Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

Gemini VI-A’s launch on 15 December was precisely timed so that its Titan would insert it into an orbital plane which closely coincided with that of Borman and Lovell. Trajectory planners had calculated that a liftoff 6.471 seconds past 8:37 am provided ideal conditions for a rendezvous during their fourth orbit. The Gemini VII crew saw only cloud when they tried to spot the launch, but once the Titan climbed out of the weather Borman and Lovell had an oblique view of its contrail from their vantage point out over the Atlantic.

From within the capsule, however, Schirra and Stafford’s rise from Earth was dramatic. In his autobiography, Stafford would recount feeling little discomfort as G forces climbed beyond five, then seven, peaking at nearly eight, and his first view of the planet’s horizon as the Titan’s second stage inserted them into a preliminary orbit. The G loads caused him to feel some pain in his gut and pressure on his lungs, forcing him to take short, sharp breaths – then, all at once, five minutes and 35 seconds after launch, the forces went from eight down to zero. The two men raised their visors, took off their gloves and finally removed their helmets, stowing them below their knees.

Six hours of work awaited them. At orbital insertion, they were trailing Gemini VII by almost 2,000 km. An hour and a half after launch, Schirra pulsed the OAMS thrusters to increase the apogee to 272 km and close the distance to some 1,175 km; this was followed at 10:55 am by a ‘phase-adjustment’ burn, whose purpose was twofold. Firstly, it reduced the distance between them and the target and secondly, it raised Gemini VI-A’s perigee to 224 km. Most importantly, it established the timing for the subsequent chase. Half an hour later, Schirra turned the spacecraft 90 degrees to the ‘right’ – in a southward direction – and again fired the OAMS to push Gemini VI-A into the same plane as Borman and Lovell. By this point, three hours after launch and entering their third orbit, they had narrowed their distance still further to 483 km. At 11:52 am, Capcom Elliot See told them that they should soon be able to establish radar contact with Gemini VII. Indeed, a flickering signal was replaced by a solid lock at a range of 434 km.

A little under four hours into the flight, in the so-called Normal Slow Rate (NSR) manoeuvre of the rendezvous sequence, Schirra pulsed the aft-mounted thrusters for 54 seconds to slightly increase Gemini VI-A’s speed and enter an orbital path of 270 x 274 km, co-elliptic with and fixed 27 km below the target, which was now 319 km ahead. Stafford, meanwhile, busied himself with a circular slide rule and heavily-crosshatched plotting chart on his lap, checking the computer’s analysis of the radar data and relaying information to Mission Control. Shortly thereafter, they placed their spacecraft in the ‘computer’ – or automatic – rendezvous mode and Schirra dimmed the interior lights to aid his visibility. At 1:41 pm, he announced his first visual sighting of what he thought was a star: ‘‘My gosh, there is a real bright star out there. That must be Sirius.’’ It wasn’t. It was Gemini VII, glinting in the sunlight, just 100 km away. They lost sight of it briefly when it entered Earth’s shadow, but when their eyes adjusted they identified its blue tracking lights. Twelve minutes later, when the target was 60 km ahead and the geometry was correct, Schirra initiated the terminal phase manoeuvre designed to close the range to 3 km. He then executed a pair of mid-course correction burns and, at 2:27 pm, just 900 m from their target, started pulsing Gemini VI-A’s forward thrusters to steadily reduce the closure rate.

Closer and closer they drifted, until Schirra and Stafford were just 40 m from Borman and Lovell, with no relative motion between them. Back on Earth, in the MOCR, flight controllers erupted in applause and waved small American flags, while Chris Kraft, Bob Gilruth and other senior managers fired up celebratory cigars. Unlike Vostoks 3 and 4, which had merely drifted past each other at a distance of several kilometres as a result of being in slightly different orbits in August 1962, Wally Schirra had achieved a ‘real’ rendezvous. He defined it thus: ‘‘I don’t think rendezvous is over until you are stopped – completely stopped – with no relative motion between the two vehicles, at a range of approximately 120 feet [40 m]. That’s rendezvous!’’

At one point during the rendezvous Stafford had been confused, however. After being rivetted to his plotting board, he suddenly looked up, glanced out his window, and saw randomly moving stars. Thinking Schirra had lost control, he barked out that they had blown it. Quickly, however, Schirra reassured him that the ‘stars’ were not stars, but merely John Glenn’s fireflies: frozen particles reflecting sunlight. The two men laughed. (Later in the mission, using fast ASA 4000 film in a Hasselblad,

they engaged in astronomical photography for one of the principal investigators, Jocelyn Gill. However, not all of the images were astronomical; some were urine dumps and when they returned to Earth, Gill looked at one beautiful constellation of ‘stars’ and asked them what it was. Without missing a beat, Schirra looked at the shimmering cloud of just-dumped urine droplets and deadpanned: ‘‘Jocelyn, that’s the constellation Urion!’’)

From their vantage point in the ‘passive’ spacecraft, Borman and Lovell had expressed fascination at the thruster bursts and spurts emerging from Gemini VI-A. At one stage, they were startled to see a tongue-like jet some 12 m in length! Both crews would report cords and stringers 3-5 m long streaming and flapping behind their respective spacecraft; these turned out to be the remains of covers from the shaped explosives which severed the Geminis from the final stage of their respective Titan Ils. The rendezvous had cost Schirra barely 51 kg of fuel and only 38 per cent had been expended in total from Gemini VI-A’s tanks, leaving him plenty in reserve to fly a tour of inspection of, and station-keep with, Gemini VII for the next five hours and three orbits. At one stage, Schirra manoeuvred as close as 30 cm, allowing he and Stafford to hold up a ‘Beat Army’ card in their window to torment Borman, a West Point graduate. In response, Borman held up a ‘Beat Navy’ card. Gemini VI-A moved to the rear of its sister craft to examine the stringers, then came nose-to-nose, and so stable were both Geminis that, for a time, neither command pilot had to even touch his controls.

During manoeuvres, Schirra found the spacecraft responded crisply, allowing him to make velocity inputs as low as 3 cm per second, which he and Stafford concluded were fine enough to execute a docking with an Agena-D or any other target. ‘‘I took my turns flying,’’ recounted Stafford, ‘‘having convinced the Gemini programme managers to add a second manoeuvre controller to the pilot’s side.’’ As the crews’ workday drew to a close, Schirra flipped Gemini VI-A into a blunt-end-forward orientation and pulsed the OAMS thrusters to separate. After a meal and sleep, Schirra awoke to a stuffy head and runny nose, which made him glad that the mission was flexible and, assuming all of the tasks were completed, had the option to return to Earth after 24 hours. Moreover, Gemini VII’s fuel cells needed the attention of mission controllers and would benefit from having the additional tracking burden of Gemini VI-A out of the way.

But not before a final ‘gotcha’ from Schirra and Stafford. It was nine days before Christmas, after all…

As the two spacecraft went their separate ways, the MOCR controllers and Borman and Lovell were initially alarmed to hear Stafford report that he saw ‘‘an object, looks like a satellite, going from north to south, probably in polar orbit… Looks like he might be going to re-enter soon. Stand by one. You just might let me try to pick up that thing.’’ Then, over the communications circuit, came the sound of the Gemini VI-A astronauts playing ‘Jingle Bells’. The ‘object’, it seemed, was the familiar, jolly, red-suited, white-bearded old man himself, making his annual ‘re­entry’ to deliver his payload of presents to terrestrial children. ‘‘You’re too much!’’ radioed Capcom Elliot See.

In fact, Mickey Kapp, producer of Bill Dana’s ‘Jose Jimenez in Orbit’ album, had

provided Schirra with a small, four-hole Hohner harmonica just days before launch. Schirra had secured it in one of the pockets of his space suit with dental floss. “I could play eight notes,” he wrote, “enough for ‘Jingle Bells’. It may not have been a virtuoso performance, but it earned me a card in the musicians’ union of Orlando.’’ (Schirra would also receive a tiny gold harmonica from the Italian National Union of Mouth Organists and Harmonica Musicians.) Not to be outdone, Francis Slaughter of the Cape’s Flight Crew Operations Office, had fitted small bells to the boots of Stafford’s suit… supposedly as a joke, but little realising they would provide backing rhythm for Schirra’s Christmas soiree. Today, the tiny harmonica and Stafford’s bells are enshrined in the Smithsonian.

A little more than a day after launch, Schirra placed his spacecraft into an inverted, ‘heads-down’, attitude, to provide better observation of Earth’s horizon. At an altitude of ЇОО km, to ensure that Gemini VI-A did not overshoot its splashdown point, he set its banking angle at 55 degrees left and held it steady until the computer took control at 85 km above the ground. ‘‘We were going backwards, heads-down,” wrote Stafford, ‘‘so I had a great view of the horizon and the cloud-covered Gulf of Mexico, and a clear sense that we were really moving fast.’’ The astronauts duly switched off the computer at 24 km, deployed the drogue parachute at 14 km and the main canopy blossomed out at З.2 km. Impact with the Atlantic, in the first successful demonstration of a controlled re-entry, took place at 10:28:50 am on 16 December, at 2З degrees З5 minutes North latitude and 67 degrees 50 minutes West longitude, merely 1З km from its pre-planned splashdown point. It was fortunate that it was so successful, for Gemini VI-A’s descent was in full view of live television beamed from the recovery ship Wasp, transmitted via the Early Bird communications satellite. An hour later, displaying a thumbs-up of a job well done, Schirra, then Stafford, strode down the Wasp’s red carpet to the strains of a band playing ‘Anchors Aweigh’.

For Borman and Lovell, almost three days awaited them before their own splashdown. They started by removing their suits. The novelty of being in space had now worn very thin and, years later, Borman would describe the time after Gemini VI-A’s departure as ‘‘a tough three days’’ in which the two bearded, exhausted and uncomfortable men ‘‘simply existed… in a very, very cramped space’’. At the suggestion of Cooper and Conrad, they had taken novels. Borman spent some time reading Mark Twain’s ‘Roughing It’, which proved apt, and Lovell dived into part of ‘Drums Along The Mohawk’ by Walter D. Edmonds, a text about the American pioneers.

Even Mike Collins, who served as Lovell’s backup on Gemini VII, wondered how they managed to endure it. In his autobiography, Collins admitted the Gemini was so small that, on the ground, he could not sit in the simulator for more than three hours at a time and even with the relative freedom of weightlessness – which allowed Borman and Lovell to float, restore circulation and avoid bedsores – it was an uncomfortable existence. ‘‘The cockpit was tiny, the two windows were tiny, the pressure suits were big and bulky and there were a million items of loose equipment which constantly had to be stowed and restowed,’’ he wrote, adding that ‘‘no one who has never seen a Gemini can fully appreciate what it’s like being locked inside one for two weeks.’’

As the mission wore on, the Post Office passed up a request for them to mail their Christmas cards and parcels early. Lovell complained that he had “a stack of stuff up here”, to which the capcom replied that he should have sent his presents home with Gemini VI-A. With their homecoming looming, they were reminded by Chuck Berry to elevate their feet and pump their legs, to which Borman announced that they were eager to get out of Gemini VII as soon as possible.

Retrofire, described graphically by Lovell, commenced as they flew over the Canton Islands on their 206th orbit. “Retrofire has a unique apprehension in the fact that both of us are aviators and we understand the apprehension in flying,” he said. “If you have an accident in an airplane, something’s going to happen: you hit something or it blows up. Now, in liftoff and re-entry, a space vehicle is like an airplane. Something’s happening. But if the rockets fail to retro, if they fail to go off, nothing’s going to happen. You just sit up there and that’s it. Nothing happens at all. That’s the unique type of apprehension, because you know that you’ve gotten rid of the adaptor, you know that you’re going to have 24 hours of oxygen, ten hours of batteries and very little water. So you play all sorts of tricks to get those retros to fire.’’

Fortunately, the four retrorockets fired in tandem and to perfection. As their descent commenced, Capcom Elliot See told them to fly a 35-degree left bank until Gemini VII’s computer guidance assumed control. “You have no control over how close you’re going to get to the target,’’ Lovell recalled later. “Your only control is how good that computer is doing or how good your [centre of gravity] was when you set up the computer and the retrofire time.’’ Borman rolled Gemini VII into a heads – down orientation, allowing him to use the horizon as an attitude guide, but could see nothing and was forced to rely upon his instruments and Lovell’s called-out adjustments. After the flight, Borman would endorse the need for two pilots to fly a Gemini, since there was no practical way to follow the instruments and monitor the horizon at the same time.

The dynamic loads after 330 hours in weightlessness came, they recounted, “like a ton’’, even though G forces reached a peak of 3.9, barely half as much as a typical Mercury re-entry. Drogue parachute deployment jolted the two men, rocking the spacecraft by 20 degrees to either side, after which the main canopy opened. When Gemini VII hit the ocean at 9:05 am, Borman, unable to see any recovery helicopters, felt that he had lost a bet with Wally Schirra – that he could land the closest to his planned impact point. In reality, he had landed just 11.8 km off-target. In view of their lengthy stay in space, the two men were surprisingly fit, although Borman felt a little dizzy and both walked with a slight stoop on the deck of the recovery ship, Wasp. “The most miraculous thing,’’ reported a jubilant Chuck Berry, “was when they could get out of the spacecraft and not flop on their faces; and they could go up into the helicopter and get out on the carrier deck and walk pretty well.’’ They were, added Berry, in better physical condition than Cooper and Conrad had been. Lovell’s cardiovascular cuff revealed that less blood pooled in his legs than Borman and both maintained their total blood volumes.

As Chris Kraft and his flight control team fired up more cigars on the afternoon of 18 December 1965, the prospects for a lunar landing before the end of the decade had grown steadily brighter. Alexei Leonov’s triumphant spacewalk in March had been followed by the United States’ decisive response: no fewer than five Gemini missions – ten men blasted aloft, in total – whose endurance records had shown that astronauts could survive two-week flights to the Moon and back with few physical or psychological problems. They could rendezvous and survive the rigours of working outside their spacecraft in pressurised suits… or so it seemed. The next year, 1966, would see five more flights, closing out the programme in advance of the first Apollo mission, and all were destined to push the envelope still further by physically docking Geminis onto Agena-D targets and having astronauts spacewalk from craft to craft to install and remove experiments.

It would be an ultimately successful, though risky, year. Indeed, Deke Slayton would describe it as “NASA’s best’’. However, it would begin inauspiciously. In its third month, aboard Gemini VIII, the man who would someday be first to set foot on the Moon almost became one of the first to die in space. In its sixth month, the man who would one day be the last Apollo astronaut to set foot on the Moon would come close to losing his own life as the dangers of EVA became terrifyingly clear. Before that, on the gloomy, overcast morning of 28 February 1966, fire and death would rain down over St Louis, Missouri.

Upon the safe return of Young and Collins, barely six months remained to fly the final two Geminis. In order to focus resources entirely upon the Apollo effort, 31 January 1967 had been mandated as the deadline for the end of Project Gemini. Judging from the rate of launches thus far, NASA management felt confident that flying Gemini XI on 7 September and Gemini XII on 31 October was achievable. Those two missions, both lasting three to four days, would perfect each of the techniques demonstrated thus far: rendezvous, docking, EVA and using the Agena – D target to adjust their orbits.

First up would be Gemini XI’s Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon, who had been named to the mission on 21 March 1966, only days after finishing their previous stint as Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott’s backups on Gemini VIII. The two men were an almost-perfect match, sharing a friendship that long pre-dated their NASA days, back to a time in the late Fifties when they were roommates aboard the aircraft carrier Ranger. A decade later, as astronauts, they earned a reputation for being cocky and fun-loving – Gordon, indeed, was such a ladies’ man that Conrad nicknamed him ‘Animal’ – yet both were intensely focused.

The respect in which Gordon was held as a test pilot and naval aviator preceded his time at NASA; in fact, when he applied unsuccessfully to join the 1962 astronaut class, he was already on first-name terms with Al Shepard, Wally Schirra and Deke Slayton. In 1971, Slayton would consider it one of his most difficult tasks trying to choose between Gordon and Gene Cernan to command the final Apollo lunar mission; Gordon would lose, but by barely a whisker.

Richard Francis Gordon Jr was born in Seattle, Washington, on 5 October 1929, attending high school in Washington State with dreams of the priesthood, rather than any aspiration to fly. Upon receiving his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Washington in 1951, his focus had shifted somewhat to professional baseball or a career in dentistry. Gordon had settled firmly on the latter when the Korean War broke out and, in 1953, he joined the Navy and discovered his life’s true calling: aviation.

He would win top honours for his precise aerial manoeuvres, which guided him through All-Weather Flight School to jet transitional training to the all-weather fighter squadron at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida. It was shortly after being selected to join the Navy’s test pilot school at Patuxent River, Maryland, in 1957 that he and Conrad met and became lifelong friends. The pair would frequently while away raucous nights in bars and nightspots, knocking back beer and shots, then show up at the flight line six hours later, models of sobriety. ‘‘They were not only good pilots,’’ wrote Deke Slayton, ‘‘but a good time.’’

After graduation, Gordon test-flew F-8U Crusaders, F-11F Tigers, FJ-4 Furies and A-4 Skyhawks and also served as the first project pilot for the F-4H Phantom II. Later, he moved on to become a Phantom flight instructor and helped introduce the aircraft to both the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets. His expertise and reputation as one of the hottest F-4H fighter jocks in the world reached its zenith when Gordon used it to win the Bendix transcontinental race from Los Angeles to New York in May 1961. By doing so, he established a new speed record of almost 1,400 km/h and completed the epic coast-to-coast journey in barely two hours and 47 minutes.

In light of such astounding professional accomplishments, it came as a surprise to many – not least Pete Conrad – when Gordon did not make the final cut for NASA’s 1962 astronaut intake. The intensely competitive Gordon would describe his reaction as ‘‘pretty pissed off”, but he plunged directly into applying for aviation jobs, intending to retire from naval service. One night in the bar he was met by the just-selected Conrad, whose widow Nancy later described the encounter that would change Gordon’s career.

‘‘Still crying in your beer, Dickie-Dickie?’’

‘‘Just crying for you, Pete, ya poor dumb sumbitch. Stuck in a garbage can in space with some Air Force puke while I’m out smoking the field in my Phantom.’’

“So, Dick. They’re gonna fill out this Gemini program now that Apollo’s approved. At least ten more slots. I think you oughtta apply again.’’

“And why would I do that?’’

“Because you miss me.’’

A few months later, in October 1963, Gordon was picked as an astronaut. Three years after that, to his surprise and great joy, he would fly right-seat alongside his long-time Navy buddy. And three years after that, they would also fly to the Moon together. It would bring back memories of a picture of a flight-suited Conrad that he had sent to Gordon in 1962, just after his own selection. On the back, he had written: ‘To Dick: Until we serve together again’.

For Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, still in his early thirties, yet seemingly thwarted from ever flying again, the death of Vladimir Komarov cast a long shadow over his career. Shortly after the disaster, Nikolai Kamanin gathered the cosmonauts together and told him in no uncertain terms that his chances of another mission were virtually nil and that the next manned Soyuz would be flown instead by Georgi Timofeyevich Beregovoi, the oldest active pilot in the corps and a harsh critic of Gagarin, a man he considered to be an upstart. Meanwhile, retaining their slots on the ‘passive’ Soyuz, which would involve the ship-to-ship EVA, were Valeri Bykovsky, Yevgeni Khrunov and Alexei Yeliseyev. All four men began intensive training in November 1967.

Correcting Soyuz’ chronic problems was entrusted to engineers at TsKBEM, the Scientific-Research fnstitute for Automated Devices, and the Gromov Flight – Research fnstitute. The TsKBEM was the ‘new name’ for the OKB-1. Their work led to a number of improvements, including changes to the operating schedule of the reserve parachute, and by September 1967 the Utkin commission declared it was satisfied that Soyuz could commence automated missions. fn mid-October, Vasili Mishin announced that test flights would be launched with an ‘active’ vehicle sent aloft for three days, followed, if its health proved acceptable, by a ‘passive’ craft. The two would then automatically rendezvous, using their fgla radars, with docking not mentioned, but considered an option. The active craft, under the cover name of Cosmos 186, was successfully launched from Tyuratam at 12:30 pm Moscow Time on 27 October, entering an orbit of 209 x 235 km. Unlike Komarov’s Soyuz, its solar panels deployed successfully and its fgla worked perfectly, but a malfunction in its solar-stellar attitude-control sensor prevented it from adjusting its orbit. Nevertheless, the second launch was given the go-ahead.

Enthused by Cosmos 186’s success, Mishin was keen to attempt not only a rendezvous, but also a docking, and the vehicle named Cosmos 188 was duly launched to conduct this new mission at 12:12 pm on 30 October. Its launch vehicle’s trajectory was precise: inserting it into a 200 x 276 km orbit and within 24 km of Cosmos 186. The latter then fired its engine 28 times under automatic command from its Igla and at 1:14 pm, barely an hour after the passive vehicle’s launch, the pair had docked. Clear images appeared on Soviet television that evening, giving the outside world its first brief glance at the configuration of the Soyuz spacecraft.

Despite a small, 8.5 cm gap between the two craft, the Cosmos vehicles undocked after three and a half hours to commence their respective re-entries. Here the problems arose. Cosmos 186 suffered a failure of its solar-stellar sensor, which altered its descent trajectory into a purely ballistic fall from orbit; still, it was recovered safely. On the following day, 1 November, Cosmos 188 proved unable to perform a guided re-entry because of an incorrect attitude. It re-entered at an excessively steep angle, to such an extent that its self-contained package of explosives remotely destroyed the descent module, lest it land on foreign soil. (Had the explosives not fired, it was later concluded, Cosmos 188 would have landed about 400 km east of Ulan-Ude, just to the north of the Mongolian border, but still in the Soviet Union…)

Early the following year, Yuri Gagarin and a handful of other cosmonauts defended their ‘candidate of technical sciences’ theses at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy and the prospects of another flight into space seemed to brighten a little. On 27 March, he and test pilot Vladimir Seregin took off from the Chkalovskaya airfield, near Moscow, in an antiquated MiG-15UTI trainer. Shortly afterwards, Gagarin requested permission to alter his course… and then, at 10:31 am, communications were lost.

‘‘The weather was very bad that day,’’ remembered fellow cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who was overseeing parachute jumps from a helicopter near Kirzach airfield. ‘‘The cloud cover was low and it was raining hard. My team had performed just one jump when the weather deteriorated even further. The rain turned to sleet and conditions were so bad that I cancelled the session and requested permission to return to base.’’ As he waited to learn if his request had been granted, Leonov heard two loud bangs from the distance, one of them clearly an explosion, the other a sonic boom, with barely a second or so between them. During the return to base, he was puzzled when the control tower kept radioing Gagarin’s callsign. Leonov wondered if they were mistakenly calling him instead, but upon landing he was told that contact had been lost with Gagarin and Seregin. When Leonov described the explosions he had heard, a helicopter was hastily despatched to the last known location of Gagarin.

At length, as late afternoon gave way to a wintry twilight, the helicopter commander reported finding the wreckage of the MiG some 64 km from the airfield. Debris, he said, was scattered in a wooded area and the aircraft’s engine was buried several metres underground. Search and rescue forces, who arrived shortly thereafter, would determine that the MiG-15 had hit the ground at over 700 km/h.

An upper jaw, identified as that of Seregin, was found and Soviet Air Force officials informed Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin of the accident. As yet, however, they had no confirmatory evidence that Gagarin had also died. Early the following morning, a piece of cloth hanging from a birch tree offered the first proof: it was from Gagarin’s flight jacket. Clearly, neither he nor Seregin had ejected. The men’s remains – which Doran and Bizony described as “fingers, toes, pieces of ribcage and skull’’ – were both interred in the Kremlin Wall. The cause of the accident was hard to find. Theories included a bird strike, a collision with a hot-air balloon (the remains of which, in fact, were found close to the crash site) and even more outlandish notions that Gagarin was drunk or Seregin was taking pot-shots at wild deer from the MiG. Still others postulated that after angrily throwing a cognac in Leonid Brezhnev’s face in the wake of Komarov’s death, Gagarin had been imprisoned or confined to a mental asylum. . .

In December 1968, the official accident report pointed towards pilot error, but when the classified files were reopened two decades later it became more likely that Gagarin and Seregin did not have accurate altitude data and had flown into an area where a supersonic Sukhoi SU-15 jet was operating. Bizony and Doran noted that Seregin was told the cloud base was 1,000 m, when in fact it was nearer to 450 m. Witnesses would later confirm seeing both Gagarin’s aircraft and the Sukhoi. “According to the flight schedule of that day,’’ wrote Leonov, “the Sukhoi was prohibited from flying lower than 10,000 m. f believe now, and believed at the time, that the accident happened when the jet pilot violated the rules and dipped below the cloud cover for orientation … that he passed within 10 or 20 m of Yuri and Seregin’s plane while breaking the sound barrier. The air turbulence overturned their jet and sent it into a fatal flat spin.’’ fn such a situation, and thinking they were higher than they actually were, neither Seregin nor Gagarin would have had much time to respond or eject.

ft was Leonov who finally identified Gagarin’s physical remains. . . from fragments of flesh removed from the crash site and placed into a metallic bowl. “A few days before,’’ he wrote in his autobiography, “f had accompanied Yuri to the barber to have his hair cut. f had stood behind Yuri talking while the barber worked. When he came to trim the hairs at the base of Yuri’s neck, he noticed a large, dark brown mole.’’ Leonov had joked that the barber should be careful not to cut the mole, little realising that it would prove pivotal shortly thereafter in identifying the last mortal remains of Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin. “Looking down at the fragments of flesh lying in that metal bowl,’’ Leonov wrote, “f saw that one bore the mole.’’ The first man to conquer space was dead at the age of just 34.

The day before Gagarin and Seregin died, the Soyuz State Commission, headed by Kerim Kerimov, met to discuss future plans. The parachute design for the spacecraft had been extensively overhauled and cleared to fly. At 1:00 pm on 14 April, with several cosmonauts, including Georgi Beregovoi, in attendance, Cosmos 212 was successfully launched into a 210 x 239 km orbit. Next day, at 12:34 pm, it was followed by Cosmos 213, which entered orbit just four kilometres from its target. Within an hour, and with Cosmos 212 leading the rendezvous, the two craft docked automatically, separated later that evening and each completed five-day independent missions. Cosmos 212 performed the first-ever guided Soyuz re-entry on 19 April, touching down in high winds near Karaganda in Kazakhstan. fts twin, after performing automated tasks in radiation sensing, micrometeoroid detection and photometry, landed near Tselinograd on 20 April.

By this time, many were looking to Beregovoi to fly the next manned Soyuz mission, planned as a four-day flight, with Boris Volynov, Yevgeni Khrunov and Alexei Yeliseyev aboard the second, ‘passive’ mission. They would fulfil the denied missions of Soyuz 1 and 2. But not yet. Trials of the spacecraft’s backup parachute were not considered good enough to assign a human pilot and it was deemed likely that, with a crew of three cosmonauts aboard, it might rip during deployment. Vasili Mishin and the parachute’s designer proposed reducing the three-man crew to two. Further, it seemed prudent, to avoid unnecessary risk, to dock the two Soyuz vehicles, but not yet to attempt a risky EVA transfer.

Mstislav Keldysh, head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was even more cautious, refusing to endorse a manned flight until further automated tests had been conducted. On 29 May 1968, Mishin suggested a compromise: a docking of two Soyuz vehicles in orbit, one of them unmanned, the other carrying a single cosmonaut. After the success of that flight, the next crews would be committed to the EVA transfer, perhaps as early as September. Dmitri Ustinov stepped in the way of this plan, demanding an additional automated flight, which caused the intended August date for the first mission to slip until October. On 10 June, the Soyuz State Commission convened and Kerim Kerimov approved a plan to launch the automated mission in July, followed by the joint manned mission in September and a full-scale docking and EVA in November or December. Ustinov added to this the proviso that the EVA should transfer not one, but two, cosmonauts between ships. One Soyuz, obviously, would land with a crew of three, necessitating the repair of the backup parachute… and quickly.

Cosmos 238 was duly launched on 28 August, a month late because of problems with its parachutes, and apparently conducted at least one major orbital manoeuvre, before touching down four days later. All hurdles appeared to have been cleared and the joint mission, with an unmanned Soyuz 2 and Beregovoi aboard Soyuz 3, was scheduled for mid-October. This was slightly postponed due to pre-flight malfunctions and problems during testing of the spacecraft, but the State Commission met on 23 October and confirmed Beregovoi as the Soyuz 3 pilot. The new backups would be Vladimir Shatalov and Boris Volynov. Born on 15 April 1921 in Fedorovka in the Ukraine, Beregovoi was a fully-fledged colonel in the Soviet Air Force and, thanks to his exploits as a squadron commander in the Second World War, had long since been decorated with the coveted Hero of the Soviet Union medal.

He had joined the Air Force in 1941 and was rapidly assigned to a ground-attack unit, flying the Ilyushin Il-2 and completing 185 combat missions against Nazi Germany. Following the end of hostilities, he became a test pilot and flew more than 60 different types of aircraft, becoming deputy chief of the Air Force’s flight testing department. He was accepted for cosmonaut training in 1962 and, as a fellow war veteran, had been looked upon favourably by Nikolai Kamanin. In their biography of Gagarin, however, Doran and Bizony suggested that after serving in a backup capacity for an unflown Voskhod mission, Beregovoi locked horns with the First

Cosmonaut over flight assignments… and personally insulted the younger man over his limited flying experience and qualifications. According to onlookers, Gagarin threatened to do everything in his power to keep Beregovoi from flying in space. Even in the last days before Soyuz 3, serious concerns were raised over 47-year-old Beregovoi’s suitability to carry out the mission. He had failed his pre-launch examination, receiving a ‘bad’ mark rather than the expected ‘excellent’, but instead of substituting him for Shatalov, he was given a second chance, which he passed with a respectable ‘good’. After the flight, when asked if his advanced age was a factor in the indecision over whether he should fly, Beregovoi responded that his height – 1.8 m – was actually a deciding factor…

At noon on 25 October 1968, the unmanned Soyuz 2 (it only received this name after Beregovoi’s launch aboard Soyuz 3) lifted-off from Tyuratam, entering a perfect orbit of 183 x 224 km. Although the systems aboard the spacecraft appeared to be functioning normally, conservatism and scepticism over the reliability of the fgla system prompted suggestions that the attempt to dock with Beregovoi be dropped in favour of a simplified, two-part rendezvous, firstly to a distance of 30 km and then to 100-200 m. Next morning, at 11:34, Soyuz 3 set off and within minutes Beregovoi was in an orbit of 205 x 225 km, ready to exorcise the ghost of Vladimir Komarov and put Soyuz through its paces.

During his first orbit, ground controllers activated the fgla system, which guided Soyuz 3 towards its passive target and brought it to within 200 m. At this point, as an external television camera relayed pictures to Earth, Beregovoi took manual control to attempt a docking. As he closed in to around 50 m, Soyuz 3 inexplicably banked 180 degrees from the target, despite the cosmonaut’s best efforts to counter it. Suspicion that the fgla had contributed to this failure was denied by the system’s designer, Armen Mnatsakanyan, who claimed that ‘‘the cosmonaut had been confused by the light beacons [on Soyuz 2] and thereby [had manoeuvred in such a way] that a certain angle had been formed between the antennas of the [two] craft’’. This, it was concluded, had caused Soyuz 3 to turn away to one side. Mnatsakanyan’s judgement: pilot error.

Years later, Asif Siddiqi would write that, indeed, upon realising that the two spacecraft were imperfectly aligned, Beregovoi should have gingerly stabilised his craft along a direct axis to the target. However, he used a stronger thruster firing to place Soyuz 3 into a completely incorrect orientation relative to the target. Soyuz 2’s radar sensed this improper deviation and automatically turned its nose away to prevent docking, but Beregovoi tried to complete a fly around and a second approach. When the same thing happened again, it became clear that Soyuz 3’s propellant load was running low, leaving barely enough for re-entry. Further docking attempts were immediately abandoned and the two craft drifted apart.

fn spite of these problems, during his four days in space, Beregovoi demonstrated the basic habitability of Soyuz, even giving his terrestrial audience a televised tour of the descent and orbital modules during no fewer than three transmissions. ft did not have quite the same impact as the Wally, Walt and Donn Show, but proved a close Soviet second. Clad in a woollen training top and a white helmet with microphones, he spoke of the sheer ‘comfort’ of Soyuz and that, although he did not ‘need’ a space

suit for protection, one was carried aboard Soyuz 3 regardless. Beregovoi also participated in Earth observation studies, noting forest fires and thunderstorms close to the equator and conducting astronomical and Earth-resources photography.

Soyuz 2, meanwhile, suffered a failure of its astro-orientation sensor, but successfully re-entered and landed in Kazakhstan at 10:56 am on 28 October. This was soon followed by Beregovoi’s own return, which aroused much anxiety, since it was the first Soviet manned re-entry since Komarov’s death. An initial abortive retrofire was followed by a successful 145-second burn over the Atlantic Ocean early on 30 October. The descent module, thankfully, perfectly executed a guided return, hurtling over Africa and the Caspian Sea and hitting the snow-covered steppe near Karaganda with a firm thud at 10:25 am. The ebullient Beregovoi’s first contact with a living being came when he was met by a bewildered local boy on a donkey.

Notwithstanding the problems with the Soyuz 2 docking attempt, the mission had been an extraordinary success, with all of the spacecraft’s systems – including its Igla rendezvous device – performing as advertised. So too, apparently, did Beregovoi himself: in an oblique jab at the insubordination of Wally Schirra’s Apollo 7 crew, Tass reported that the Soyuz 3 pilot had followed his instructions correctly and without complaint. Still, in his post-flight report to the State Commission the following day, Beregovoi actually had a number of complaints: the jettisoning of the launch vehicle’s payload fairing was “unpleasant”, he told them, and one of his viewports was fogged up, whilst others had dust between the panes. Moreover, the manual control system was “too sensitive’’ during his approach towards Soyuz 2. The completion of the Soyuz shakedown cruise, though, set the stage for a far more ambitious docking and spacewalking extravaganza planned for the Soyuz 4 and 5 missions in January 1969. Before that, however, a lunar launch window was scheduled to open for the Soviets at the beginning of December. Had they given up on their lunar dream, the Americans wondered, or was another space spectacular on the cards?

TRAGEDY

The failure of the first Agena-D target vehicle on 25 October 1965 left the Gemini effort in a quandary. Its role in the following year’s rendezvous and docking missions was crucial, yet its reliability had been brought into serious doubt. Efforts to resolve its woes spanned four months and the first few weeks after the failure were spent identifying the cause. Investigators quickly focused on the Agena’s engine. By November, a ‘hard-start’ hypothesis – in which fuel was injected into the combustion chamber ahead of the oxidiser, effectively causing it to ‘backfire’ – had been generally accepted by the engineers. However, this problem was itself deeply rooted in NASA’s original specification for the Agena-D to be able to restart itself up to five times during a single mission.

In order to achieve multiple restarts, oxidiser began flowing first, then a pressure switch restricted fuel flow until a given amount of oxidiser had reached the combustion chamber. This had the advantage of enhancing the engine’s startup characteristics, but was also extremely wasteful, with numerous instances of oxidiser leaks. As a result, oxidiser was often expended before fuel. In an effort to rectify this wastage problem, engine subcontractor Bell Aerosystems removed the pressure switch, allowing fuel to enter the combustion chamber ahead of the oxidiser. However, the investigative panel for the Agena-D speculated that fuel in the chamber – perhaps in considerable quantities – might have caused the engine to backfire when the oxidiser arrived, resulting in an explosion.

Meanwhile, in mid-November, a two-day symposium on hypergolic rocket ignition at altitude convened to discuss the failure and identify corrective actions. The data from the accident implied that oscillations and mechanical damage had been induced after engine ignition and temperature drops pointed towards a fuel spillage of some sort. When the Agena’s electrical circuitry failed, the engine stopped, but a valve responsible for managing fuel tank pressures remained open. As the fuel stopped flowing, pressures built up inside the tanks, which ruptured and destroyed the vehicle. Although the symposium was unsatisfied that this represented

the definitive cause of the accident, it had little other data upon which to base its judgements. One of its recommendations was that future Agena-D engines should be modified and tested at simulated altitudes closer to those at which it would operate: 76 km. (Previously, it had only been tested at simulated altitudes of 34 km.)

In response, Lockheed formed a Project Surefire Engine Development Task Force to carry out the modification programme, which continued to arouse debate until the week before Gemini Vlff’s scheduled March 1966 launch. By that time, the crew assigned to a subsequent mission, Gemini IX, had lost their lives in a blaze which nearly claimed their spacecraft, too. Civilian Elliot See, a deeply religious former General Electric pilot who had performed engine testing before coming to NASA, was paired with Air Force Major Charlie Bassett – “a terrific stick-and-rudder man,” according to Gene Cernan – to fly a three-day mission and practice rendezvous, docking and spacewalking.

At 7:35 am on 28 February 1966, the men and their backups, Cernan and Tom Stafford, took off from Ellington Field near Houston in a pair of T-38s and flew in tandem to McDonnell’s St Louis plant. “Prime and backup were not allowed to fly in the same airplane,’’ wrote Mike Collins, “lest a crash wipe out the entire capability in one specialty.’’ In other words, in Gemini IX’s case, See could fly with anyone but Stafford and Bassett with anyone but Cernan. Their schedule called for them to spend ten days in St Louis, practicing rendezvous procedures in the simulator, as well as viewing their just-completed Gemini IX spacecraft. Weather conditions in St Louis that morning were bad, with low cloud, poor visibility, rain and snow flurries, and at 8:48 am Lambert Field airport – located 150 m from the McDonnell plant – prepared to support two instrument-guided landings. lt was standard practice to rely upon instruments under such appalling weather conditions.

The two sleek T-38s – tailnumbered ‘NASA 901’ (See and Bassett) and ‘NASA 907’ (Stafford and Cernan) – descended through the murky clouds at 8:55 am, directly above the centreline of the south-west runway, far too low and flying too fast to land. Stafford, who had been concentrating on remaining in position on See’s right wing, decided to ascend and attempt a flyaround. However, See inexplicably announced his intention to enter a tight turn and make another approach. Normally careful, considered and judicious, it has been speculated over the years that he wanted to beat the backup crew to the runway. If this was indeed the case, it surely demonstrated that See had the competitive nature typical of an astronaut. Sadly, good luck was not on his side that day.

Stafford was surprised as See’s T-38 disappeared from view, exclaiming to Cernan: ‘‘Goddamn! Where the hell’s he going?’’ Breaking through the clouds, heading directly for the corrugated-iron Building 101, which contained Gemini lX, See realised he could not land successfully. He lit his afterburners, broke hard right and pulled back on the stick, but at 8:58 am the T-38 grazed the top of the building, gashed open the roof – losing a wing as it did so – and cartwheeled into a nearby parking lot, whereupon it exploded.

lnside Building 101, McDonnell foreman Domien Meert watched aghast from his desk in the subassembly room as a sheet of flame flared across the now-exposed ceiling. Workers dived for cover under benches as honeycomb shards from the T-38’s

The original Gemini IX crew, Elliot See (left) and Charlie Bassett. Scheduled for a three-day mission in May 1966, they were both killed in St Louis just 11 weeks before launch.

shattered wing hit the Gemini X spacecraft, still under construction. Elliot See, who had been thrown from the fuselage, was found dead in the parking lot, his parachute half-opened, while Charlie Bassett – one of the most promising of the third group of astronauts, selected in October 1963 – had been decapitated. His severed head was later retrieved from the rafters of the very building in which his spacecraft was being readied for flight.

Stafford and Cernan were oblivious to the tragedy. They were simply ignored by air traffic controllers, left to their own devices and, wrote Cernan, “annoyed that the tower was being so vague in its communications”. Eventually, with a near-empty fuel gauge pushing him close to declaring an emergency, Stafford set NASA 907 down on the runway without incident and turned onto the taxiway. He was puzzled by an odd question from the tower: “Who was in NASA 901?” When Stafford told them that the Gemini IX prime crew was aboard the other T-38, he was advised that McDonnell Aircraft had “a message” for him. Minutes later, after opening his canopy, Stafford was told by James McDonnell himself that See and Bassett had both been killed.

The men’s remains, wrote Cernan, were unrecognisable and their identification was not helped by the fact that all four astronauts had placed their NASA badges and personal papers in a baggage pod aboard See and Bassett’s T-38 before leaving Houston. Only by checking with the men who were still alive was it possible to determine which ones had died.

It seemed impossible to imagine 28 February 1966 as a day for miracles, but it was to say the very least fortuitous that no deaths were sustained on the ground. If See had been a little lower at the moment of impact, he would have hit Building 101 in a head-on collision, destroying Gemini IX and potentially killing hundreds of McDonnell staff who were skilled in the art of manufacturing spacecraft The United States’ plan to reach the lunar surface before the end of the decade would have evaporated.

Later that afternoon, James McDonnell climbed onto the roof to survey the damage. Next day, his company’s 37,000 employees returned to work and, as planned, on 2 March, Gemini IX was loaded aboard a C-124 transport aircraft and flown to Cape Kennedy. At around the same time, the entire astronaut corps gathered at Arlington National Cemetery to watch as the remains of 38-year-old Elliot McKay See Jr and 34-year-old Charles Arthur Bassett II were laid to rest.

NASA immediately created a seven-man investigative board, chaired by Al Shepard, which examined every parameter and detail relating to See and Bassett’s tragic final flight. The T-38, it was found, was in perfect operational order and the men’s physical and psychological state was fine. Their flying abilities, on paper at least, were exemplary and both had renewed their instrument flying certificates within the last six months. The appalling weather was certainly a contributory factor in the disaster, but the board’s final conclusion that pilot error was to blame did not surprise Deke Slayton.

“Of all the guys in the second group of astronauts,” he wrote, “Elliot was the only one I had any doubts about. I had flown with him and the conclusion was just that he wasn’t aggressive enough. Too old-womanish. . . he flew too slow – a fatal

problem in a plane like the T-38, which will stall easily if you get below about 270 knots.” Slayton had named See as Neil Armstrong’s pilot on the Gemini V backup crew, but had not felt confident to keep the pairing together for Gemini VIII, particularly since the latter would feature a lengthy EVA. “He wasn’t in the best physical shape,’’ Slayton wrote, adding that “I didn’t think he was up to handling an EVA. I made him commander of Gemini IX and teamed him up with Charlie Bassett – who was strong enough to carry the two of them.’’

Neil Armstrong, who worked with See on Gemini V, has said little about his qualifications as an astronaut, but certainly found it difficult to blame his comrade for his own death. “It’s easy to say… what he should have done was gone back up through the clouds and made another approach,’’ Armstrong told biographer James Hansen. “There might have been other considerations that we’re not even aware of. I would not begin to say that his death proves the first thing about his qualification as an astronaut.’’

Regardless, years later, Slayton would admit that he had allowed himself to “get sentimental’’ about giving See a mission and that, ultimately, it was a bad call. Within hours of the tragedy, he had telephoned Tom Stafford to tell him that he and Cernan were now the Gemini IX prime crew. Three weeks later, Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin were named as their backups. It is interesting that the deaths of See and Bassett proved pivotal in deciding the identities and shaping the futures of the men who would someday be the first to set foot upon the Moon. By backing up Gemini IX, for example, Aldrin eventually wound up as pilot on the very last Gemini mission. Slayton admitted in his autobiography that without this twist of fate, it would have been “very unlikely’’ that Aldrin would have gone on to join the first Apollo lunar landing crew. Indeed, Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott, set to fly Gemini VIII on 16 March 1966, would become the only Gemini crew who would both someday walk on the lunar surface.

For Armstrong, his astronaut career would be the culmination of a lifetime of aviation which had carried him to the edge of the atmosphere in rocket-propelled aircraft, into the world’s first spaceflying corps and almost into suborbital space aboard a revolutionary machine called ‘Dyna-Soar’.

In spite of Young and Collins’ success, one particular aspect of Gemini XI caused the most worry: the desire to complete rendezvous and docking with the Agena-D target on their very first orbit! To be fair, ‘desire’ is probably the wrong word. The necessity for rendezvous and docking at such an early stage would be essential when an Apollo command and service module was approached by the ascent stage of a lunar module after the Moon landing.

‘‘There was a lot of concern that it wasn’t going to be successful,’’ Gordon told Neil Armstrong’s biographer James Hansen. ‘‘For the Apollo application, the desire was to rendezvous as rapidly as possible because the lifetime of the LM’s ascent stage was quite limited in terms of its fuel supply.’’ To accomplish this first-lap rendezvous and docking, Gemini XI would have to meet a launch window barely two seconds long and Conrad and Gordon’s three days aloft would also feature a lengthy spacewalk, experiments … and the physical tethering of their spacecraft to the Agena target.

The purpose of the latter, said backup command pilot Neil Armstrong, was to ‘‘find out if you could keep two vehicles in formation without any fuel input or control action’’. Armstrong had been teamed with rookie astronaut Bill Anders to shadow Conrad and Gordon’s training regime and the foursome frequently found themselves in the Cape Kennedy beach house over the summer months of 1966, running through rendezvous and docking procedures, trajectories and flight plans. Before too many more years had passed, all four of them, on three separate missions, would apply this knowledge on flights to the Moon.

Conrad’s assignment to Gemini XI was inextricably linked to the mission’s demonstration of achieving high altitudes. In mid-1965, he learned of plans to fly the spacecraft around the Moon and, even when such a mission was rejected by Jim Webb and Bob Seamans, had pushed vigorously to use some of his Agena fuel to carry Gemini XI into a high orbit. Among the earliest champions of Conrad’s scheme were the scientists – flying to high altitude, he argued, would allow the astronauts to acquire high-resolution imagery of weather patterns and possibly benefit other experiments. Fears that the Van Allen radiation belts might scupper such a mission were allayed when Conrad despatched Anders – a qualified nuclear

Dick Gordon (left) and Pete Conrad demonstrate the tether experiment at their post-flight press conference.

engineer – to Washington to devise and argue ways of avoiding them. Indeed, radiation data gathered by Young and Collins on Gemini X had turned out to be barely a tenth of pre-flight estimates.

The plan to fly Gemini XI to high altitude thus approved, another of its key objectives – tethering the spacecraft to its Agena as a means of demonstrating better station-keeping – bore fruit. Under direction from NASA, McDonnell engineers recommended that a nylon or Dacron line no longer than about 50 m could produce a reasonable amount of cable tension. The station-keeping requirement for such an experiment quickly expanded, however, to encompass a means of inducing a form of artificial gravity. Ultimately, a 30 m Dacron tether was chosen for the task and the only serious concern was how Gemini XI could be freed from the Agena. It was decided to fire a pyrotechnic charge and, failing that, to snap a break line in the tether with a small separation velocity.

Particularly worrisome, though, was achieving rendezvous with the Agena on Conrad and Gordon’s very first orbital pass. (Within NASA, it was known as an ‘M = 1’ rendezvous.) This had been suggested several years earlier by Richard Carley of the Gemini Project Office, in response to Apollo managers’ concerns that such practice was necessary to provide a close approximation of lunar orbit rendezvous. During Gemini X, John Young had expended so much fuel that it seemed overly ambitious, but Flight Director Glynn Lunney eventually appeased naysayers that Mission Control could provide enough backup data on orbital insertion and manoeuvring accuracy that Conrad and Gordon would have all they needed to perform it. Still sceptical, William Schneider, deputy director for Mission Operations, bet the review board’s chairman James Elms a dollar that a first-orbit rendezvous could not be done economically.

Despite the greater success of Mike Collins in performing his EVAs on Gemini X, concerns remained. Practicing spacewalking techniques in a realistic environment had led, in mid-1966, to the adoption of‘neutral buoyancy’ – submerging fully-suited astronauts in a water tank – as the closest terrestrial analogue to the real thing. In his autobiography, Collins related its introduction in the closing weeks before his own mission, but had little time to spare practicing under such conditions. Gene Cernan, perhaps best-placed to observe the difficulties of EVA, was one of the first to undergo neutral buoyancy training, and found that it did indeed approximate his efforts in space.

Yet refining techniques also encompassed an astronaut’s body positioning and the inclusion of more practical aids, including handholds, shorter umbilicals (Young and Collins recommended a 9 m tether, rather than l5 m, to avoid entanglement, which was accepted) and better foot restraints in the Gemini adaptor section. This last proposal led to two suggestions from McDonnell – a spring clamp, like a pair of skis, and a ‘bucket’ type restraint – with NASA finally opting for the latter, which came to be nicknamed the ‘golden slippers’.

Rendezvous, docking, tethered station-keeping and spacewalking. . . and a full plate of 12 scientific experiments would thus fill Conrad and Gordon’s three days in space. Two of the experiments – Earth-Moon libration region imaging (S-29) and dim-light imaging (S-30) – were newcomers to Project Gemini, together with seven already-flown investigations into weather, terrain and airglow photography, radiation and microgravity effects, ion-wake measurements, nuclear emulsions and ultraviolet astronomy and a trio of technical objectives focusing on mass determination, night-image intensification and the evaluation of EVA power tools. By the end of August 1966, the Manned Spacecraft Center had announced that all of the experiments were ready to fly.

Elsewhere, preparations for Gemini XI had become closely entwined with those of the previous mission, Gemini X. The Titan II propellant tank for the latter had become corroded by leaking battery acid during transfer from Martin’s Denver to Baltimore plants in September 1965. It had been replaced with the tank originally allocated to Conrad and Gordon’s flight; the Gemini XI crew were correspondingly assigned the propellant tank previously earmarked for Gemini XII. This finally reached Baltimore for checkout and integration in January 1966.

Six months later, Conrad and Gordon’s Titan was in place on Pad 19 at Cape Kennedy. At around the same time, the Gemini spacecraft itself was hoisted into position and the hot weeks of August were spent connecting cabling and replacing some leaking fuel cell sections.

By this stage, Gemini XI’s launch date had slipped by two days to 9 September, but as the fuelling of its Titan II booster progressed, a minute leak was found in the first-stage oxidiser tank. Technicians quickly set to work rectifying the problem: a sodium silicate solution and aluminium patching plugged the leak and launch was rescheduled for the following day. That attempt, too, came to nothing, as Conrad and Gordon were en-route to Pad 19, when it was learned that their Agena-XI’s Atlas booster was experiencing problems with its autopilot. Hoping to resolve the glitch in time, the General Dynamics test conductor called a hold in the countdown to check it out.

The Atlas engineers out at Pad 14 reported that they were receiving faulty readings and were in the process of running checks to determine if the autopilot component needed replacement. Ultimately, the checks took too long to meet the launch window on 10 September and, after an hour of troubleshooting, the attempt to launch the two vehicles that day was called off. Another attempt, William Schneider announced, would be made on the 12th. It later became clear that the fault was caused by a fluttering valve, coupled with unusually high winds and an over­sensitive telemetry recorder. Fortunately, none of the Atlas’ components needed to be changed and managers cleared the mission to fly.

Early on 12 September, Conrad and Gordon were sealed inside their spacecraft by Guenter Wendt’s closeout team at Pad 19. Despite a minor oxygen leak which required the reopening and resealing of Conrad’s hatch, the launch of their Agena – XI target went ahead on time at 8:05 am. Still, there was little time to waste, for Gemini XI had been granted barely two seconds in which to launch; its almost – impossibly-short ‘window’ dictated by the requirement to rendezvous with the Agena on the astronauts’ first orbit. It demonstrated, if nothing else, the growing maturity of America’s space effort. “Rocketeers of the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties,’’ wrote Barton Hacker and James Grimwood, ‘‘would have been aghast at the idea of having to launch within two ticks of the clock.’’

Aghast or not, Conrad and Gordon’s liftoff was perfect, coming at 9:42:26.5 am, just half a second into its mandated two-second launch period. Six minutes later, on the fringes of space, the two astronauts received the welcome news from Mission Control: their ascent and the performance of their Titan II had been ‘right on the money’ and they were cleared for their M = 1 rendezvous. To kick off its first sequence, just 23 minutes after launch, Conrad pulsed Gemini XI’s thrusters in a so – called ‘insertion-velocity-adjust-routine’ – or ‘Ivar’ – manoeuvre, correcting their orbital path and placing them on track to ‘catch’ the Agena, then 430 km away.

Conrad’s next manoeuvre was more tricky, occurring as it did outside of telemetry and communications range. At the appointed moment, he performed an out-of­plane manoeuvre of about one metre per second, then pitched Gemini XI’s nose 32 degrees ‘up’ from his horizontal flight plane. This completed, the two men activated their rendezvous radar and … just as predicted, they received an immediate electronic ‘lock-on’ with the Agena. By the time they re-established radio contact with the ground, they were just 93 km from their quarry.

Capcom John Young, seated at his console in Houston, sent final numbers through the Tananarive tracking station to the astronauts and, as Gemini XI neared the apogee of its first orbit, Conrad ignited the OAMS to produce ‘multi-directional’ changes – forward, ‘down’ and to the right – in support of the rendezvous’ terminal stage. All at once, less than 40 km away, the Agena flashed into view with orbital sunrise over the Pacific Ocean, almost blinding them as it did so. The two men scrambled for sunglasses and Conrad pulled his spacecraft to within 15 m of the target. Making landfall over California, and a little more than 85 minutes since launch, they had achieved the world’s quickest orbital rendezvous. Moreover, they still retained some 56 per cent of their fuel reserves. William Schneider lost his bet with James Elms, writing that ‘‘I never lost a better dollar’’.

‘‘Mr Kraft,’’ the jubilant astronauts called to Flight Director Chris Kraft, ‘‘would [you] believe M equals 1?’’ On 12 September 1966, he certainly did.

With predictable ambiguity, in the dying months of 1968, the Soviets gave little away to either confirm or deny that they had any interest in competing with the United States to reach the Moon. Fortunately for them, their head of state had not committed them to the same audacious goal as John Kennedy had done for America seven years before. However, it is well known that the Soviets had a vigorous manned lunar effort. . . and made equally vigorous attempts to hide it, although the intricacies will be discussed further in the next volume. On 14 October, indeed, Academician Leonid Sedov told the 19th Congress of the International Astro – nautical Federation in New York that “the question of sending astronauts to the Moon at this time is not an item on our agenda… it is not a priority’’. A few weeks later, discussing Beregovoi’s mission with the press, Mstislav Keldysh was forced to admit that Soyuz was not designed for a circumlunar flight and that journeys to the Moon were not being studied.

For months, though, speculation had grown over the development of a large lunar rocket, known as the ‘N-l’, or, had it successfully flown, as the ‘Raskat’ (‘Peal’). NASA Administrator Jim Webb, informed by CIA sources early in 1968 about the N-l, had proven so vocal about its existence that the booster was also colloquially known as ‘Webb’s Giant’. Its development had begun under Sergei Korolev in 1959 and it was originally intended to lift space stations into orbit or even deliver human crews to Mars with a nuclear-powered upper stage. Two years later, it received a small amount of funding and a government report established a schedule for its maiden launch sometime in 1965. The chance of the N-l moving from paper to production took a dramatic turn with Kennedy’s lunar speech in May 1961 and Korolev began laying plans for a Soviet mission to the Moon, featuring a new spacecraft called ‘Soyuz’.

Several launches, it was realised, would be needed to loft the crew-carrying Soyuz, the lunar lander and additional engines and fuel. Powering the giant rocket would be a new engine known as the RD-270, built by Valentin Glushko, employing unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and an oxidiser of nitrogen tetroxide; this hypergolic mixture reduced the need for a complex combustion system, but also yielded a reduced thrust when compared to a combination of, for example, kerosene and liquid oxygen. Korolev felt that a high-performance design demanded high – performance fuels and moved instead to work with Nikolai Kuznetsov’s OKB-276 bureau, which suggested a ‘ring’ of NK-15 engines on the rocket’s first stage. The interior of the ring would be open, with air piped into the hole through inlets near the top of the stage; this would then be mixed with the exhaust to augment the N-l’s total thrust.

Eventually, in recognition of the difficulties of orbital rendezvous, Korolev opted for a direct-ascent means of reaching the Moon. The result was that the N-l increased dramatically in size and was combined with a new lunar package called the ‘L-3’, which contained additional engines, an adapted Soyuz spacecraft (known as the ‘Lunniy Orbitny Korabl’ or ‘LOK’) and a lunar lander. Had the N-l actually flown successfully, it would have been one of the largest launch vehicles ever built: at 105 m tall, it was slightly shorter than the Saturn V, yet produced a million kilograms more thrust from its first stage engines. It had five stages in total, three to boost it into orbit and two to support lunar activities. The lower three stages formed a truncated cone, some l0 m wide at the base, arranged to best accommodate the kerosene and liquid oxygen tanks.

Astonishingly, the first stage – known as ‘Block A’ – was powered by no fewer than 30 NK-15 engines, arranged in two rings, with one ring handling pitch and yaw and the others on gimballing mounts for roll manoeuvres. With an estimated thrust of 4.5 million kg, Block A would have easily out-thrust the Saturn V’s first stage, although its use of kerosene offered poorer performance: it could place 86,000 kg into low-Earth orbit, compared to the Saturn V’s 118,000 kg. The N-l’s second stage would have comprised eight uprated NK-15V engines in a single ring and four smaller NK-21 engines in a square arrangement on its third stage.

The complexities of building plumbing to feed fuel and oxidiser into the clustered rocket engines proved an incredibly delicate and fragile task and contributed in part to the four catastrophic N-1 launch failures between 1969-72. The plumbing difficulties experienced during the construction of the Saturn V’s first stage, which comprised just five engines, must have been exacerbated tenfold for the N-1’s 30 engines. During the week that Apollo 8 circled the Moon, the first N-1 was being readied at Tyuratam for its first unmanned launch, scheduled for early in 1969.

As the N-1 proceeded through its torturous and ultimately unsuccessful development process, another rocket – the Proton – was meeting with greater success. It had been designed to loft a cosmonaut-carrying version of the Soyuz spacecraft, albeit without an orbital module, on a circumlunar trajectory. In readiness for this so-called ‘Soyuz 7K-L1’ variant, a number of unmanned missions were launched towards the Moon under the cover name of ‘Zond’. Despite several dismal Proton failures, Zond 5 was launched on 14 September 1968, passing within 1,950 km of the lunar surface and splashing down in the Indian Ocean seven days later. In addition to demonstrating the spacecraft which might someday support two cosmonauts, Zond 5 took the first living creatures – a pair of steppe tortoises, wine flies, mealworms, plants, seeds and bacteria – to the vicinity of the Moon.

Eight weeks later, on 10 November, Zond 6 provided perhaps the biggest impetus to get Apollo 8 into lunar orbit before the end of the year, when it too carried a biological payload and numerous instruments to the Moon. It hurtled just 2,420 km past the lunar surface, acquiring high-resolution photographs, but its descent module depressurised during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. This killed all of the biological specimens and would probably have resulted in the deaths of cosmonauts, too, had they been aboard. On the other hand, failure occurred because the spacecraft was held in an unusual attitude for a protracted time, owing to a problem that a pilot could have readily been able to overcome. Further, the seal suffered in the heat of the Sun and would not have been overly stressed if a crew had been aboard. To add insult to what had been a less-than-successful mission, only one negative was recovered from its camera container. . . and its parachutes deployed too early, causing it to crash land. Despite the depressurisation and parachute faults, either of which would have doomed a human crew, Tass’ announcement a few days later explicitly stated that Zond 6’s mission had been “to perfect the flight and construction of an automated variation of the manned spacecraft for flying to the Moon’’. It marked a stark contrast to Sedov’s claim only weeks earlier that the Soviets had no interest in manned lunar missions. . .

In perhaps one of the bitterest ironies, Frank Borman, who would command Apollo 8, the first manned circumlunar expedition, became the first American astronaut to be invited to the Soviet Union afterwards. When he arrived, he was welcomed with a huge party, held in his honour at Moscow’s Metropole Restaurant. Hundreds of guests flocked to shake his hand and have their photograph taken with him. One of them was Alexei Leonov. Borman congratulated Leonov on his Voskhod 2 spacewalk and the two chatted about the circumlunar mission and possible landing sites on the Moon. Most likely, Borman considered Leonov to be showing the interest typical of a space explorer. Little did he realise that Leonov had been training to complete the very same goal for which Borman was now being applauded.

Initially, in the months after Sergei Korolev’s death, Leonov and a civilian cosmonaut, possibly Oleg Makarov, had been tipped to fly the first circumlunar Soyuz mission sometime in the summer of 1967. “We then expected to be able to accomplish the first Moon landing,’’ wrote Leonov, “ahead of the Americans in September 1968.’’ The Soviet plan was for one cosmonaut to descend to the surface in the LK (‘Lunniy Korabl’) landing craft, whose spidery appearance was uncannily similar to Grumman’s lunar module, leaving his colleague in orbit aboard the main L-3 craft.

‘‘To train for the extreme difficulties of a lunar landing,’’ Leonov wrote, ‘‘we undertook exhaustive practice in modified Mi-4 helicopters. The flight plan of a lunar landing mission called for the landing module to separate from the main spacecraft at a very precise point in lunar orbit and then descend towards the surface of the Moon until it reached a height of 110 m from the surface, where it would hover until a safe landing area could be identified. The cosmonaut would then assume manual control of its descent. . . ’’ In addition to flying the circumlunar mission, it is likely that Leonov would have hoped for such a landing mission of his own. For that reason, he qualified as a helicopter pilot and spent much of 1966 and 1967 using it to prepare himself as much as possible for a Moon landing.

Not only would the journey to the lunar surface be fraught with risk, but so too would the return to Earth. In fact, the Soviet plan to slow down from transearth velocities would be to enter the atmosphere, ‘bounce’ off and re-enter a second time,

as would Apollo. “The key to this difficult manoeuvre,” continued Leonov, “was the angle of re-entry. If it was wrong, the spacecraft would be severely deformed, perhaps even destroyed… Several times during training sessions, I sustained pressures of 14 G, the maximum to which a human being can be subjected on Earth. This put tremendous strains on every cell in my body and caused several haemorrhages at those points where my body was most severely compressed.” With the completion of Zond 6, western analysts knew that the next favourable ‘window’ for a Soviet circumlunar shot opened on 6 December 1968, just two weeks before the window for Apollo 8. It never happened. The parachute failure and the depressurisation issue were sufficiently serious to have killed a cosmonaut crew and Vasili Mishin did not want to risk one until Zond was proven by at least two further test flights. Of course, the Americans knew nothing of this and missing the December window would pose yet more questions as to what the Soviets were up to. Years later, Alexei Leonov would tell Tom Stafford that he and Oleg Makarov were prepared to take the risk and ride a Zond for seven days to the Moon and back. ‘‘We could have beaten the Apollo 8 crew,’’ Leonov said sadly, ‘‘but Mishin was a blockhead.’’

It is July 1966. At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, a 41-year-old test pilot named Jim Wood is moments away from becoming the United States’ 17th man in space. Alone, pressure-suited and tightly strapped into the tiny cockpit of a stubby winged ship called ‘Dyna-Soar’, he will shortly be boosted by a Titan III-C rocket onto a suborbital trajectory to evaluate the world’s first reusable manned spacecraft. It was a precocious forerunner of the Space Shuttle and, indeed, had it flown, many observers believe that it could have revolutionised – perhaps even ‘routinised’ – today’s space travel.

Wood’s mission never happened. Nor did Dyna-Soar itself reach fruition, although at the time of its cancellation in December 1963 it was supposedly eight months away from performing a series of airborne drop-tests from a modified B-52 bomber. Much criticism has been levelled at then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, accusing him of poor judgement in killing a project with so much promise, so close to completion and whose contractors had already spent nearly half of its $530 million development budget. To be fair, Dyna-Soar faced immense problems of its own, the most important of which was its ill-defined purpose.

The spacecraft was viewed from two different perspectives during its genesis in the late Fifties: as a research vehicle to explore hypersonic flight regimes or, as the Air Force preferred, as a fully functional military glider capable of delivering live warheads with precise, pilot-guided accuracy onto targets anywhere on Earth. Ambitious plans were even afoot for the inspection and maybe destruction of enemy satellites in orbit, as well as the carriage of reconnaissance cameras, side-looking radar and electronic intelligence sensors. Assuming a manned flight sometime in the summer of 1966, it was hoped that Dyna-Soar would evolve into this advanced weapons system by the mid-Seventies. This would offer military strategists a route around the problem that ‘conventional’ ballistic missiles might no longer be able to strike hardened targets with sufficient accuracy. Moreover, the ‘boost-glide’ flight profile of Dyna-Soar – able to cover velocities between Mach 5 and 25 – was perceived as a better alternative to using complex, air-breathing turbojet or ramjet engines, which were difficult to develop and could only operate a lower speeds. Indeed, according to studies conducted by the Rand Corporation, vehicles flying below Mach 9 might be rendered vulnerable to Soviet air defences by 1965.

In the most paranoid days of the Cold War, Dyna-Soar thus provided the United States with a seemingly invincible means of attacking and snooping on enemy targets from any direction and, when flying at low altitudes, gave barely a three-minute warning of its arrival. Additionally, it could sweep across Soviet territory at altitudes in the range of 40 to 80 km, providing a much better imaging resolution than was possible with the best spy satellites and its data could be in the hands of Pentagon officials within hours.

Size-wise, this astonishing machine was a third as large as today’s Shuttle: 10.6 m long, with a wingspan of 6 m. Powered by a Martin-built ‘trans-stage’ engine, capable of 32,660 kg of thrust, it would have ridden into space atop the Titan III-C. This choice of launch vehicle changed significantly as Dyna-Soar’s own purpose fluctuated. ‘‘It was originally scheduled to be launched on the Titan I,’’ said Neil Armstrong, one of its original pilots, ‘‘[then] when the Titan III was introduced, with additional [solid] rocket engines strapped on the side, it [became] an orbital vehicle.’’ Armstrong left the project in mid-1962 to join NASA’s astronaut corps and later revealed that Dyna-Soar’s main aim was for hypersonic research, hence its acronym: the ‘dynamic soarer’. Its 72.48-degree delta wings were flat-bottomed and its aft fuselage was ‘ramped’ to give directional stability at transonic speeds. This would have provided a sufficient hypersonic lift-to-drag ratio to permit a cross-range capability of around 3,200 km. In other words, a diverted landing from Edwards Air Force Base in California meant that it could conceivably touch down anywhere in the continental United States, Japan or even Ecuador.

In fact, thanks to a unique set of wire-brush ‘skids’, it could even land on compacted-earth runways little more than 1.6 km long. Typically, it would have been launched from Cape Canaveral by the Titan III-C, then remained affixed to the rocket’s third and final stage. This would have acted as a restartable ‘trans-stage’, capable not only of inserting Dyna-Soar into a 145 km orbit, but also adjusting its altitude and inclination. The trans-stage could boost its velocity, thus frustrating ground-based efforts to predict its overflight path during bombing or spying missions.

Emergency aborts during a Dyna-Soar launch, though, did not fill Armstrong with confidence. ‘‘There was a question [of] what kind of abort technique would be practical to try to use in case there was a problem with the Titan,’’ he recalled years later. ‘‘It was determined, rather than a ‘puller’ rocket, [we had a] ‘pusher’ rocket to push the spacecraft up to flying speed from which it could make a landing, but it wasn’t known at that time what might be practical, how much thrust would be needed and how much performance would be needed. We had the F-5D aircraft, which I determined could be configured to have a similar glide angle for the Dyna – Soar for similar flight conditions and devise a way of flying the aircraft to the point at which the pusher escape rocket would burn out, so you would start with the identical flight conditions that the Dyna-Soar would find itself after a rocket abort from the launch pad. Then, you only had to work out a way to find your way to the runway and make a successful landing. I worked on that project for a time and found a technique that would allow us to launch from the pad at Cape Canaveral and make a landing on the skid strip. We practiced that and I believe that [NASA test pilots] Bill Dana and Milt Thompson both continued after I transferred from Edwards to Houston. There was a NASA report written about the technique. It was a practical method. I wouldn’t like to have to really do it in a real Dyna-Soar!’’

During its development, the Air Force also hoped to conduct synergistic exercises in which the spacecraft could dip into the upper atmosphere, employ its aerodynamic manoeuverability to change its inclination relative to the equator and refire the trans-stage to boost itself back into orbit. This tricky task was provisionally pencilled-in for the fifth manned test, sometime in the spring of 1967, after which pilots would have begun evaluating its precision-landing capabilities. In the event of trans-stage problems, a solid-fuelled abort motor, derived from the Minuteman missile, was attached to Dyna-Soar and would have separated the pair, performed an emergency retrofire and initiated re-entry. On the other hand, assuming a successful mission had been completed, the trans-stage would have been jettisoned over the Indian Ocean and the spacecraft would commence its long glide through the atmosphere to touch down at Edwards. Later missions, intended to complete two or even three Earth orbits, were expected to fly at higher altitudes of around 180 km. During re-entry, the pilots would test Dyna-Soar’s controllability at various pitch angles during a range of hypersonic and thermal flight regimes.

It was not, however, completely controllable by its pilot throughout the entire speed range and a fly-by-wire augmentation system was provided to run in four automatic modes. A side-arm controller offered him the ability to perform pitch and roll inputs and, through conventional pedals, to execute yaw manoeuvres; the Titan III-C would even have been able to be flown manually during part of its initial boost in orbit! Throughout re-entry, the guidance computer – capable of storing up to ten airfield locations – would have provided continuous updates on Dyna-Soar’s display to advise on issues such as angle-of-attack, banking angles and structural limitations.

Physically, the spacecraft was based on a Rene 41 steel truss, which compensated for thermal expansion within the heated airframe during re-entry. Dyna-Soar was roughly divided into four parts: a pilot’s cockpit, pressurised central section and two unpressurised equipment bays. Each internal compartment was encased in a ‘water wall’ to offer passive cooling during re-entry, allowing their pressure shells to be constructed from conventional aluminium. Additional cooling within each compartment brought temperatures down still further to around 46°C.

In order to withstand the fiery plunge into the atmosphere, Dyna-Soar’s belly and wing leading edges were coated with molybdenum and its nosecap tipped with zirconium. Theoretical predictions expected the wing edges to reach temperatures of 1,550°C, the nosecap around 2,000°C and the belly some 1,340°C during the most extreme re-entry profiles. During all flight phases, the pilot had clear views through two side windows, but the three-piece forward windshield was covered during ascent, orbital operations and most of re-entry. Interestingly, the cover – which guarded against thermal extremes – was not scheduled to be blown off until Dyna-Soar reached a speed of Mach 6, just in time for landing. Tests conducted by Neil Armstrong in the modified Stingray fighter, however, showed that, in the dire eventuality that the cover failed to jettison properly, landings could be safely performed using only the two side windows for visibility. Clearly, this was far from ideal and stands testament to the skills of the men chosen to fly Dyna-Soar: Wood, Armstrong, William ‘Pete’ Knight, Milt Thompson, Al Crews, Hank Gordon and Russ Rogers.

The cockpit in which the pilot would have sat provided all the instrumentation and life-support gear to fly the vehicle, together with an ejection seat which could only be used at subsonic speeds. Behind the cockpit, the central section – pressurised with 100 per cent nitrogen – would have carried a 450 kg instrumentation package, fitted with data recorders for more than 750 temperature, pressure, loads, systems performance, pilot biometrics and heat flux sensors. Finally, at the rear of Dyna – Soar were the equipment bays, containing liquid hydrogen and nitrogen supplies, hydrogen peroxide tanks and power system controls.

The leading contenders for building the spacecraft in the late Fifties were Bell and Boeing, both of which offered the capability to cover the entire requirement range from low-Mach speeds to orbital velocity using a single vehicle. Ultimately, despite Bell’s expertise in designing winged spacecraft of this type, Boeing was chosen as Dyna-Soar’s prime contractor in June 1959. Original plans called for three ‘waves’ of operations: a series of suborbital flight tests, followed by orbital and eventually operational weapons-delivery missions. By the autumn of 1962, critical design reviews of Dyna-Soar’s subsystems had been completed and significant break­throughs achieved in high-temperature materials and fabrication of components for the ‘real’ airframe. Publicly, it seemed worth the wait. When a mockup of the spacecraft was displayed at Las Vegas in September of that year, it quickly grabbed the imagination of America. Writing in Reader’s Digest after the event, John Hubbel

described it as looking “like a cross between a porpoise and a manta ray” and enthused that Dyna-Soar was one of the most important aviation triumphs since the Wright Brothers’ first flight.

Many others agreed with him. The Mercury capsules were blunt and uninspiring in comparison to this sleek, futuristic spaceplane. Despite the public adoration of Dyna-Soar, however, the project was in serious trouble and barely months away from cancellation. Robert McNamara had already expressed serious concerns that it lacked direction or specific purpose – the Department of Defense regarded it as a hypersonic research vehicle, the Air Force as a strategic bomber – and very little attention had been paid to precisely what missions it would undertake. McNamara made his opinions clear during a series of reviews of the project during the course of 1963, before ultimately cancelling it at year’s end in favour of a military space station called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. Ultimately that, too, wasted millions of dollars and never bore fruit.

More than four decades later, Dyna-Soar is recognised as an ambitious, far­sighted endeavour, literally at the cutting-edge of the technology of its day. Its legacy remains visible in many elements of the Shuttle’s design and capabilities – from the concept of the ‘rocket-glider’ to the payload bay, from landing on pre-determined runways to its reusability – and its extensive wind-tunnel testing provided valuable engineering data for later projects. In the words of a recent NASA study of the X – planes, of which Dyna-Soar was one, ‘‘very few vehicles have contributed more to the science of high-speed flight – especially vehicles that were never built!’’

Amidst such euphoria, Conrad’s actual docking with Agena-XI at 11:16 am seemed anticlimatic, although both astronauts were able to practice the docking-and – undocking exercise which had eluded John Young two months earlier. Pulling loose from the target, then redocking, said Conrad, was much easier in space than on the ground and the astronauts managed it in daylight and darkness. It also gave Dick Gordon the distinction of becoming the first astronaut not in a command position to perform a docking manoeuvre.

This was followed by an ignition of the Agena’s main engine to boost their orbital altitude to the highest yet achieved by humans. Facing 90 degrees away from the flight path, Conrad fired the engine to add 33 m/sec to their velocity, as a test-run, and confirmed to Young that this was ‘‘the biggest thrill we’ve had all day’’. It was but the prelude for one of their main tasks on 14 September: increasing the high point of their orbit to no less than 1,370 km. For now, however, the astronauts rested, powering down Gemini XI, tucking into their first meal and bedding down for their first night’s sleep in space.

Despite its audacious nature, their only problem was a pair of dirty windows. This had, in fact, plagued each Gemini to date and even covers which could be jettisoned after launch had been little help. Capcom Al Bean told Gordon to rub half of Conrad’s window with a dry cloth during his spacewalk on 13 September. Four hours before they were scheduled to open Gemini XI’s hatch, they began preparing their suits and equipment; only to realise that, so thorough was their training, they actually needed barely 50 minutes to have all of their gear up and running.

By this point, Gordon could conceivably have gone outside, so Conrad called a halt, which left them sitting idly, fully kitted-out in their equipment. An hour later, they hooked up Gordon’s environmental support system and conducted several oxygen-flow checks, which proved a mistake because it dumped oxygen into the cabin and its excess was then vented into space. They could ill-afford this rate of oxygen loss and Conrad told Gordon to switch back to Gemini XI’s systems. Gordon, by this point uncomfortably warm, was relieved to get back onto the interior environmental control system. After all, the extravehicular system’s heat exchanger had been designed to operate in a vacuum, rather than inside a pressurised cabin.

The main problem, wrote astronaut Buzz Aldrin, actually lay in Conrad and Gordon’s impatience in skipping through the formal, six-page, hundred-plus-step sequence of donning and preparing their equipment. “As a result,’’ Aldrin related in 1989, “they upset cabin pressurisation when they checked out Gordon’s oxygen umbilical and he became overheated long before his EVA began.’’

The men considered asking Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth to let Gordon begin his EVA one orbit early, but due to issues with tracking and lighting, decided to stick with the pre-planned schedule, a decision that they would come to regret. As they prepared to fit Gordon’s sun visor onto his helmet, it proved a stubborn chore; Conrad eventually fastened one side, but could not reach over to snap the other side in place, leaving Gordon hot, bothered and in need of rest. After struggling for a few more minutes, Gordon eventually snapped the right side in place – cracking the sun visor in the process – and was thoroughly winded by the time he cranked open the hatch and stood on his seat at 9:44 am on 13 September, just two minutes past one full day into the mission. . . and precisely on time.

Instantly, Gordon’s exit into space was accompanied by everything else inside the cabin that was not tied down. Standing on his seat, his first activity was to deploy a handrail – a fairly easy task – after which he removed the S-9 nuclear emulsion package from outside the spacecraft and passed it in to Conrad, who stuffed it into his footwell. Next, Gordon tried to install a camera in a bracket to photograph his own movements, but this proved difficult. To resolve it, Conrad let enough of the umbilical slide through his gloved hand to let Gordon float above the camera, thump it with his fist and secure it in place.

The spacewalker’s next task was to attach the 30 m Dacron tether, housed in Agena-XI’s docking collar, onto Gemini XI’s nose. As Gordon pushed himself forward, he missed his goal and drifted in an arcing path above the adaptor and around in a semi-circle, until he reached the back of the spacecraft. However, Conrad had released only a couple of metres of the 9 m umbilical, so he pulled Gordon back to the hatch to start his trek again.

At length, Gordon reached the target and grabbed some handrails to pull himself astride Gemini’s nose – prompting Conrad to yell “Ride ‘em, cowboy!” – but the exercise proved more difficult in space than it had in ground tests. Aboard the zero – G aircraft, Gordon had been able to push himself forward, straddle the Gemini’s re­entry and recovery section and wedge his feet and legs between the docking adaptor and the spacecraft to hold himself in place, thus leaving his hands free to attach the tether and clamp it to the docking bar. However, in the vacuum of space, he found himself constantly fighting against his suit to keep himself from floating away; a situation rendered all the more difficult by the lack of any kind of ‘saddle’ or ‘stirrup’ to help him. All Gordon could do was hold on with one hand and try to operate the tether clamp with the other.

He struggled vigorously for six minutes, finally securing the line and setting the stage, at last, for the tethered flight experiment which would come later in the mission. Yet it was clear to Conrad that Gordon was encountering severe difficulties and the differences between EVA practice in terrestrial conditions and the real thing were profound: the spacewalker, soaked with sweat and eyes stinging, was reduced to groping his way blindly around. He tried to remove a mirror on Gemini XI’s docking adaptor, to help Conrad see him at the back of the spacecraft, but it would not move, and had no chance to wipe the windows either.

As Gordon neared the hatch, Conrad helped as much as he could, discussing procedures for getting to the spacecraft adaptor to store his zip-gun. It was obvious, though, that Gordon was exhausted: when they passed next over the Tananarive tracking station, Conrad told John Young that he had ‘‘brought Dick back in… he got so hot and sweaty, he couldn’t see’’. Unlike Gene Cernan, however, Gordon had no trouble whatsoever getting back inside Gemini XI or closing the hatch. Disappointingly, the spacewalk had lasted just 33 of its intended 107 minutes and one of its key tasks – experiment D-16, a power tool evaluation which had also evaded Dave Scott on Gemini VIII – was lost. Clearly, many of the complexities of EVA still remained to be resolved.

Having said that, Gordon’s exhaustion did not disrupt the remainder of the mission. Flight planners had learned to schedule periods of less-vigorous activity immediately after heavy workloads and Conrad and Gordon’s next task involved leisurely repacking equipment and restoring some semblance of order to the cabin. Additionally, communications with Mission Control dwindled to little more than short transmissions about spacecraft systems and medical checks, which gave them much-needed respite. Conrad test-fired a sluggish thruster, the men ate a meal and photographed the atmospheric airglow.

These moments of relatively quiet time would not last. Ahead of them lay the so – called ‘high ride’ – their Agena-assisted climb to a record-breaking altitude of 1,370 km. To prepare themselves, they donned their suits, closed their visors and secured as much cabin equipment as possible, as if in readiness for re-entry, and focused their attention on the Agena-XI. A problem quickly appeared. As they made a pre-firing

check of the target, it became clear that it was not properly accepting commands; instructions, in fact, had to be transmitted twice before they were acknowledged. Conrad expressed his concerns to Capcom Al Bean, who told them that, in fact, the Agena was responding correctly, but Gemini XI’s displays were at fault. “Heck of a time to have a… glitch like that show up,’’ Conrad grumbled, but was assured that everything remained ‘go’ for the burn.

Forty hours and 30 minutes after Gemini XI’s launch, at 2:12 am on 14 September, Conrad fired the Agena’s engine for 26 seconds, adding a blistering 279.6 m/sec to their speed. Both men were electrified by the burn. ‘‘Whoop-de-doo!’’ Conrad yelled. ‘‘[That’s] the biggest thrill of my life!’’ Like the experience of John Young and Mike Collins two months earlier, Conrad and Gordon were pushed ‘forward’ against their seat harnesses and, gradually, saw the Earth change from a vast expanse of blue and white beneath them. . . into something more planet-like, with a very distinct curvature. ‘‘I’ll tell you,’’ Conrad told the capcom in Carnarvon, Australia, ‘‘it’s go up here and the world’s round. . . you can’t believe it. . . I can see all the way from the end, around the top… about 150 degrees.’’

Beneath them, Conrad told Al Bean, the men beheld the intense and striking blues of the oceans, the sprinkling of clouds and the astonishing clarity of Africa, India and Australia. ‘‘Looking straight down,’’ he radioed, ‘‘you can see just as clearly. There’s no loss of colour and details are extremely good.’’ To cope with the adverse radiation effects of the Van Allen belts, Gemini XI’s high-apogee orbits were timed to take place over Australia, where levels were calculated to be relatively low. Over Carnarvon, indeed, Conrad reported that on-board dosimeters read barely 0.2 rads per hour. ‘‘Sounds like it’s safer up there than a chest X-ray,’’ replied Bean. In fact, Conrad added, Gemini XI experienced less radiation at 1,370 km than Young and Collins had endured in a longer period of time at 830 km.

It was at this altitude – 1,370 km high, the highest yet attained by humanity – that the flight’s imaging experiments, notably the synoptic terrain and weather photography objectives, produced some of their most stunning results. In total, Conrad and Gordon clicked more than 300 exposures and their descriptions of the sheer clarity of the eastern hemisphere filled principal investigators with excitement and anticipation.

Not until Apollo 8’s journey to the Moon in December 1968 would humans travel to higher altitudes and four decades later, Conrad and Gordon retain the record for the highest-ever Earth orbit attained by humans. ‘‘As the coupled craft soar toward their record apogee,’’ Time magazine told its readers a week after Gemini XI’s splashdown, following NASA’s release of the pictures, ‘‘the curvature of the Earth’s horizon becomes more pronounced and the Earth assumes an unmistakably globelike shape. Though the pictures are sharp and show geological features plainly, the Earth seems devoid of life; it offers no visible evidence of its teeming population, its great cities, its bridges or its dams.’’

Two orbits later, on their 26th revolution, as Gemini XI passed over the United States, Conrad again fired the Agena’s engine for 23 seconds to lower their apogee to 304 km and reduce their speed by 280 m/sec. After a bite to eat, at 8:49 am, Gordon opened his hatch, high above Madagascar, for his second EVA. This time, he stood

Dick Gordon, photographed by Pete Conrad shortly before opening Gemini XI’s hatch to throw out unwanted equipment.

on the ‘floor’ of Gemini Xf, poked his helmeted head outside and watched the sunset. Secured by a short tether, he could at least use both hands to mount cameras easily in their brackets and remained ‘outside’ for no less than two full hours. ‘‘Most enjoyable’’ was his summary of the stand-up EVA and, indeed, flight surgeons commented that from the biosensor data, it was uneventful.

Whilst outside, Gordon experienced two nighttime passes, photographing several star fields with the S-13 ultraviolet camera and his view was so unimpaired that he was able to coach Conrad about which way to direct Gemini Xf. Although the Agena’s stabilisation proved somewhat erratic, the linked vehicles remained sufficiently stable to yield excellent results in about a third of Gordon’s photographs. fndeed, as the spacecraft passed over the United States, the skies were so clear that both men were able to marvel at the view of Houston. Drifting across Florida, then out over the Atlantic, Gordon suddenly broke the silence to tell Conrad that he had just fallen asleep outside. He was not the only one: Conrad, too, had dozed off inside the spacecraft.

‘‘That’s a first,’’ radioed John Young. ‘‘First time sleeping in a vacuum.’’

Returning inside after two hours and eight minutes, Gordon’s exhaustion was not, like that of Cernan, caused by over-exertion and battling against his rigid suit, but instead by sheer concentration on his tasks.

Their next step was the tethered vehicle exercise, which could be attempted by two different means. One of these assumed the position of a ‘pole’, always pointing towards Earth’s centre – a so-called ‘gravity gradient’ attitude – in which Conrad and Gordon would have backed their spacecraft out of the Agena’s docking cone slowly until the 30 m tether became taut. ff properly positioned, a slight thrust of just 3 cm/sec would have kept the tether taut and the joined ‘pole’ would have drifted serenely around the globe, each spacecraft maintaining the same relative position and attitude.

Should this have been unsuccessful, the men were tasked with trying a ‘spin-up’, or ‘rotating’, mode, a technique studied by McDonnell engineers. fn this case, after physical undocking, Conrad would fire Gemini Xf’s thrusters to induce a rotation of one degree per second and as the tethered pair circled Earth, their mutual centre-of – gravity would lie at a specific point on the tether, around which they would do a slow, continuous cartwheel. Centrifugal force would, it was theorised, keep the tether taut and the two spacecraft apart, with the tether itself providing centripetal force to keep them both in equilibrium.

Over Hawaii, Conrad and Gordon separated from the Agena and began the cautious attempt to start the gravity gradient demonstration. There was enough initial tension in the tether to upset the target and cause the Gemini to move to the ‘right’ – towards the Agena’s docking adaptor – and Conrad quickly adjusted his motion. Then, as he backed away, the tether stuck, probably in the stowage container, when just 15m had been released. Conrad pulsed the OAMS thrusters to free the tether, but it quickly became hung up on a patch of Velcro and he was forced to shift Gemini Xf out of vertical alignment to peel the tether off the Velcro pad. This disturbed the Agena again and there still remained about 3 m of tether to be pulled out.

On the ground, engineers began to worry. The Agena should have taken around seven minutes to stabilise itself; when it took longer, they began to suspect that something was wrong with its attitude-control system and opted to abandon the gravity gradient attempt and adopt the ‘spin-up’ mode instead. However, when Conrad tried to initiate the rotation, another problem arose when he could not get the tether taut; it seemed to rotate counter-clockwise. ‘‘This tether’s doing something I never thought it would do,’’ he told John Young. ‘‘It’s like the Agena and I have a skip rope between us and it’s rotating and making a big loop… Man, have we got a weird phenomenon going on here!’’

Although the spinning line was curved, it also had tension, and for several minutes Conrad and Gordon jockeyed Gemini XI’s thrusters to straighten the arc. Eventually, the tether straightened and became taut and Conrad rolled the spacecraft and fired the thrusters to begin the slow cartwheeling motion. At first, it seemed that he had ‘stretched’ the tether, which had a big loop in it, but steadily, as both astronauts gritted their teeth, centrifugal force took over and it smoothed out. A 38- degree-per-minute rotation rate was obtained and remained steady throughout a nightside orbital pass.

Moving into dawn, they were asked by the Hawaii capcom to accelerate their spin-up rate and, with some reluctance, Conrad agreed. Suddenly, Gordon shouted ‘‘Oh, look at the slack! It’s going to jerk this thing to heck!’’ When the added acceleration started, the tether tightened, then relaxed, causing a ‘slingshot’ effect which seesawed both astronauts up to 60 degrees in pitch. In response, Conrad steadied the spacecraft and, to his surprise, the Agena stabilised itself. Their rotation rate checked out at 55 degrees per minute and they were able to test for a tiny amount of artificial gravity: when they placed a camera against Gemini XI’s instrument panel and let go, it moved in a straight line to the rear of the cockpit and parallel to the direction of the tether. Neither of the astronauts, however, felt any physiological effect of gravity. After three hours of docked operations, they jettisoned Gemini XI’s docking bar and pulled away.

Despite understandable disappointment that the gravity gradient technique could not be fully demonstrated, the spin-up mode at least proved that station-keeping could be done economically. After undocking, Conrad originally intended to decrease his spacecraft’s speed, allowing him to pull ahead of the Agena, but was advised instead to prepare for a ‘coincident-orbit’ rendezvous, whereby he would follow the target by 28 km in its exact orbital path. This would demonstrate their ability to station-keep at very long range with little fuel usage.

As a result of the plan change, Gemini XI’s separation manoeuvre was adjusted; instead of a retrograde firing, Conrad and Gordon ‘added’ speed and height to their orbit, such that Agena-XI passed ‘beneath’ and in front of them. Next, they fired their OAMS to place themselves in the same (coincident) orbit as the Agena, trailing it. Three-quarters of a revolution around Earth, Conrad decreased his ‘forward’ speed and, as expected, Gemini XI dropped into the Agena’s orbital lane, 30 km behind it, with no relative velocity between the pair.

At the same time, the men set to work on another of their scientific tasks: the night-image intensification experiment (D-15), which sought to evaluate the usefulness of equipment which scanned ground-based objects onto the instrument panel. Conrad aimed Gemini XI at specific targets, including towns and cities, cloud formations, lightning flashes, horizons and stars, airglow, coastlines and peninsulas, while Gordon described his view on the monitor into a tape recorder. Unfortunately, Conrad’s dirty window prevented him from seeing much and, indeed, the glow from the monitor meant that he never became adequately dark-adapted. Nonetheless, the men returned with astonishing recollections, including the lights of Calcutta, whose shape almost exactly paralleled official maps of the city.

Turning their attention back to the Agena, they asked ground controllers on the Rose Knot Victor tracking ship how far they were from the target and were advised that their distance remained 30 km, closing very slowly. A second rendezvous, beginning at 3:09 am on 15 September, was near-perfect: Conrad tilted Gemini XI’s nose 53 degrees above level flight and fired the forward thrusters. This placed them in a lower orbit than the Agena, ready to catch up with it, and they took some time to tend to their experiments. An hour later, Conrad fired the aft thrusters to raise his spacecraft’s orbit, then began to brake Gemini XI until he finally reported that he was on-station and steady with the target once more. Twelve minutes later, they executed a separation burn from the Agena for the final time. By this stage, the success had been so great that they could afford to be jocular; Conrad even asking Flight Director Glynn Lunney to send up a tanker to refuel them for more rendezvous.

The ambitious mission came to a close with a fully-automatic re-entry; unlike previous returns, in which the command pilots had flown their spacecraft down from 120 km using the Gemini’s offset centre-of-gravity to generate lift for changes in direction, Conrad would not use his hand controller in conjunction with computer directions. Gemini XI would follow computer commands automatically, a technique derisively nicknamed ‘chimp mode’ by the astronauts. Seventy hours and 41 minutes after launch, at 8:24 am on 15 September, partway through their 44th orbit, the retrorockets fired. Conrad disengaged his hand controller and put the system onto autopilot. This performed admirably and Gemini XI splashed down safely, within 4.6 km of the helicopter carrier Guam, at 8:59 am.

Half an hour after hitting the Atlantic, Conrad and Gordon were aboard the Guam, almost exactly three days since leaving Cape Kennedy. Rendezvous, docking and their record-breaking altitude boost had been, all three, successfully achieved; yet EVA issues remained. Buzz Aldrin, in training to conduct his own excursion on Gemini XII in November, became one of the first astronauts to work underwater in ‘neutral buoyancy’ to prepare himself for working in space. His was supposed to be one of the most complex to date, completing what Gene Cernan had been unable to do in June: flying the Air Force’s AMU backpack. Ironically, had the AMU flown on Gemini XII, Aldrin would not, and almost certainly he would not have gone on to become the second man on the Moon.

Since July 1969, Mike Collins has achieved fame as ‘the other one’ on the first lunar landing crew. A year before making that momentous flight, he might have been aboard Frank Borman’s Apollo 9 mission, destined to perform a high-Earth-orbit test of the combined command and service module, complete with the lunar module. That mission changed significantly by the time it finally flew, renamed ‘Apollo 8’, in December 1968. For Collins, though, the most significant change was that he had gone from being the mission’s senior pilot. . . to sitting on the sidelines in Mission Control.

The original line-up for the Apollo lunar effort envisaged a seven-step process, labelled ‘A’ through to ‘G’. First would come unmanned test flights (‘A’) of the command and service module, already achieved by Apollo 4 in November 1967 and Apollo 6 in April 1968. Next, the ‘B’ mission, completed by Apollo 5, would conduct an unmanned test of the lunar module. A manned ‘C’ flight, involving the command and service modules in Earth orbit, was originally assigned to Gus Grissom, but completed by Wally Schirra’s Apollo 7 crew. Final strides towards the Moon focused on four increasingly more complex missions: ‘D’ (a manned demonstration of the entire Apollo system in Earth orbit), ‘E’ (repeating D, albeit in a high elliptical orbit with an apogee of 6,400 km), ‘F’ (a full dress-rehearsal in orbit around the Moon) and ‘G’ (the landing itself).

During the course of 1966, crews were assembled to support the first of these flights. When Wally Schirra removed himself from the original Apollo 2 crew and scuppered the ‘duplicate’ mission, a ‘new’ Apollo 2, destined to complete the D mission, was given to Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott and Rusty Schweickart for the manned lunar module flight in Earth orbit. Years later, Deke Slayton would note that McDivitt had been intimately involved with the lunar module’s development for some considerable time and the rendezvous commitment of the mission necessitated a veteran command module pilot, Dave Scott. The command and service module and lunar module were to be launched on a pair of Saturn 1Bs. The E crew, targeted to fly the Saturn V for the first time on Apollo 3, was named as Frank Borman, Mike Collins and Bill Anders.

Numbering changed in the wake of the Apollo 1 fire, of course, but the crews remained more or less intact. In the months preceding Apollo 7, the McDivitt and Borman crews seemed on track to fly Apollos 8 and 9, which would respectively conduct the lunar module test flight and the high-orbit mission in late 1968 or early 1969. Since Borman’s crew would be the third flight of the Saturn V, they were known internally as ‘Apollo-Saturn 503’ (AS-503). Not only would it be the first manned launch of the behemoth rocket, but also, wrote Collins, the S-IVB ‘‘would be reignited, just as if it were a lunar mission… However, ours would be shut down early, causing us to stay in Earth orbit’’ with a 6,400 km apogee. ‘‘This little detail created all sorts of planning problems,’’ Collins continued, ‘‘because one could only escape from this lopsided orbit at certain prescribed intervals and if one had troubles and was forced to return to Earth prematurely, it was entirely possible to end up landing in Red China.’’

As 1967 ended with the triumphant first flight of the Saturn V, an increased wave of optimism spread through NASA that the lunar landing could be accomplished, to such an extent that by August of the following year – before Apollo 7 had even flown – some managers were talking of expediting Borman’s mission from high Earth orbit to a lunar distance. An already record-breaking apogee of six and a half thousand kilometres would be multiplied to almost three hundred and seventy thousand. Then, abruptly, in July 1968, Mike Collins was removed from the mission. One day, during a game of handball, he became aware that his legs did not seem to be functioning as they should, a phenomenon which progressively worsened: as he walked down stairs, his knees would buckle and he would feel peculiar tingling and numbness.

Eventually, and with a typical pilot’s reluctance, Collins sought the flight surgeon’s advice and was referred to a Houston neurologist. The diagnosis was that a bony growth between his fifth and sixth cervical vertibrae was pushing against his spinal column and relief of the pressure demanded surgery. A few days later, at the Air Force’s Wilford Hall Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, Collins underwent an ‘anterior cervical fusion’ procedure, whereby the offending spur and some adjoining bone was removed and the two vertibrae fused together with a small dowel of bone from the astronaut’s hip. Several months of convalescence followed, during which time Collins’ backup, Jim Lovell, was assigned to his seat on AS-503 … and something else happened. ‘Apollo 9’ would not be known as Apollo 9 anymore, but as ‘Apollo 8’ and, further, its destination had indeed changed: it would not just fly a basic circumlunar jaunt, but would actually go into orbit around the Moon.

A plan had been under consideration by George Low and Chris Kraft since April 1968 as a means of cutting out one of the seven steps and achieving a landing much sooner. They wanted to change the E mission into something called ‘E-prime’, moving from high Earth orbit to the vicinity of the Moon, but this quickly became untenable when it materialised that the lunar module would not be ready in time.

When it became evident that the first lunar module would not be available until early 1969, George Low came up with a radical idea: in place of the E mission would be a flight known as ‘C-prime’, which aimed to send a command and service module, without the lunar module, around the Moon in December 1968. Low knew from Rocco Petrone, director of launch operations at Cape Kennedy, that the lunar module would not be ready for December, but at a meeting in Bob Gilruth’s office on 9 August it was felt that the navigation and trajectory teams, together with the astronauts and their training staff, could be ready for a Moon shot. The additional risk of actually entering lunar orbit would be beneficial in that it would provide empirical data on orbital mechanics and the formulation of better gravitational models.

Since Jim Webb and George Mueller were at a conference in Vienna at the time, it was left to Deputy Administrator Tom Paine, still sceptical after the Apollo 6 pogo problems and uncertain as to the reliability of the SPS engine, to conditionally approve it. Mueller, with some reluctance, also agreed, but Webb vehemently opposed the idea. He had been particularly lambasted after the Apollo 1 fire and did not want to be hauled over the coals if the Moon shot failed, particularly as the spacecraft had not even been tested with a human crew. On the other hand, of course, he intended to resign from NASA and was finally won over, with reservations, on 16 August. A few weeks later, Webb visited Lyndon Johnson in Washington to announce his resignation. With Webb gone, the prospects for C – prime brightened.

The plan was officially set in motion by NASA on 19 August by Sam Phillips, although some managers remained nervous about making such a bold move before Wally Schirra’s shakedown flight of the command and service module. Officially, until that mission had flown successfully, the ‘new’ Apollo 8 would represent “an expansion of Apollo 7’’, but that ‘‘the exact content… had not been decided’’. The content of the mission may not have been decided, but the crew certainly had been. On 10 August, Deke Slayton told Jim McDivitt that the flight order was being switched: that his D mission with the lunar module would now become Apollo 9, preceded by Borman’s C – prime expedition around the Moon. ‘‘Over the years,’’ McDivitt recounted in Slayton’s autobiography, ‘‘this story has grown to the point where people think I was offered the flight around the Moon, but turned it down. Not quite. I believe that if I’d thrown myself on the floor and begged to fly the C-prime mission, Deke would have let us have it. But it was never really offered.’’ Offered or not, McDivitt acquiesced, he, Scott and Schweickart had been training for so long on the lunar module that they were the best-prepared and wanted to fly its maiden mission.

Privately, Frank Borman was pleased with his lot when he received command of C-prime. McDivitt’s D mission ‘‘was a test-piloting bonanza,’’ wrote Andrew Chaikin, ‘‘and Borman would have gladly traded places.’’ Borman was at North American’s Downey plant, working on tests of Spacecraft 104 – the command module for the E mission – when he was summoned to take a call from Deke Slayton. Shortly afterwards, he was back in Houston, in Slayton’s office, hearing about the C-prime plan, together with disturbing CIA reports that the Soviets might be only weeks away from staging their own manned circumlunar flight. When Slayton asked Borman if he would command Apollo 8 to the Moon, it was essentially a question with only one answer.

Also pleased with the decision was Jim Lovell, Borman’s senior pilot, who had been drafted in only weeks earlier to replace Mike Collins. The pair had, of course, already flown together on Gemini VII and were a good match. Lovell had been planning to take his family – his wife Marilyn and their three children – to Acapulco for Christmas 1968, but was now forced to tell her instead that his yuletide destination had a somewhat different, more exotic and far more extraterrestrial flavour. One evening, flying cross-country with Borman in a T-38 jet, he had sketched a design for Apollo 8’s crew patch onto his kneeboard: a figure-eight emblem, with Earth in one circle and the Moon in the other. With Borman in command, it would be Lovell’s job as senior pilot to oversee Apollo 8’s navigation system, using the command module’s sextant to make star sightings, verify their trajectory and track lunar landmarks. Lovell would be Apollo’s final senior pilot. The next mission, Apollo 9, would feature a lunar module in addition to its command and service modules and the moniker of ‘senior pilot’ would be effectively superseded by that of ‘command module pilot’ (CMP). During subsequent Moon

landing missions, the CMP would fly solo in lunar orbit, requiring them to have previous spaceflight experience. The ‘pilot’ position, in turn, would be replaced by that of ‘lunar module pilot’ (LMP), the man who would accompany the commander down to the Moon’s surface.

One astronaut who was unhappy about the Apollo 9/8 change, though, was Dave Scott. As command module pilot of the D mission, he had nursed Spacecraft 103 — ‘his’ original ship — through testing and preparation at North American and was now being swapped for another vehicle, Spacecraft 104. On the opposite side of the coin, Bill Anders, on Borman’s crew, was also unhappy. Since the beginning of 1968, he had been immersed in lunar module training and would tell Andrew Chaikin years later that he felt he had an 80 per cent chance of a seat on a landing crew. Now, with the change to their flight, the elimination of the E mission and the creation of C – prime, without a lunar module, Anders knew that he had gained the first circumlunar mission, at the expense of probably losing the chance to someday walk on the Moon.

A year before Robert McNamara finally axed the Dyna-Soar, Neil Alden Armstrong’s test-piloting career took a different turn. . . one that would someday guide him to the lunar surface. Armstrong’s life was one of movement. Born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, of Scots-Irish and German descent, on 5 August 1930, his father was a government worker and the family moved around the state for many years: from Warren to Jefferson to Moulton to St Mary’s, finally settling permanently in Wapakoneta in 1944. By this time, Armstrong was an active member of his local Boy Scout group and his mind was filled with dreams of flying. ‘‘I began to focus on aviation probably at age eight or nine,’’ he told NASA’s oral history project in 2001, ‘‘and [was] inspired by what I’d read and seen. My intention was to be an aircraft designer. I later went into piloting because I thought a good designer ought to know the operational aspects of an airplane.’’

When Armstrong enrolled at Purdue University in 1947 to begin an aeronautical engineering degree, he became only the second member of the family to undergo higher study and famously had learned to fly before he could drive. (Years later, he recalled first flying solo aged just 16. Alas, his early logbook entries were lost in a fire at his Houston home in 1964.) Under the provisions of the Holloway Plan, Armstrong committed himself to four years of paid education in return for three years of naval service and a final two years at university. He was summoned to active military duty in January 1949, reporting to Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida for flight training. Over the next 18 months, Armstrong qualified to land aboard the aircraft carriers Cabot and Wright. A few days after his 20th birthday, he was officially classified as a fully-fledged naval aviator.

His initial assignments were to Naval Air Station San Diego, then to Fighter Squadron 51, during which time he made his first flight in an F-9F Panther – “a very solid airplane” – and later landed his first jet on an aircraft carrier. By late summer in 1951, Armstrong had been detailed to the Korean theatre and would fly 78 missions in total. His first taste of action came only days after arrival, whilst serving as an escort for a photographic reconnaissance aircraft over Songjin. Shortly thereafter, whilst making a low-altitude bombing run, his Panther encountered heavy gunfire and snagged an anti-aircraft cable. “If you’re going fast,” he said later, “a cable will make a very good knife.’’ Armstrong somehow managed to nurse his crippled jet back over friendly territory, but the damage was of such severity (a sheared-off wing and a lost aileron) that he could not make a safe landing and had to eject. Instead of a water rescue, high winds forced his ejection seat over land, close to Pohang Airport, and he was picked up by a jeep driven by an old flight school roommate, Goodell Warren.

By the time Armstrong left naval service in August 1952, he had been awarded the Air Medal, a Gold Star and the Korean Service Medal and Engagement Star. For the next eight years, however, he remained a junior lieutenant in the Naval Reserve. After Korea and his departure from the regular Navy, Armstrong completed his degree at Purdue in 1955, gaining coveted admission to the Phi Delta Theta and Kappa Kappa Psi fraternities and meeting his future wife, home economics student Janet Shearon. They were married in January 1956 and their union would endure for almost four decades, producing three children, one of whom – a daughter, Karen – tragically died in her infancy.

Armstrong’s aviation career, meanwhile, expanded into experimental piloting when he joined NACA, the forerunner of NASA, and was initially based at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio. Whilst there, he participated in the evaluation of new anti-icing aircraft systems and high-Mach – number heat-transfer measurements, before moving to the High Speed Flight Station at Edwards Air Force Base in California to fly chase on drops of experimental aircraft. There, aboard the F-100 Super Sabre, he flew supersonically for the first time. On one occasion, flying with Stan Butchart in a B-29 Stratofortress, Armstrong was directed to airdrop a Douglas-built Skyrocket supersonic research vehicle. Upon reaching altitude, however, one of the B-29’s four engines shut down and its propellor began windmilling in the airstream. Immediately after airdropping the Skyrocket, the propellor disintegrated, its debris effectively disabling two more engines. Butchart and Armstrong were forced to land the behemoth B-29 using the sole remaining engine.

His first flight in a rocket-propelled aircraft came in August 1957 aboard the Bell X-1B, reaching 18.3 km, and three years later he completed the first of seven missions aboard North American’s famous X-15, to the very edge of space. On one of these flights, in April 1962, just a few months before joining NASA’s astronaut corps, he reached an altitude of 63 km. However, during descent, he held up the aircraft’s nose for too long and the X-15 literally ‘bounced’ off the atmosphere and overshot the landing site by some 70 km, but he returned and achieved a safe touchdown. Although he was not one of the handful of X-15 pilots who actually reached space, exceeding 80 km altitude, Armstrong’s abilities in the rocket aircraft have been widely praised. The late NASA research flier Milt Thompson called him ‘‘the most technically capable’’ X-15 pilot.

In November I960, by now flying for NASA as a civilian research pilot, Armstrong was chosen for the Dyna-Soar effort, ultimately leaving the project in the summer of 1962 as the selection process for the second group of astronauts got underway. At around the same time, he last flew the X-15, achieving a peak velocity of Mach 5.74. When his name was announced by NASA in September, he became one of only two civilian astronauts. Although Deke Slayton later wrote that nobody pressured him to hire civilians, fellow selectee Jim Lovell felt that Armstrong’s extensive flying history within NACA and NASA rendered him a likely choice to make the final cut. In fact, Armstrong’s application arrived a week after the 1 June 1962 deadline, but, according to Flight Crew Operations assistant director Dick Day, ‘‘he was so far and away the best qualified… [that] we wanted him in’’.

After admission into the New Nine, Armstrong came to be regarded as by far the quietest and most thoughtful. ‘‘When he said something,’’ recalled Frank Borman, ‘‘it was worth listening to.’’ His Apollo 11 crewmates Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin would both characterise his nature as ‘‘reserved’’ and Dave Scott, the man who would fly with him aboard Gemini VIII, described him as ‘‘cool, calm and energised’’, who never operated in a frantic manner, but who could identify and resolve problems quickly, efficiently and smartly. All of these qualities would prove vital on his first spaceflight, when he would come close to losing his life.