 flight, which ended successfully last week. Glenn and his Project Mercury colleagues showed that man can get into outer space and get safely back to earth. McDivitt and White showed that man can endure in space, that by his own skills he can cope with mechanical failure with little more danger (although sensing the same frustrations) than the ordinary Sunday-afternoon motorist. The historian of the future may well look back on the flight of Gemini 4 as the time when man erased most doubts about his ability to fly to the moon--and beyond.

The Best of Both. "Gemini 4 demanded the best of men and machines," said Dr. Robert R. Gilruth, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston, after the successful completion of the flight. And it got the best. Except for a few relatively minor flaws, the space capsule functioned magnificently; even in the searing heat of reentry, the cabin stayed around 70DEGF., with humidity of about 60%--just like a crisp June day in Denver. As for the men, Command Pilot McDivitt and Copilot White survived more than four days of weightlessness in such good shape that space doctors were amazed. Each logged 97 hr. 56 min. in space--just 21 hr. 10 min. less than the record set by Soviet Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky in June 1963. Together, they were aloft three times longer than all eight U.S. astronauts who preceded them. They covered 1,609,684 miles in their 62-orbit flight. Not only did White spend 20 minutes floating alone outside the capsule, but as a bonus the space twins returned to earth with a breathtakingly brilliant series of films of the space stroll (see color pages).

Swift Kick. On the capsule's third day in space, nearing the end of the 48th revolution around earth, its IBM computer went on the blink. Even though the computer was necessary to help the pilot guide the capsule back to earth with pinpoint accuracy, the failure caused no great alarm. At the Houston Control Center, Mission Director Christopher Kraft blamed "glitch"--a computer-age gremlin that causes an abrupt change in power, fouling up delicate circuits. Kraft turned to Astronaut John Young, who used a similar computer on the earlier Gemini 3 flight, asked if a swift kick might revive it. Said Young, "Yes, if everything else fails." Nothing would get it going again, but Kraft declared that the failure would have "absolutely no effect on the safety of the flight."

What the computer's failure did mean was that McDivitt would not be able to "fly" the capsule back to earth. Kraft therefore advised him that ground computers would have to help steer Gemini 4 for him, as they did in Mercury flights.

In the final orbits, ground operators advised the spacecraft, "This looks like about an 8-G re-entry"--meaning the astronauts would be pressed back with eight times the force of gravity instead of the anticipated 4-Gs. "Oh, that's too much for an old man like me," said McDivitt, then just three days away from his 36th birthday. Replied ground control: "You can hack it."

Negative for Item Bravo. Preparing for reentry, McDivitt and White spent three hours securing loose equipment. Reason: for an accurate descent, the capsule's center of gravity must be ex actly determined; if, in reentry, anv equipment were to start flying around, it could shift the center of gravity.

Just before the re-entry process be gan, Dr. Charles Berry, Project Gemini's chief physician, chatted with his patients. "I'd like to make sure that both of you feel completely rested. Is that affirmed?" Replied McDivitt: "We are a little tired, but we are as rested as we can be." "Do you feel that there is any need for Item Bravo?" asked Berry, referring to the Dexedrine pep pills carried by the astronauts. The answer: "Negative."

Flight control cut in. "Anything else you want, Jim?" Replied McDivitt, "Yeah, my computer." As an amiable second thought he said he could also use some soap and water: "I feel pretty darn woolly." Retorted ground control: "Just don't take a bath." McDivitt would have loved to. "I thought those fumes after 24 hours were bad," quipped the astronaut, bathless for four days. "You ought to be up here now." McDivitt had one final request: "Don't forget, I want to be recovered in a hurry." Replied ground control: "Roger. All you've got to do is hit the spot."

Re-Entry. Over Hawaii, McDivitt maneuvered the capsule around, blunt end forward. "Start burn," came a command from the Hawaii ground station. "Affirmative, am firing," said McDivitt. He pushed the Orbit Attitude Maneuver System stick forward, firing a 100-lb. thrusting rocket toward the blunt end to guide the capsule into a lower perigee about 50 miles high. The rockets fired for 2 min. 41 sec.--one second too long, and enough to send the spacecraft at least 40 miles off its mark.

Near Guaymas, Mexico, McDivitt fired four retrorockets, each with a 2,500-lb. kick, to put the slowly spinning cabin into the proper trajectory. At 400,000 ft., the spacecraft re-entered the atmosphere, and communications, as expected, went out in the intense heat of friction. In his last garbled transmission, McDivitt could be heard to say, "O.K." Outside, the heat shield glowed red-hot as the temperature rose to 3,000DEG F. The astronauts were enthralled. "The prettiest part of it all is re-entry," said McDivitt afterward. "We saw pink light coming up around our spacecraft. It got oranger, then redder, then green. It was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen." At 100,000 ft. the blackout ended, and McDivitt's voice came through. "We're five-by-five up here," he said, meaning that he and White felt fine. At 50,000 ft. a drogue chute eight feet in diameter billowed out to stabilize the spinning craft, and at 10,600 ft. the white-and-orange main chute, 84 ft. across, blossomed like a giant marigold to waft the 3.5-ton craft gently to sea. Some 390 miles east of Cape Kennedy and 53 miles from the waiting aircraft carrier Wasp, the capsule plopped into the Atlantic. McDivitt was disappointed that it was not a bull's-eye. "I wanted to land on the after-elevator of the Wasp," he said later. But he was obviously pleased to be back on earth. "Hooray! Hooray!" he cried. "We're going to the Wasp!"

Fifteen minutes after splashdown, Navy frogmen were lowered into the water by a helicopter. They peered into McDivitt's window to see if the astronauts were all right, then strapped a huge yellow flotation collar around the capsule to keep it from sinking.

Reception. Just 57 minutes after hitting the water, McDivitt and White were landed by helicopter on the flight deck of the Wasp. More than a thousand sailors crowded around to cheer them. There had been fears that they would faint, or at least experience dizziness the first time they tried to walk. But both saluted the U.S. flag, then strode without a misstep along the red carpet that had been laid down for them.

They were bearded and sweaty, and fatigue lines were etched deeply around their eyes. But they grinned, and at one point McDivitt, for the hell of it, let out a loud "Yahoo!" Before the hungry, thirsty astronauts had a chance to eat or drink anything, doctors whisked them down to sick bay for the first of a series of intensive medical tests that will continue for weeks. "I knew we'd wind up in a hospital," quipped McDivitt.

The medics' chief concern was how four days of weightlessness would affect the astronauts' cardiovascular systems. There were fears that a long period of physical inactivity, heightened by the absence of gravity, would make their hearts lazy and flabby, cause dizziness and fluttering of the heart when the men suddenly became active again. White, whose normal heartbeat is an unusually slow 50 per min., registered 96 while lying on the Wasp's examining table. When the table was tilted upright, his heartbeat spurted to almost 150 per min. Four days later it was still 70 to 80. But even that reaction was better than doctors had expected.

As for McDivitt, he had a few flecks of caked blood in his nostrils. The medical men figured that this was caused by the dryness of his mucous membranes from inhaling pure oxygen for so long. Their solution for future space trips: a pinch of plain old petroleum jelly in the nostrils. X rays were taken of the astronauts' little fingers and heel bones both before and after the flight to see whether their long exposure to weight lessness and inactivity caused note worthy loss of calcium. The Soviet cosmonauts suffered such bone demineralization on their flights, and patients confined to bed for as little as three days have been known to suffer sharp losses of calcium. Results of the X rays, how ever, will not be in for some time.

Straw Men. While in space, McDivitt lost four pounds and White, eight. But heavy eating aboard the Wasp changed that. By the time they arrived back in the U.S., each was a pound heavier than before Gemini 4's takeoff.

All in all, the doctors were delighted. "It was far, far better than anything we could have expected," said Berry, who flew from Houston to the Wasp. "If I were any happier today, I think I'd be flying around the room." Berry said the flight promised "to knock down an awful lot of straw men. We had been told that we would have an unconscious astronaut after four days of weightlessness. Well, they're not. We were told that the astronaut would experience vertigo, disorientation when he stepped out of that spaceship. We hit that one over the head."

What bothered the astronauts most was fatigue. "Both men were bushed," said Berry. McDivitt explained later that he and White were kept awake both by radio transmissions and both by the thumping of jet thrusters fired to correct the cabin's attitude. "Try to sleep with somebody slapping you on the foot with a hammer," he said. "You don't get much."

Three days after the astronauts emerged from their capsule, the Wasp put in at Mayport, Fla. McDivitt and White were flown to Houston's Ellington Air Force Base, where their wives--both named Pat--their children and 1,500 well-wishers waited in 92DEG heat. Four-year-old Patrick McDivitt could hardly wait to blurt out some news. "Daddy! Daddy!" he cried. "I jumped off the high board!" McDivitt grinned, patted his son's head.

Troublesome Tether. In a press conference at the Space Center the next day, McDivitt and White matter-of-factly gave 75 newsmen a rundown of their flight. Seated at a table covered with gold-colored cloth, McDivitt said he had trouble trying to rendezvous with the booster that had hurled the capsule into orbit. It was, he said, tumbling too much. Mission Director Kraft, noting that when McDivitt thought the booster was 400 ft. off, it was really 2,000 ft. away, said: "It's pretty hard to tell distances up there by eyeballing it." Next August's Gemini 5 flight, how ever, will have sophisticated radar for rendezvous exercises.

White confessed that during his "extravehicular activity," his 25-ft. tether gave him considerable trouble, kept tugging him toward the very spot he had been warned to avoid--the spacecraft's adapter section. There, two-foot-long plumes of burning fuel shot out from the thruster rockets fired by McDivitt to stabilize the capsule, and White at times drifted as near as five or six feet above them.

White said he knew that anything he said during his space walk would be heard over live radio and TV, confessed that he was worried about "What do you say to 194 million people?" He decided to chat with McDivitt as if no body at all were listening. "What you heard," he said, "was two test pilots conducting their mission in the best manner possible."

A few hours after the astronauts' press conference, President Johnson flew down to Houston and came up with the surprise he had promised the astronauts earlier, when he congratulated them by phone after their arrival aboard the Wasp. "I've been saving some little something for you," said the President at that time. Now, standing in front of Houston's Mission Control Center, he told Air Force Majors McDivitt and White that he was nominating them for promotions to lieutenant colonel. He also said he was nominating Gemini 3 Command Pilot Gus Grissom, who helped guide Gemini 4 from the ground, and Mercury Astronaut Gordon Cooper, who will fly Gemini 5, for the same jump in rank. This "little to ken," he told the astronauts, is "some thing you can eat as well as wear."

Gemini 4 had its failures--a missed rendezvous, a stuck hatch, a computer that malfunctioned -- but they were minor compared with its stunning success. Space officials made no effort whatever to conceal their optimism. Minutes after the Gemini 4 capsule splashed down, they flashed this con fident message on TV screens at the Space Center: "End of flight plan--tune in next time for G 5."

Their optimism washed over into the Apollo moonshot program. Where officials were recently talking about 1970 as the likely year for the first U.S. lunar landing attempt, last week they were talking about 1969, and Apollo Manager Joseph Shea said the first at tempt might even come in mid-1968. "That's the true implication of Gemini 4 for Apollo," said Shea. Original plans called for a landing on the 15th Apollo shot, he explained, but "now we may be able to make an attempt on the fourth, fifth or sixth launch."

Whatever the exact date, this much is certain: Gemini 4 has fixed man's eyes irrevocably on the moon--and it has convinced U.S. officials that before too long man's eyes will be looking back down from the moon.

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