CORNED BEEF SANDWICH

Shortly after their arrival in orbit, with a packed five hours ahead of them, things did not appear to be going well for the Gemini 3 crew. Twenty minutes into the mission, as Molly Brown passed out of range of the mid-Atlantic tracking station in the Canary Islands, Young noticed the oxygen pressure gauge suddenly drop. At first, he suspected a malfunction, but his attention was soon drawn to a number of peculiar readings from other instruments, suggesting that he and Grissom may have a power supply problem on their hands. Quickly, Young switched from the primary to the backup electrical convertor, which powered the dials, and the glitch vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. From the moment Young first spotted the problem to its resolution took barely 45 seconds.

The cell-growth study, to be run by Grissom, proved a dismal failure; perhaps, he said, the adrenaline was pumping a little too much and he twisted the handle too hard, broke it and ruined the whole experiment. (Ironically, the scientist on the ground, operating the control sample, also broke his handle!) For his part, Young experienced difficulties with the radiation investigation on his side of the cabin and, although he completed it correctly, the results were inconclusive. Exposed to nearly identical doses of radiation, the in-flight blood samples showed higher levels of damage than their control counterparts on the ground. After the mission, both men would blame differences between the experiment packages they flew with and trained with as the cause of the problem, but admitted that observing sea urchins did not carry the same ‘‘oh, wow’’ factor as manoeuvring their spacecraft and experiencing the wonders of microgravity.

At the end of the first orbit, with Molly Brown flying nose-first, Grissom fired the forward-facing OAMS thrusters for a carefully timed 74 seconds to slow down by about 15 m/sec and almost circularise the orbit. Then, passing over the Indian Ocean in darkness on the second orbit, he yawed 90 degrees to one side and fired first the forward-facing thrusters and then the aft-facing thrusters in an effort to cancel out the 3 m/sec of the previous burn, which he was almost able to do, with the residual marginally increasing the inclination of their orbit with respect to the equator. These two manoeuvres had been made ‘out of plane’ so as not to disturb their circular orbit.

On the third and final orbit, with Molly Brown flying base-first, a 109-second ‘fail-safe’ burn lowered the perigee to 72 km to ensure a successful re-entry in the event of a retrorocket malfunction. No such malfunction materialised, thankfully, and, after running through their checklists, Young fired the pyrotechnics to separate the equipment module from the adaptor and armed the automatic retrofire switch. One by one, the four braking engines ignited, another set of pyrotechnics released the spent retrorocket compartment and Molly Brown plunged, its ablative base forward, into the atmosphere. ft was during this dynamic phase of the mission, at an altitude of 90 km, that another experiment – the communications task – was to begin and Young duly threw the switch on his side of the cabin as the plasma sheath broke the radio link with Mission Control. Unlike the other experiments, this one proved encouraging: at high rates of water flow, investigators later concluded, both UHF and C-band signals from the spacecraft could be received by ground stations. ‘‘We could see the whole retro pack burning up as it came in right behind us,’’ Grissom remembered of the dramatic re-entry.

By monitoring the trajectory during re-entry, the on-board computer could predict the splashdown point and display this to Grissom, who could adjust the ‘lift vector’ by using the thrusters in the nose to roll left or right of the ‘neutral’ position in order to steer towards the target. When this indicated that they were coming in short, his efforts to ‘extend’ made little difference. ft was later concluded that theoretical and wind tunnel predictions of Gemini’s lift capability did not match its actual lift. fn fact, Molly Brown would splashdown 84 km short of the intended point and 110 km from the recovery ship, fntrepid. Nevertheless, the role of an engineering test flight was to determine the vehicle’s performance and this empirical data would be taken into account on future missions.

As the drogue parachute deployed, Molly Brown was oriented with its heat shield down. However, after the main canopy had inflated, Grissom threw a switch to adjust the parachute line to a two-point configuration that would angle the capsule’s nose at a 45-degree angle to the horizontal. Even though both men were strapped in, this transition was so violent that it pitched them into their windows, cracking Young’s helmet faceplate and punching a hole in Grissom’s. Fortunately, splash­down at 2:16:31 pm was relatively smooth, although Grissom could see little through his window, as the still-attached parachute caught the wind and dragged Molly Brown’s nose underwater. Fearing a similar demise as had happened to Liberty Bell 7, Grissom jettisoned the parachute and Gemini 3 bobbed upright. This time, he had not lost his spacecraft. . . but, alas, with the swelling waves, quickly lost his breakfast.

That breakfast had, of course, been augmented somewhat by Young’s crafty corned beef sandwich, one of the few events of the mission still remembered decades later. “I was concentrating on our spacecraft’s performance,” Grissom recalled after the flight, “when suddenly John asked me: ‘You care for a corned beef sandwich, skipper?’ If I could have fallen out of my couch, I would have! Sure enough, he was holding an honest-to-john corned beef sandwich!’’ As Grissom sampled the treat, bits of rye bread began to float around the pristine cabin, forcing him to put it away. His only complaint was that there was no mustard on it. Still, it proved somewhat tastier than Gemini 3’s staple of reconstituted apple sauce, grapefruit juice and chicken bits.

In his autobiography, Deke Slayton admitted that he had given permission for Young to carry the sandwich, but in view of the complaints NASA later received over its ‘frivolous’ astronauts’ antics, he was obliged to render a formal, though mild, reprimand. For Grissom, though, it would be a highlight of the mission. It did not affect Young’s career and on 6 April, barely two weeks later, he and Grissom were assigned to the backup crew for Gemini VI, the rendezvous mission, scheduled to take place in the autumn.

With Intrepid still some distance from them, it is hardly surprising that Grissom refused to open Molly Brown’s hatches until Navy swimmers from a rescue helicopter had affixed a flotation collar to the spacecraft. The splashdown point was in the vicinity of Grand Turk Island in the Atlantic. Although the spacecraft proved lousy as a boat, its performance in orbit had been nothing short of outstanding. ‘‘I do know that if NASA had asked John and me to take Molly Brown back into space the day after splashdown, we would have done it with pleasure,’’ said Grissom. ‘‘She flew like a queen, did our unsinkable Molly, and we were absolutely sure that her sister craft would perform as well.’’ Still, the seasick Grissom was first to leave the capsule and Young kidded him about his failure to adhere to the old saying about captains being last to leave. Without missing a beat, Grissom replied ‘‘I just made you captain as I got out!’’ Indeed, in a little more than a year’s time, Young would captain his own Gemini into orbit.