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Up The Learning Curve

v1.1.1 / chapter 18 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* Through 1966, the US conducted five more Gemini missions. The Gemini flights did not go as easily in 1966 as they had the year before, indeed involving brushes with disaster, but problems were methodically addressed as resolved. In the meantime, the Soviets and the Americans continued to send probes to the Moon.

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[18.1] GEMINI 8 TUMBLES / GEMINI 9: CERNAN'S ORDEAL
[18.2] GEMINI COMPLETED: GEMINI 10 THROUGH GEMINI 12
[18.3] MORE SOVIET LUNAR PROBES / LUNAR ORBITER / SURVEYOR

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[18.1] GEMINI 8 TUMBLES / GEMINI 9: CERNAN'S ORDEAL

* "Gemini 8", a retry attempt to perform an Agena docking, was launched on 16 March 1966. The crew was Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott. The docking was performed successfully -- the first time a spacecraft had docked with another spacecraft, another win for the Americans.

However, the triumph was very short-lived, since the assembled spacecraft began to roll. The astronauts managed to regain stability, but then the roll began again. They separated the two spacecraft, but the Gemini began to roll faster, at a rate of about once a second, and the hand controllers failed. Scott reported: "We have serious problems here. We're tumbling end over end, and we've disengaged from the Agena."

Soon they were spinning at a rate of about once a second. The astronauts were in serious danger: if the spin kept up, they might black out and never recover. They quickly discovered that an attitude-control thruster had become stuck ON, and disabled the main attitude control system. They were able to use the re-entry control system to maneuver, but of course the spacecraft had to be brought down immediately. The Gemini splashed down in an emergency recovery zone, in the Pacific off of Okinawa, after less than 11 hours in orbit. They had to wait about 40 minutes for recovery but were unharmed.

Armstrong was a reserved person who always chose his words carefully. When he was asked about his mental state during the emergency, he thought it over and replied: "I suspect you could categorize it as anxiety." His coolness under stress while the capsule was tumbling impressed ground controllers, but there was some muttered sniping at Armstrong in the astronaut corps. Given the big egos involved, it wasn't any surprise that some felt that they could have handled the emergency better than a civilian test pilot. It was chickenshit, but sometimes the competitiveness in the astronaut corps brought out the worst in people.

* "Gemini 9" was a third attempt to dock with an Agena, and was launched on 3 June 1966. The crew was originally to have been Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, but fate had decided otherwise.

Neil Armstrong and Elliot See were the only civilian test pilots in the astronaut corps at the time. Armstrong had come from the X-15 program and was regarded as one of the best pilots of the corps, while See had come from General Electric, performing engine flight test, and was regarded as one of the weakest. On 28 February, the Gemini 9 prime crew of See and Bassett and the backup crew of Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan were flying in two T-38s to the McDonnell factory in Saint Louis where the Gemini capsules were being built to get some simulator time.

See was in the front seat of one T-38, with Bassett in the back, while Stafford was in the front seat of the second, with Cernan in the back. The weather was lousy in Saint Louis, with low cloud cover, rain, and snow. The two T-38s, flying close together, were buffeted around in the squall, and Stafford decided to abort his approach and perform another go-round. See decided to try to land, banking off and disappearing into the muck, causing Stafford to exclaim: "Goddam! Where the hell's he going?!"

See realized he couldn't make the approach and throttled up to get back up into the sky, but the T-38 clipped the roof of the factory building where the Gemini was being assembled, tearing off the wing and causing the jet to cartwheel into the parking lot in the rear. Both See and Bassett were thrown out of the aircraft and killed immediately. Fortunately they didn't kill anyone else when they hit, though 14 people were injured, none seriously. Stafford and Cernan remained circling around in the murk, not knowing what had happened because everyone was trying to sort the disaster out. There was some confusion on the ground for a while as to which of the two aircraft had crashed in the parking lot, and for a while people thought that it was Stafford and Cernan who had been killed.

It could have been much worse. If See had been a bit lower, he would have slammed directly into the factory building, leaving carnage behind -- and incidentally destroying the Gemini spacecraft being built there, setting the entire program seriously behind schedule.

* The Gemini mission went on, with Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan assigned in See and Bassett's place. An Agena was been launched on 17 May to wait for them in orbit, but there was a booster failure and it didn't reach space. A back-up rendezvous target was launched on 1 June. It wasn't actually a Gemini-Agena, consisting only of the docking system of the GATV without the rocket motor and other flight systems that had been thrown together as a backup system. The "Agena Target Docking Adapter (ATDA)", known for some reason as the "Blob", couldn't be used to perform orbital changes but it could be used for rendezvous practice.

The ATDA appeared to be fine as far as ground controllers could determine, but when the two astronauts approached it on their third orbit, they found out that its clamshell payload shroud hadn't been released. The shroud was flapping open and shut, giving the appearance of an "angry alligator". As it turned out, it was classic Murphy's Law: it was possible to install the straps holding the shroud in place backwards, and so somebody installed them backwards.

Astronaut Ed Aldrin pushed for a spacewalk, with Cernan to simply cut the band loose. A lot of the other astronauts found "Buzz" Aldrin exasperating. He was single-minded and opinionated; he had recently graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing a doctoral thesis on space rendezvous, and would even give astronauts' wives extended lectures on the subject while their eyes glazed over. He became known as "Doctor Rendezvous".

Aldrin pushed the EVA idea to the management and some seemed to be swayed a bit, though it was very dodgy: the ATDA was tumbling, cutting the band might cause it to lash back, and the ATDA also carried unpredictable pyrotechnic devices. Later on, astronauts and cosmonauts would carry out EVA operations that were at least as dodgy without any serious difficulty, but at that time nobody had ever done any real work during an EVA, much less tried to tackle such a complicated situation. It was out of the question then, and given the fact that nobody realized just how deeply ignorant they were about EVA at the time, every bit as out of the question in hindsight.

Gene Kranz even threatened to resign if the EVA was ordered, but he was overreacting, having misjudged the enthusiasm for the idea. Neither Chris Kraft nor Bob Gilruth liked it; in fact, a few days later Gilruth suggested to Deke Slayton that Aldrin be pulled off his mission slot, leading to a long argument. Everyone knew Aldrin was bright, but sometimes he could get so blinkered-and-blindered that he lost his good sense.

With the shroud flapping back and forth there was no way to dock, but the astronauts did practice simulated rendezvous with the otherwise useless Blob. Rendezvous was not trivial: it was hunting a very small object in a very big sky, and the technology available to the Gemini astronauts was so primitive that plotting out the rendezvous maneuvers required considerable effort with pencil, paper, and slide rule. It was an exhausting procedure: after the third and final rendezvous with the ATDA, Stafford had to call down to mission control and say that he and Cernan simply had to get some rest instead of going on down the list to the next task.

This announcement came as something of a shock down on the ground, since it was the first time astronauts had begged off on their scheduled tasks. Cooler heads realized that Stafford wouldn't have suggested a change in plans if it wasn't necessary, and CAPCOM Neil Armstrong, always the coolest by his nature, told the press: "I'm glad to see Tom use exceptionally good judgement."

* After resting up, on 4 June, Cernan was scheduled to make an extended spacewalk of almost three hours. He was supposed to remove an "astronaut maneuvering unit (AMU)", a big pack fitted with a thruster system developed by the Air Force, from the Gemini's adapter section, and test it out. He was wearing a specially modified David Clark G4C suit that had heat shielding over its lower backside, using a stainless steel mesh known as "Chromel-R", to protect it from the AMU's thrusters. Cernan also had an enhanced life-support pack, mostly to support a support a cooling system; life support was still provided by an umbilical from the capsule.

The Soviets had of course said nothing about Leonov's desperate effort to get back in the Voskhod, and Ed White's short stint of floating around in space had looked like a joyride. The reality was that there was nothing trivial about any activity in an almost completely alien environment where anything that an astronaut might do -- including nothing -- could kill him. Cernan had trouble from the start, wrestling with his umbilical as though he were fighting a snake, turning and tumbling, struggling with a spacesuit that strongly resisted his every move, trying to get to the back of the Gemini and avoid the sharp edges around the rear rim. Although he had spent a considerable amount of time in the gym before the flight to condition himself, he still became overheated and exhausted.

Cernan described it later: "Every time I'd push or turn a valve, it would turn my entire body in zero gravity. I had nothing to hold on to. And we take for granted gravity, because we can do that kind of work with ease if something is holding our feet to the ground. Nothing was holding me anywhere."

In hindsight, all that shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. It was absolutely elementary physics at work, but hindsight is convenient, and in the real world doing something entirely new is bound to provide some surprises. Cernan sweated so hard that his face visor fogged up; defog film, like that used by a scuba diver, had been put on the faceplate of Ed White's suit, but on the basis of the Gemini 9 flight schedule it would have dried up before Cernan could make his EVA, and nobody thought it worth the bother to jump through the hoops to have Cernan apply it himself. He would have to stop every now and then to rub his nose on the faceplate to create a peephole.

Cernan called it a "hair-raising" experience. Just before launch, almost as an afterthought, Deke Slayton had come up to Tom Stafford and told him that if Cernan died during the EVA, Stafford had to make sure that he got Cernan's body back to Earth, since a dead astronaut orbiting over people's heads would be a very bad advertisement for NASA. Stafford was appalled that the matter hadn't been brought up before. There was no way he could get Cernan's dead body back in the hatch, no way to close the hatch if he did get the corpse back in the spacecraft, and no way to reenter with the hatch open. All Stafford could say was that he would do what he could, which in reality wasn't much, and if he failed, all he could do was cut Cernan loose and come back down without him. Cernan wasn't part of the conversation, but it was simple cold logic and he understood it perfectly well: "I might still be a satellite out there."

Now this had gone from a wild idea to a very ugly real possibility. Stafford told himself to hell with it and called Mission Control to tell them that as mission commander, he was calling it quits. The AMU test had to be given up -- it would never actually be tested on an EVA -- and although Cernan was supposed to stay "outside" for almost three hours, he returned to the capsule in two. He groped blindly around to get back to the capsule, having to stop periodically to wait for the visor to clear a bit, finally reaching the hatch in a state of exhaustion.

However, he wasn't out of the woods yet; the worst was still to come. Stafford managed to help Cernan get in the capsule and then they cranked down the hatch until it finally closed, leaving Cernan in a tortured position where breathing was very difficult; he croaked to Stafford over their private intercom: "Tom, if we can't pressurize the spacecraft in a hurry and I have to stay this way for the rest of the flight, I'll die!"

Stafford got the cabin pressure back up as fast as he could, which equalized the pressure against Cernan's spacesuit, allowing him to relax and start breathing again. Cernan pulled off his helmet and inhaled the cool cabin air; his face was beet red, and Stafford, fearing that Cernan was about to pass out, sprayed his face with water, though spraying fluids in the capsule was normally forbidden because droplets might short out spacecraft systems. Cernan's hands were so swollen that when he pulled off the suit's gloves, some of his skin came with them. It was so much of a relief that he didn't care.

Gemini 9 came back home on 6 June, landing almost exactly on target. The touchdown was hard and gave the astronauts a very bad moment: when they hit, water seemed to seep into the capsule as if it were sinking, and Cernan felt water pooling up in the legs of his spacesuit, as if it had sprung a leak. Recovery team frogmen quickly managed to put a flotation collar on the capsule, but as it turned out it hadn't been in any danger. The water in the Gemini was from the capsule's own water supply: the rough landing had broken a water line. As far as the water in Cernan's boots went, it was his own sweat from the EVA, puddling up under the influence of gravity.

Nobody had guessed EVA would be so difficult. Reporters asked NASA officials why Cernan had so much trouble when White had found the experience so enjoyable. The difference was, of course, that White had been taking a joyride while Cernan had been trying to get something done, but for the moment everybody was muddled. Cernan knew that the same astronauts who had quietly sniped at Neil Armstrong were likely sniping at him as well: of course, if they had been there, they would've done much better.

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[18.2] GEMINI COMPLETED: GEMINI 10 THROUGH GEMINI 12

* "Gemini 10" was launched on 18 July 1966, the crew consisting of John W. Young and USAF Captain Michael Collins. They were supposed to dock with an Agena that had been launched for the mission, and use its rocket engine to change orbits for a rendezvous with the Agena launched for the nearly-disastrous Gemini 8 mission.

The mission went very well, with Collins performing two EVAs. Collins had been briefed by Cernan and some improvements had been made, for example modifying the hatch to make it easier to close. The first spacewalk went well, but the second, to retrieve a micrometeroid experiment from the older Agena, ended up with Collins tangled up in his umbilical -- it had been extended to 15 meters (50 feet) for this mission, which turned out to be a bad idea -- and becoming overheated. This time, the EVA was cut short without much hesitation; it wasn't good news, but at least Gene Cernan breathed a bit easier, knowing EVA really was difficult. The two astronauts returned to Earth on 21 July.

* "Gemini 11" was launched on 12 September 1966, the crew consisting of Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon. The first goal of the flight was to dock with an Agena on the first orbit, and this was successfully accomplished.

Gordon conducted a spacewalk -- using a 9 meter (30 foot) umbilical this time -- to connect a 30 meter (100 foot long) tether to the Agena to conduct studies in using tethered spacecraft for "gravity gradient" stabilization, in which the difference in gravity at the ends of the tether kept the two spacecraft aligned perpendicular to the Earth below, and in spinning the two to provide artificial gravity. The EVA was another fiasco, and though Gordon successfully attached the tether, he wore himself out doing it. He got so tired that he simply straddled his legs over the Agena and sat there to get some rest, with Conrad calling out: "Ride 'em, cowboy!" Once again, the spacewalk was cut short without hesitation.

On the second day of the flight, the astronauts used the Agena's engine to kick themselves up to an altitude of 1,370 kilometers (850 miles). Watching the Agena firing in front of them was spectacular, as was the vista of the globe stretched out before them at the peak of their extended orbit. They conducted other experiments and returned to Earth on 15 September, this time landing closer to the carrier than any previous mission.

* By this time, everyone was becoming extremely frustrated with EVA. Gene Kranz of Mission Control later summarized what happened: "As engineers, we started saying: Look, we've had three missions where the EVAs didn't go well -- what was wrong? Then we have a science advisory team step in and say: Look, your entire principles of EVA are wrong -- how you train, how you prepare the crew, the kinds of tools and instruments you use." They went back to the drawing board. There was one more flight in the Gemini program, and this time they were going to get EVA right.

"Gemini 12" was launched on 11 November 1966, the crew consisting of Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin. This mission performed a docking with an Agena, and Aldrin was in his element. Now Doctor Rendezvous was putting his learning into practice.

Aldrin performed spacewalks totaling five and a half hours. He had trained for spacewalks floating in a spacesuit in a swimming pool back on Earth. The Gemini had also been modified with an extensive set of handrails and footholds, including a "workstation" on the nose and another in the rear where he could set up shop to work on something, held in place with two snap-on tethers connected to his suit. Even the Agena had been fitted with handrails. The task list had been reduced to the simplest sets of actions to see how well they could be performed: instead of trying to get something done during an EVA, mission planners had stepped back to first principles to determine how an EVA should be done in the first place.

It was plenty of effort, but everything went according to plan: NASA had got over the hump on EVA. Aldrin said it was a "piece of cake". Gene Cernan didn't much care for Aldrin and thought he got a big head over the whole thing, writing later: "In true Buzz fashion, he would openly claim in later years that he had personally solved all the problems of EVA."

Gemini 12 came back to Earth on 15 November, ending the program. Gemini had validated long-duration missions, rendezvous, and spacewalking. There had been some lobbying during the program about going further, using the Gemini for a swingby flight of the Moon, using the Gemini-Agena to boost out of Earth orbit, but von Braun had been against it, calling it a "last resort" in public, and it never came close to happening. That was just as well, since Gemini had been plagued with a string of technical problems, and such a mission clearly would have been risky to the point of suicidal.

To be sure, Gemini had been flown specifically to uncover such difficulties so they could be addressed, but Apollo could not be anywhere near as unreliable if a Moon mission were to have any chance of success. Within weeks, this issue would become all-important.

* One of the footnotes of the Gemini program was the end of Shorty Powers' career as the astronauts' mouthpiece. He had always been a hard drinker, and the drinking had been getting progressively worse. When it was discovered that he had been leaking inside information on the Gemini program to a reporter in return for bottles of whiskey, he was shunted off to a dead-end job where he could do no further harm, at least to anyone but himself. The astronauts weren't too sad to see him go. Powers would die in 1980, effectively having drunk himself to death.

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[18.3] MORE SOVIET LUNAR PROBES / LUNAR ORBITER / SURVEYOR

* Both the Soviets and the Americans were continuing to send robot probes to the Moon, with the USSR taking a lead but the US gradually catching up and moving ahead. The Soviets performed attempts to launch Luna E-6 soft-lander probes using the Molniya booster on 21 March and 20 April 1964, but neither made orbit. One did make orbit after launch on 12 March 1965, but that was as far as it got, with the spacecraft designated "Cosmos 60". Yet another launch on 10 April 1965 didn't make orbit.

A shot on 9 May 1965 seemed to go according to plan, with the spacecraft announced as "Luna 5" as it fell towards the Moon. Unfortunately, it could not stop its fall and it crashed into the Sea of Clouds. A German telescopic observatory claimed to have seen an enormous cloud of dust kicked up by its violent impact into the Lunar surface. "Luna 6" was launched on 8 June. The spacecraft engine failed to shut down after midcourse correction, sending it wildly off course. The probe missed the Moon by almost 160,000 kilometers (100,000 miles).

A different class of probe, "Zond (Probe) 3", was launched on 18 July, and sent back photos of the lunar farside as it went into solar orbit. It was strictly a flyby probe, in fact it was a Venera 3MV planetary flyby spacecraft, the same type as used for the failed Zond 1 Venus shot and Zond 2 Mars shot. It was apparently a test flight, using the Moon as a target to evaluate the spacecraft's cameras and instruments.

Zond 3 was followed by more Luna E-6 soft landers. "Luna 7" was launched on 4 October. Its retrorockets went off too soon and the probe crashed into the Sea of Storms. "Luna 8" was launched on 3 December, but its retrorockets went off too late, with the probe also crashing into the Sea of Storms.

The Soviets were being very persistent, and their persistence finally paid off. "Luna 9" was launched on 31 January 1966 and landed successfully in the Ocean of Storms, relaying panoramic TV shots of the Moonscape around it for three days. Their streak of bad luck had ended, for the moment, and in spite of all their troubles they had again scored a "first" in space against the Americans.

The Soviets attempted to launch their first true lunar orbiter, as opposed to the Luna E-3 swingby probes, on 1 March 1966. It was a "Luna E-6S" spacecraft, based on the same bus as that which carried the Luna E-6 soft lander but with a sophisticated instrument payload of space physics instruments. It was battery operated and had no camera. The spacecraft never made it out of Earth orbit and was assigned the designation of "Cosmos 111".

However, less than a month later, on 31 March 1966 the USSR launched a second E-6S lunar orbiter, which successfully entered Moon orbit on 4 April, to be named "Luna 10". It was the first successful lunar orbiter and returned data for almost two months. Luna 10 was followed by two more successful lunar orbiters, including "Luna 11", launched on 24 August 1966, and "Luna 12", launched on 22 October 1966. These were both "E-6LF" spacecraft, much like the E-6S but equipped with a camera.

The last Soviet Moon probe of 1966 was "Luna 13", launched on 21 December. It was a "Luna E-6M" soft lander, much like the older Luna E-6 system but with an improved and bigger lander that added a seismic sensor, a soil penetration tester, and a radiation detector to the camera. It successfully performed a soft landing and took measurements. That was the end of Moon probe shots for a while; the focus then changed to providing support for the Red manned Moon effort.

* The US was close behind the USSR in sending robot probes to the Moon. With the Ranger missions ended, it was time to move to the next stages of American Lunar exploration: putting an observation platform into orbit around the Moon, and soft-landing a sampling probe on the Moon's surface. Studies for a "Lunar Orbiter" had been underway since 1960, and the NASA Langley center received the green light for the project in early 1963. JPL had been working on the soft-lander, named "Surveyor", through the same timeframe.

Both projects reached the operational stage at roughly the same time. The Lunar Orbiter was a 384 kilogram (847 pound) spacecraft carrying two cameras and some incidental experiments. The cameras took images on film, with a capacity of about 210 frames. The film was then developed on board and scanned for transmission back to Earth. That was the general scheme used by the unsuccessful Samos spy satellites, but it is unclear if NASA had access to any of the development work on the Samos system.

The first Lunar Orbiter was launched on the new Atlas-Agena D on 10 August 1966. The high resolution camera was out of focus, but the medium resolution camera returned an excellent set of images. Four other Lunar Orbiter missions followed to the last launch on 1 August 1967, with each mission proving successful. The first three were put into low-inclination orbits to survey landing sites for the Apollos. The last two were put into polar orbit so they could cover the entire surface, and managed to map about 99% of the Moon.

All the probes were deliberately crash-landed into the Moon to prevent them from being hazards to navigation. NASA headquarters took notice of the competence of the missions, the fact that Langley had met budget, and, not least, that Langley had not shown any inclination to quarrel with the top brass.

* In the meantime, JPL was moving forward on Surveyor, the first American lander probe. The Surveyors weighted about 269 kilograms (593 pounds). They were spindly craft, with three fold-out landing legs around a central bus with instruments; spacecraft power, control, and communications systems; and a solid-fuel retrorocket, surrounded by three liquid-fuel vernier rockets. Twin solar panels were raised above the probe.

The Surveyor was to be the first operational payload carried by an Atlas fitted with the Centaur upper stage, powered by twin RL-10 LOX-LH2 engines. As mentioned earlier, JPL had great hopes for the Centaur, since it would give them much greater payload capability than the Agena, but development had been troublesome. One of the particular problems was that LH2 is much colder than LOX. This meant troublesome thermal interactions between the LOX and LH2 tanks in the stage, with the LOX heating up and vaporizing the LH2, and LH2 freezing the LOX solid.

The first launch test of an Atlas-Centaur was on 8 May 1962, but the booster exploded less than a minute into flight. After considerable backtracking, a successful test flight was performed on 23 November 1963, but problems continued. In 1965, an Atlas-Centaur not only didn't get off the ground, but exploded so violently that it wrecked the launchpad.

On 30 May 1966 an Atlas-Centaur finally performed a flawless mission, throwing Surveyor 1 towards the Moon. The problems with Ranger likely added to the nerves as the spacecraft approached the lunar surface, but the probe soft-landed successfully on the Moon on 2 June. The soft landing confirmed that the lunar soil was capable of supporting a manned Moon landing, since there had been fears, most loudly voiced by astronomer Thomas Gold, that spacecraft landing on the Moon might sink into a sea of dust, laid down by aeons of micrometeorites falling on the lunar surface. The Surveyor probes would provide no evidence to support this idea, but much to the annoyance of NASA Gold would continue to doggedly insist that the lunar surface was covered with pits of "moondust" until events finally proved otherwise beyond any sane argument.

"Surveyor 2" was launched on 20 September, but crashed into the Moon and was destroyed. "Surveyor 3" landed successfully on 19 April 1967. Surveyor 4 also was destroyed in a crash-landing, but at least it was the last failure of a NASA Moon probe. The next three Surveyor missions went perfectly. The last of the probes, "Surveyor 7", touched down on 9 January 1968. All the Surveyors had a TV camera. Surveyors 3 and 7 had a scoop on a robot arm that was used to test the integrity of the Moon's soil. Surveyors 5, 6, and 7 had a simple chemical analysis system to perform studies of lunar material.

* In the end, after an expenditure of over $900 million USD, the American lunar probe program had mixed results. There were questions over the real scientific value of the missions, and the Ranger and Surveyor programs had resulted in endless contention between JPL and NASA headquarters. However, the early failures of the program had led to improvements in processes that would help make the Apollo landings a success and provide a basis for further American robotic planetary exploration.