THIRD TIME LUCKY

Five days before See and Bassett were killed in St Louis, the AMU was delivered to Cape Kennedy for testing. Initial inspections were worrisome: with nitrogen pressurant leaks from its propulsion system and oxygen leaks from its integral life – support unit. However, by mid-March, engineers had rectified these glitches and the rocket armchair was once more on track for Gemini IX’s launch, planned for 17 May 1966. Right from the start, in terms of complexity, its three days aloft would mark a quantum leap even over the ambitious Gemini VIII.

Newly bumped from backup to prime crew, Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan would tackle a flight that even an internal NASA memo had dubbed “really exciting” and which, if successful, would generate “experience one would not ordinarily expect to get in less than three missions”. Key tasks, aside from the lengthy EVA, would be a simulation, using the Agena, of how an Apollo command and service module would rendezvous and dock with the lunar module. Stafford and Cernan would then fire the Agena’s main engine to boost themselves into a higher orbit. After the completion of the Agena rendezvous activities, Cernan would perform his spacewalk.

On 2 March, the Gemini IX spacecraft – which had so narrowly avoided destruction on the factory floor of McDonnell’s Building 101 – was shipped to Cape Kennedy and its Titan II rocket was erected at Pad 19 three weeks later. By the end of the month, the spacecraft had been attached to the tip of the Titan and electrical and mechanical compatibility tests got underway in anticipation of the mid-May launch. Elsewhere at the Cape, the Atlas booster which would be used to loft Stafford and Cernan’s Agena into orbit was installed on Pad 14. By early May, the Agena itself, tailnumbered ‘5004’, had arrived at the launch complex and was mated to the Atlas.

In the small hours of 17 May, Flight Director Gene Kranz arrived at his console to oversee the launches of the Atlas-Agena and, 99 minutes later, of Gemini IX. Meanwhile, in the crew quarters at Cape Kennedy, Stafford and Cernan were awakened, underwent standard medical checks and sat down to breakfast with Deke Slayton and Al Shepard. In his autobiography, Cernan would recount keeping ‘‘a stone face, all business, but butterflies stirred in my stomach’’. He strung a religious medal around his neck, bearing a silver disk with the image of Our Lady of Loreto and the legend ‘Patroness of Aviation, Pray for Me’, then settled into a couch to have his biosensors and space suit fitted.

The heightened sense of anxiety was not helped when Slayton took Stafford aside for a private ‘word’; Cernan would not learn until later what their conversation had been about. It was a conversation that Slayton would have with many a Gemini command pilot whose mission featured an EVA. Cernan’s spacewalk would be an exceptionally dangerous one, Slayton told Stafford, and if something went wrong and he was unable to get back inside Gemini IX, NASA could ill-afford to have a dead astronaut floating in orbit. In such a dire situation, somehow, Stafford would have to bring Cernan’s corpse back to Earth.

In his autobiography, Stafford recalled staring at Slayton in astonishment. ‘‘To bring him back,’’ he wrote, ‘‘the hatch is going to be left partially open because the attachment point for the umbilical is inside the spacecraft near the attitude hand controller.” Such an awkward re-entry would not be survivable. In reality, he told Slayton, when the explosive bolts blew at the base of the Titan, signalling liftoff, it was Stafford, as Gemini IX’s command pilot, who would call the shots and make the difficult decisions if something should go wrong.

Cernan also knew that the only realistic option for Stafford would be to cut him loose, close the hatch and return to Earth alone. He understood the risks equally as well as Stafford and Slayton. ‘‘I knew Tom would be unable to pull me back inside if I couldn’t get myself out of trouble,’’ he wrote. ‘‘He would work like the devil to rescue me, but eventually would have to abandon me. We both knew it.’’

Slayton would have a similar conversation a few weeks later with Gemini X’s command pilot, John Young, and would receive a similar reception. ‘‘There was no way,’’ Young recounted in a 1996 interview, ‘‘if anything happened to somebody going outside a Gemini that you could get them back in.’’ The seat was too narrow and it was impossible for the command pilot to reach over and pull an inflated, rigidised space suit with an immobile person inside back into the right-hand seat with enough overhead clearance to close the hatch. It is more than fortunate, therefore, that such an eventuality never came to pass.

By the time Stafford and Cernan arrived at Pad 19 and were strapped inside their spacecraft, all eyes were on the impending Atlas-Agena launch and a fervent hope pervaded the Cape that there would be no repeat of the Gemini VI debacle. All seemed to be going well and, at precisely 10:12 am, the rocket thundered aloft. Aboard Gemini IX, Stafford and Cernan were exuberant as the final hurdle before their own launch at 11:51 am was cleared… or so it seemed.

One hundred and twenty seconds after liftoff, wrote Cernan, ‘‘one of the two main engines on the Atlas went weird’’. The No. 2 engine wobbled, then inexplicably gimballed into a full-pitchdown position, spinning the entire rocket into an uncontrollable tumble. All attempts by the rocket’s stabilisation system to correct the problem were useless. Ten seconds later, as intended, the engines shut down and the needle-like Agena separated on time, but, Cernan continued, ‘‘it was too late, too low, too fast and all wrong’’. So wrong, in fact, that the 216-degree pitchdown had effectively pointed the Agena back towards Cape Kennedy, with a climbing angle just 13 degrees above horizontal. Worse yet, guidance was lost and the Agena plopped into the Atlantic, 198 km off the Cape, at 10:19 am.

Thirteen million dollars’ worth of hardware was gone, all the result, it later became clear, of a short in a servo control circuit. Atop the Titan on Pad 19,

Stafford’s first reaction, understandably, was “aw, shit”, as the second Atlas-Agena of his astronaut career vanished. He and Cernan quickly inserted the safety pins back into their ejection seats’ safe-and-arm devices and Guenter Wendt’s team began the laborious process of extracting them from the spacecraft. Despite the disappointment, good fortune glimmered on the horizon. Gemini IX would still fly its mission, thanks to a decision made late the previous year.

A rendezvous with Gemini VIII’s Agena was out of the question, since its orbit had not decayed sufficiently to be reachable by Stafford and Cernan. However, late in 1965, following the loss of Gemini VI’s Agena, NASA had ordered General Dynamics to furnish a backup Atlas. In response, McDonnell prepared an alternate rendezvous vehicle, known as the Augmented Target Docking Adaptor, or ATDA. It had to be ready, the agency stipulated, within two weeks of an accident and ongoing Agena engine problems brought it close to being used on Gemini VIII. Early in February 1966, the ATDA arrived at Cape Kennedy and was placed into storage for the very eventuality that NASA now faced with Gemini IX. Within hours of the failure, NASA formally approved the use of the ATDA and its Atlas, tailnumbered ‘5304’, for launch on the first day of June.

The tube-shaped ATDA, nicknamed ‘The Blob’ by the astronauts, looked very much like the Agena from the front and possessed a docking collar covered by a fibreglass cone; the latter was to be jettisoned shortly after arrival in orbit. Unfortunately, the ATDA did not have the Agena’s rear fuel tanks and powerful rocket engine, just two rings of thrusters to help with rendezvous and proximity operations. To ensure that the ATDA’s Atlas did not succumb to a similar failure, the cause of the 17 May mishap had to be pinpointed. Within a week, it was clear that a pinched wire in the autopilot had been responsible for the short circuit, necessitating additional work on the rocket’s electrical connectors.

Following a brief return to Houston for additional simulator training, Stafford and Cernan were back in Florida in good time for the 1 June launch attempt. Nothing would stop them this time: even if the ATDA and its Atlas were lost, they intended to use the final stage of their Titan as a rendezvous target. Shortly after five that morning, they were awakened to black clouds and the knowledge that Hurricane Alma brewed somewhere in the distance. The weather had little impact on the proceedings. At 10:00 am, the Atlas lumbered off Pad 14 and within six minutes had inserted The Blob almost perfectly into a 298 km orbit. ‘Almost’ perfectly, that is, because telemetry data quickly indicated that the cone covering The Blob’s docking collar had only partially opened and had failed to separate.

A brief conference confirmed that this problem was not insurmountable and the newly-renamed Gemini IX-A remained on schedule. Stafford and Cernan had a six – minute ‘window’, between 11:38 and 11:44 am, to launch, after which they would rendezvous with The Blob on their third orbit and dock high above the United States. (Conducting rendezvous progressively ‘earlier’ in a mission was deemed to offer the closest analogue for lunar orbital rendezvous operations.) A glitch in the Gemini’s inertial guidance system halted the proceedings, setting them three minutes behind schedule in an already-tight countdown. Finally, when it could not be rectified in time, the launch was scrubbed.

Another attempt could not be made until at least 3 June, giving technicians sufficient time to refuel the Titan, check the computers and identify and resolve the glitch. Launch on the 3rd would be scheduled for 8:39:50 am, precisely timed as The Blob hurtled directly above the Cape. That morning, the two astronauts again headed for their spacecraft, Stafford in no mood for humour, having already been nicknamed ‘The Mayor’ of Pad 19 because he had spent so much time there over the past eight months. Cernan wondered, indeed, if Stafford was jinxed. ‘‘I straightened him out,’’ Stafford recounted in his autobiography. ‘‘Schirra and Cernan were the jinxes. I was fine!’’

Some of the pad personnel still could not resist, however, hanging a large sign on the door to the gantry elevator which read ‘Tom and Gene: Notice the ‘down’ capability for this elevator has been removed. Let’s have a good flight.’ Stafford and Cernan’s backups, Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin, had even composed and hung their own poetic verse over the Gemini’s hatches. It read: ‘We were kidding before / But not anymore / Get your… uh … selves into space / Or we’ll take your place’. Humour aside, Cernan later wrote, ‘‘it would be a cold day in hell before Buzz Aldrin flew as the pilot of Gemini IX instead of me’’.

The potential for another glitch reared its head in the closing minutes when mission controllers transmitted a final update to the inertial guidance system and it again refused to respond. This time, however, it was decided to override it with another successfully-received trajectory update from 15 minutes earlier. Cernan described the liftoff as ‘‘just… different’’ and nothing at all like he expected it to be. ‘‘I sensed movement,’’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘‘a feeling of slow pulsation and then heard a low, grinding rumble as that big rocket started to lift away from Earth in agonisingly slow motion.’’

That slow-motion start quickly gave way to the increasing sensation of tremendous speed as the Titan headed away from the Cape and thrust Stafford and Cernan, both gritting their teeth, towards orbit. As he saw and felt things never experienced before, Cernan wished he were a poet and could adequately describe what was happening. Eight minutes after launch, hurtling through the high atmosphere under the push of the rocket’s second stage, the astronauts found talking was restricted to grunting as 7.5 G imposed huge pressures on their lungs.

That sensation was soon replaced, when the second stage shut down, by one that Cernan had never known before: the onset of zero gravity. ‘‘A few nuts and bolts left behind by workers oozed out of their hiding places,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Dust particles and a piece of string did a slow dance before my nose. My hands drifted up in the weightlessness and my legs, wrapped in those metal pants, became featherlight.’’ Glancing through his tiny window, Cernan beheld the unmistakable shape of Africa, speckled with white clouds, and a distant glint of ocean. There was little time to gawp. He and Stafford had a date with an alligator.