Chapter 10

The Last Hurdle

On 13 April 1964, the Monday after the flight of Gemini-Titan 1, the men and women of the press gathered in the auditorium at the Manned Spacecraft Center to learn who would be the first to fly the Gemini spacecraft. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, introduced the four astronauts assigned to Gemini 3, the prime and the backup crews. Commander of the first team was Virgil I. Grissom - “Gus.” His crewmate was John W. Young. Backing up the mission were Walter M. Schirra, Jr., and Thomas P. Stafford.¹

The stocky, crew-cut Grissom, an Air Force major,* was an old-timer in NASA’s manned space flight program, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts picked five years earlier. He already had a quarter of an hour of spacecraft flying time as passenger on the suborbital flight of Liberty Bell 7 in July 1961, Project Mercury’s second manned mission, and would therefore be the world’s first two-time space flyer. Young, his crewmate, was a younger man and a newer astronaut; a Navy lieutenant commander, he had been one of the nine pilots selected for the space program in September 1962. Schirra, like Grissom, was one of the Mercury seven. Born in 1923, he became the old man of the astronauts corps when John Glenn resigned early in 1964. In October 1962, Schirra had ridden Sigma 7 (the fifth manned Mercury spacecraft) through six orbits in the penultimate Mercury mission. Stafford, Schirra’s co-pilot in the backup crew, was an Air Force major who became an astronaut at the same time as Young.** ²

Gilruth voiced NASA’s “high hopes of flying by the end of the year,” 1964,³ leading America back into space after an 18-month hiatus. Those hopes foundered in the storms that lashed Cape Kennedy during the summer. When the launch vehicle for Gemini 2, after passing so smoothly through test and checkout, betrayed the mission in December, even Gemini’s unmanned prelude remained unfinished at year’s end. But the opening quarter of 1963 saw the success of Gemini 2 in January and then, scarcely two months later, Grissom and Young in orbit aboard “Molly Brown.” With that, Project Gemini had clearly advanced a long step beyond Mercury and opened a new era in manned space flight.

The Men for Gemini 3

Within a week after they had been publicly assigned to the mission, the Gemini 3 astronauts were busy training for it. All astronauts were in training from the time they joined NASA, but for Grissom and Young, Schirra and Stafford, the focus now shifted to a specific mission. Their first assignment was the Gemini mission simulator at the McDonnell plant in St. Louis. This training complex included a flight simulator that matched the inside of a Gemini spacecraft and provided its riders with almost all the sights, noises, and shakings they should meet in a real flight, from prelaunch to postlanding. Because astronauts varied in size* and missions differed in goals and onboard tasks, no two spacecraft were identical, and the mission simulators had to be altered and updated for each flight. But the simulator in St. Louis had not yet been engineered to an exact replica of Spacecraft 3, so the 36 hours that Grissom and Young spent in it over the next two months, as well as the 34 that Schirra and Stafford flew, were devoted mainly to learning general systems and operations.⁴

On 10 July 1964, McDonnell workmen began taking the simulator apart to ship it to Houston, there to be set up to match Spacecraft 3. The second Gemini mission simulator was already at the Cape, although not yet updated for Gemini 3. That was supposed to have been done by mid-July, but it was not finished until October. Final checkout took the better part of a month, and the Gemini 3 crews could not begin flying simulations in Florida before 9 November.⁵

But no such hangup ever left the astronauts with time on their hands. On 10 and 11 May, all four were in St. Louis to review a mockup of the cockpit. In the months that followed, they kept a close eye on their ship, watching as it passed through its series of tests and inspections in the McDonnell plant. They also joined in the testing itself. During the second phase of systems tests in October and November, Grissom and Young spent more than 14 hours in the cockpit, 9 of them while the spacecraft was undergoing altitude chamber tests. Schirra and Stafford were not far behind, with 8 cockpit hours.⁶

During July and August, the four Gemini 3 pilots (and all their fellows) were in Dallas for a training program on the moving-base abort simulator created by Ling-Temco-Vought, Inc. This device projected the Gemini 3 launch profile in striking detail, complete with such cues as noise, vibration, and a wide range of motions that might be caused by one launch anomaly or another. The trainees also learned how to deal with any number of booster or spacecraft systems malfunctions.⁷

Throughout their training, the prospective spacemen also kept their more mundane flying skills intact. Each managed to average 25 hours a month in the cockpit of an Air Force jet. They also put in more than 200 hours apiece in innumerable briefings, three of them formal affairs that lasted two days each at Houston, St. Louis, and Cape Kennedy, the others an ongoing series of informal systems familiarizations that were part of each training activity. Periodic reviews of mission plans, physical examinations, fittings for flight suits, sessions on experiments to be carried on the spacecraft and on biomedical aspects of the mission, and any number of other operational matters helped fill the hours to overflowing.⁸

In October 1964, the Gemini 3 crews tackled still another aspect of training, practice in getting out of their spacecraft after it landed. The three-part program began with a review of egress procedures in the Gemini mockup at the McDonnell plant, then moved to the flotation tank at Ellington Air Force Base, just up the road from the Manned Spacecraft Center. The tank was a king-size swimming pool, where the crews rehearsed (both with and without space suits) climbing in and out of a boilerplate spacecraft that was either floating or submerged.⁹ Grissom and Young completed the third phase of this training in emergency egress from a floating spacecraft during February 1965. They rode a boat out into the Gulf of Mexico, where a model spacecraft was dumped into the water. Then, fully suited, they went through the postlanding checklist and practiced getting out of the spacecraft and into their one-man life rafts. The crews also took refresher courses in parachute landing that month.¹⁰

During November and December 1964, the four crewmen spent part of their time in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, at the Naval Air Development Center, the site of a man-rated centrifuge run by the Aviation Medical Acceleration Laboratory. The first phase of centrifuge training had taken place in July and August 1963, when Gemini controls and displays had been evaluated and all the astronauts had been spun through acceleration profiles for launch and reentry. For pilots not yet assigned to a mission, the second phase simply provided more of the same. But for the crews of Gemini 3 and Gemini 4,** it was an important part of mission training. They worked in pressure suits, and the others trained in shirtsleeves. Grissom rode the centrifuge for 9½ hours, Young for 11 hours; Schirra and Stafford spent only a little less time in the centrifuge than the prime crew.¹¹

When the mission simulator at Cape Kennedy had been updated to match Spacecraft 3, both crews began working in it off and on for the next four months. During that time, Grissom put in more than 77 hours flying his mission on the ground, rehearsing every phase of his planned flight again and again, not only when everything went right, but also when something went wrong.*** Young put in even more time than Grissom, over 85 hours, in the Cape simulator. Schirra managed to get in 43 hours, Stafford 54.¹² In January 1965, Grissom and his fellow crewmen were back in Dallas for more work on the abort simulator, this time focused on how best to deal with each type of booster or spacecraft malfunction. By the time this training was over, Grissom had run through 225 aborts and Young 154; Schirra and Stafford each totaled only slightly less than Young.¹³

When Spacecraft 3 arrived at complex 19, the crewmen resumed their active role in spacecraft testing. Sandwiching this exercise between trips to Houston for egress and parachute training, Grissom and Young still managed to spend almost 19 hours in the cockpit, beginning with the premate flight test on 14 February and ending with the final simulated flight on 18 March. Schirra and Stafford got in more than 14 hours of cockpit time. Altogether, the prime crew had logged 33 hours in their spacecraft before the final launch countdown began, and the backup crew had spent 22 hours.¹⁴

Nine months of grueling work were ready to pay off. By February 1965, Grissom was sure that “We’re ready to go.” NASA agreed. Rumors already put Gemini’s first manned flight earlier than the officially announced April or May. And NASA Administrator James Webb, speaking at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, hinted that the launch might come in late March.¹⁵ The men were ready, and the machines very nearly so.

The Machines for Gemini 3

McDonnell finished building Spacecraft 3 in December 1963 and moved it from the production floor to the white room in the St. Louis plant. Engineering changes and equipment installation filled the next six months. Despite some NASA worries about tight schedules, the spacecraft was ready to begin the first phase of systems testing by the end of May 1964, directed, like Spacecraft 2, by the Launch Preparations Group from the Cape. The Development Engineering Inspection (DEI), the first of the periodic reviews to make sure that McDonnell was giving NASA just what it wanted, was held on 9 and 10 June. This first review was chiefly a close look at the modules to be tested, to see that they matched specifications and were actually ready to begin testing. The DEI produced its share of changes, but nothing stood in the way of getting on with the tests.* ¹⁶

While Spacecraft 3 was moving through the McDonnell plant, Gemini Program Manager Charles Mathews took a step that showed the program had entered a new phase. During July, he set up a Gemini Configuration Control Board to be, as he later informed McDonnell, the “one official route for all configuration change action to provide continuity and coordination.” Each Monday morning, Mathews met with the heads of the Gemini Offices of Program Control, Spacecraft, Vehicles and Missions, and Test Operations to review all proposed changes and to pass on them - and every change now had to be formally presented and justified. When the board met for the first time,** on 27 July, the development era of Gemini had clearly ended. From then on, the main concerns of the program were production and operations.¹⁷

July also saw McDonnell present NASA with its plan for converting the Gemini contract from fixed fee to incentive fee. This was a direct McDonnell response to a NASA request based on a clause in the contract negotiated in 1963. The idea was to give the company a chance to earn greater profits by cutting costs, meeting schedules, and delivering an outstanding product, but to receive less money if it failed in any of the three areas. With development almost complete, such a plan became feasible. Mathews had appointed a Gemini Incentive Task Group on 2 March 1964, naming as its chairman Kenneth Kleinknecht, his deputy and former Mercury manager.*** ¹⁸ The formal Request for Proposal was ready for McDonnell by 19 May, after a review by NASA Headquarters. Walter Burke, McDonnell Vice President and General Manager for Spacecraft and Missiles, arrived in Houston on 7 July with a group of colleagues to address a large NASA gathering on his company’s ideas.**** ¹⁹

During the spring of 1964, the Air Force Space Systems Division (SSD) had also been working out incentives with its major Gemini contractors, Martin and Aerojet-General for the launch vehicle and Lockheed for the target vehicle. NASA kept close tabs on the progress and drew on SSD experience for the McDonnell proposal. Martin’s contract was converted on 10 June and Aerojet-General’s on 17 June; Lockheed negotiations were completed early in August.²⁰ MSC’s talks with McDonnell lasted through the fall of 1964, the last details being settled on 18 December, and NASA Headquarters approved the plan on 28 January 1965. It called for a total cost of $712,301,640 for the spacecraft, plus a fee that might range from $28,075,581 to $55,775,581 as the company’s performance ranged from poor to good.²¹

Contract changes notwithstanding, McDonnell had completed its tests of Spacecraft 3 modules on 12 September 1964, and was ready to mate them. On 21 September, Scott H. Simpkinson, chief of Gemini Test Operations, arrived in St. Louis at the head of 22 engineers from GPO and other MSC elements to join the Launch Preparation Group and MSC’s resident McDonnell office for the second major review of Spacecraft 3, the Module Test Review.# Twelve teams under the review board took a careful look at results from the first phase of testing, just completed, and reported their findings to the board, which announced the next day that the modules of Spacecraft 3 were indeed ready to be mated and that the second phase of systems testing might begin.²²

Spacecraft 3’s third major review began on 3 December as the first half of a two-part Spacecraft Acceptance Review (SAR).## The spacecraft had completed all systems tests except its last, the simulated flight. After its review of the test results, the acceptance board allowed McDonnell to proceed with the flight simulation. When this test was finished on 21 December, the board met for the second part of its task, a study of all test results, documentation, and overall spacecraft status. Three days after the simulated flight, on Christmas Eve, the board had “determined that Spacecraft 3 is acceptable for delivery.”²³

After the holidays, the spacecraft was loaded aboard a C-124, which delivered it to Cape Kennedy early Monday evening, 4 January 1965. The concept that a fully checked out and integrated spacecraft was being delivered had by then been largely accepted. Work in the industrial area at the Cape, from the time the craft arrived until it was transferred to the launch complex, centered on putting it in shape to fly by clearing up manufacturing shortages and installing seats and pyrotechnics, rather than by testing, with two major exceptions.

Because this was the first man-bearing Gemini spacecraft, it was the subject of a special communications test at the Merritt Island Launch Area radar range. The spacecraft communications systems were checked out in a radio-frequency environment that matched as closely as possible the conditions they would meet in orbit. Testing of the spacecraft propulsion systems was the other exception. Spacecraft 3 went through a complete end-to-end propulsion systems verification test program, including static firing (as had its predecessor), partly to check out procedures and gear, partly to build some confidence in systems whose development had been fraught with problems and which were not yet fully qualified. Even with these two special tasks, however, Spacecraft 3 was ready to move to the launch pad a month after it arrived at the Cape.²⁴

The launch vehicle for Gemini 3 had been late reaching the Cape through no fault of its own; the long delay in launching Gemini 2 had left it with no place to go. GLV-3 had, in fact, been built and tested in Baltimore with admirable dispatch. Completed early in June 1964, the vehicle had passed its horizontal tests and finished its checkout in the Vertical Test Facility by the last day of July. Another three weeks saw it through its combined systems acceptance test and review by the Vehicle Acceptance Team. When the team approved GLV-3 on 21 August, GLV-2 was still sitting on the launch pad in Florida, so GPO decided to have the Martin crew in Baltimore install the engineering changes on GLV-3 that were to have been done at the Cape. After looking over these changes, the acceptance team ordered a second combined systems test. The test rerun and the results approved, on 9 October the team once again accepted GLV-3. Martin-Baltimore formally turned it over to the Air Force on 27 October. Since Gemini 2 was still unlaunched, the Baltimore crew installed another set of modifications that had been slated for the Cape, finishing in mid-January.²⁵

Now there was room at the Cape for GLV-3, but the Air Force could no longer spare the C-133B that had carried the first two launch vehicles to Florida. A converted Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, nicknamed “Pregnant Guppy,” had to serve instead, although it could not hold both stages at once. It flew the second stage down on 9-1 January, went back to Baltimore to pick up the first stage, and returned to the Cape on 23 January. Two days later, GLV-3 was standing on the launch pad waiting for the spacecraft, which joined it on 5 February. The pace then slowed somewhat, as premate tests of the spacecraft proved troublesome. Nevertheless, spacecraft and launch vehicle were mechanically mated on 17 February, less than a month after the launch of Gemini 2. Another month was ample time to complete systems testing, and the simulated flight test on 18 March concluded the task of checking out the machines for Gemini 3.²⁶

Plans for Gemini 3

The precise scope of the third Gemini mission remained uncertain until very nearly the eve of flight. That its primary purpose, as spelled out in the “GT-3 Mission Directive,” was

to demonstrate and evaluate the capabilities of the spacecraft and launch vehicle system, and the procedures necessary for the support of future long-duration and rendezvous missions²⁷

had been settled by the rescheduling decisions of April 1963. Gemini 3, in other words, was to show that Project Gemini was ready to meet its major goals. But just how that was to be done was not clearly defined until early 1965.

Such key questions as how long the mission was to be and how its specific objectives were to be met were much discussed. NASA Headquarters had tentatively approved the three-orbit flight suggested by the program office in April 1963. This seemed too short a mission, however, to use the rendezvous evaluation pod (REP), long planned to check out spacecraft radar and maneuvering systems. If the mission could not be lengthened, some other means must be found “to demonstrate and evaluate . . . the procedures necessary for the support of future . . . rendezvous missions.” Equally unclear was how so short a flight could do much to prepare for future long-duration missions.²⁸

MSC’s Flight Operations Division did prepare a tentative mission plan in October 1963 that outlined possible use of the pod during the second orbit of a three-orbit mission. But the matter was settled when, on 4 January 1965, NASA Headquarters decided to strike the pod from Gemini 3.²⁹ The question of mission duration surfaced again late in the summer of 1964. Word leaked to the press that Grissom and Young, backed by the Astronaut Activities Office, were pressing for an open-ended mission; that is, leaving it up to the crew to decide how many orbits to try for after Spacecraft 3 was in space. GPO was averse to the idea, since the tracking network was then geographically limited and could only fully cover three orbits. Going beyond that on the first flight might be risky. NASA Headquarters again stepped in and squelched the idea. When a reporter asked Grissom what he thought about the decision, the answer was a curt, “We can do all the testing of the spacecraft we need in three trips.”³⁰

One of the first-order objectives for Gemini 3 - one that had to be achieved for the mission to be judged a success and any threat to which was cause enough to hold or cancel the flight - was to “demonstrate and evaluate the capability to maneuver the spacecraft in orbit using the orbital attitude and maneuver system (OAMS).” Early planning thus called for several OAMS firings.³¹ The reason for these firings suddenly expanded in January 1965. NASA Headquarters sent Flight Operations in Houston a set of preliminary data, with orders to revise the flight plan to protect the Gemini 3 crew against the danger that Martin Caidin, in his space thriller Marooned, had posed: the failure of spacecraft retrorockets to work, stranding the crew in space. Headquarters proposed three OAMS maneuvers to place the spacecraft in a “fail safe” orbit, one from which it would reenter whether the retrorockets fired or not. Actually, Gemini orbits were too low to be permanent, so spacecraft reentry was inevitable. What the fail-safe maneuvers were designed to achieve was the spacecraft’s return promptly enough to ensure that the crew survived. Coming as it did less than three months before the planned launch, the new demand threw mission planning into turmoil. But the response was rapid. A revised tentative flight plan was ready in little more than a month, and the final plan followed on 4 March.³²

The new plan called for firing the aft thrusters to free the spacecraft from the second stage of the launch vehicle, adding about 3 meters per second to its speed and putting it into an elliptical orbit with a perigee of 122 kilometers and an apogee of 182 kilometers. Just before first perigee, about an hour and a half into the flight and over Texas, a burst from the forward thrusters would cut 20 meters per second from spacecraft velocity and convert its orbit to a near circular 122 by 130 kilometers. During the second pass over the Indian Ocean, some 2 hours and 20 minutes into the mission, would come a series of out-of-plane burns totaling 4 meters per second, a part of the former flight plan to check out the OAMS, with no bearing on the fail-safe plan. Finally, over Hawaii on the third time around, there was a pre-retrofire burn to reduce speed by 28 meters per second, putting the spacecraft into an elliptic of reentry orbit with a perigee of 63 kilometers.³³

Another relative latecomer to Gemini 3 was a set of experiments. Although Project Mercury had included some in-orbit experiments, no one seems to have given much thought to Gemini in that context until Mercury ended in mid-1963. That summer, the Headquarters Office of Space Sciences began looking for proposals. It joined with the Office of Manned Space Flight in setting up a Panel on In-Flight Scientific Experiments, or POISE, to pass on the merits of proposed experiments. A Manned Space Flight Experiments Board was chartered in January 1964 to decide which experiments would go on which mission, Apollo as well as Gemini.³⁴

MSC had earlier formed its own experiments panel, which met for the last time on 16 January to pass on its advice about experiments for the first two manned Gemini missions to the NASA Headquarters group that had superseded it. Noting that Spacecraft 3 had already been built and that the shortness of the planned mission sharply limited any active participation by the crew, the panel stressed the need to find experiments that would largely conduct themselves and were nearly complete in terms of planning, design, and hardware. The panel members believed, although GPO did not, that two experiments left over from the proposed but never flown Mercury-Atlas 10 met these stringent criteria: one intended to explore the combined effects of radiation and low gravity on cells, the other to study cell growth at zero gravity. Both were approved by the Headquarters board when it met in Washington the following month.³⁵

The first experiment had been prompted by signs of radiation damage to cells after earlier flights, the biological effects being in some cases greater than might have been predicted from the length of exposure; this was a matter of special concern in light of plans for long-duration manned space flight. Either (or both) of two reasons might explain this anomaly: unknown biological effects produced by the “heavy primaries” component of radiation, blocked from Earth’s surface by the atmosphere and hence inaccessible to terrestrial laboratories, or the interaction of radiation with some aspect of the space flight environment, such as prolonged weightlessness. Experiment S-4 was designed to furnish a basis for weighing these alternatives.

Human blood samples were to be exposed to a known quantity and quality of radiation (both in the spacecraft and on the ground) during the zero-gravity phase of the mission. The frequency of various chromosomal aberrations in both samples could then be compared. To be mounted on the right-hand hatch, the experiment was wholly self-contained in a half-kilogram (one-pound) hermetically sealed aluminum box that held the blood samples, a radiation source, and instrumentation. The copilot had only to twist the handle and push it in to start the irradiation of the blood samples. Twenty minutes later he would twist the handle in the opposite direction and pull it out to stop the experiment. Word of these actions relayed to the ground would allow them to be duplicated.* ³⁶

The second experiment was designed to explore the possibility that cells might be directly affected by low gravity - that long-term weightlessness might produce changes with important implications for prolonged space flight. Because the effects were easier to detect in simple cell systems than in complex organisms and because theory argued that effects would appear only in cells upward of one micron across, the eggs of a sea urchin were selected as the experimental material. The eggs were to be fertilized at the start of the experiment, and the possible changes brought about by low gravity observed at several stages of the development.

The cell growth experiment was also self-contained, a sealed 2/3-kilogram (1 1/2-pound) cylinder, to be mounted on the left-hand hatch and worked by the command pilot. The handle had to be turned five times - once half an hour before flight to fertilize the eggs, then four times in flight to fix the dividing cells at specific stages of growth in successive samples. Each time the handle was turned, the fact was relayed to the laboratory, where the action would be duplicated on an identical package. Results from the simultaneous experiments would be compared later.** ³⁷

A third experiment found its way into Gemini 3 by a more roundabout path. Spacecraft falling back into the atmosphere are sheathed in an ionized plasma that blocks all radio communication, a source of much concern in at least two Mercury missions. In the first manned orbital flight, with John Glenn in Friendship 7, the five-minute blackout followed a signal that the capsule’s heatshield was unlatched. Although the signal was wrong, Mercury control spent an agonizing five minutes until the radio link was restored. Then in the very next flight, M. Scott Carpenter’s Aurora 7 overshot its planned landing point by 400 kilometers because the capsule was misaligned at retrofire. In either case, communications with the reentering spacecraft would have made many hearts beat more calmly.³⁸

A reentry communications experiment had been proposed and accepted for Mercury-Atlas 10, but when the program ended with that mission unflown, it was suggested for Gemini. Tentatively assigned to Spacecraft 3 in March 1964, the experiment failed to win a firm place for months, largely because of its half million-dollar price tag. In July, however, the Office of Advanced Research and Technology in NASA Headquarters agreed to share the cost, and the experiment had its place in the mission confirmed.³⁹

Research had shown that, for small objects, adding fluid to the ionized plasma during the reentry blackout could restore communications by lowering the plasma’s frequency enough to allow UHF radio transmission to get through. Whether the same technique would work for an object as large as the Gemini spacecraft was now to be tested. A water expulsion system would be installed on the inside surface of one of the landing- gear doors, relics of the days when landing skids were to be used with its paraglider wing. The experiment was fully self-contained except for a starting switch inside the cabin to be thrown by the copilot when the spacecraft had fallen to about 90,000 meters. At that point, the plasma sheath would surround the spacecraft, blacking out communications. Water would be automatically injected into the plasma in timed pulses for the next two and a half minutes, while ground stations monitored and recorded UHF radio reception.***⁴⁰

Maneuvers of Molly Brown

During the first two days of March 1965, the Office of Manned Space Flight held a Design Certification Review in Washington. The review board* asked for, and got, formal pledges from the top executives of all major Gemini contractors that their products were ready for manned space flight, barring something unforeseen turning up during what remained of Cape checkout. A week later, the spacecraft Flight Readiness Review revealed only minor and quickly corrected problems. The launch vehicle passed its final test, simulated flight, on 18 March and its Flight Readiness Review on Saturday morning, 20 March. When the Mission Review Board** met that afternoon, weather was the only thing that might delay the mission. Early Monday morning, the launch vehicle contractors confirmed that GLV-3 was ready to go; at 9 a.m.,the Flight Safety Review Board committed the booster to launch.⁴¹

Martin’s pad crew started loading oxidizer aboard GLV-3 at 6:22 that evening, 22 March, and five hours later all tanks were full. The final countdown began at 2 o’clock Tuesday morning, under overcast skies. Included in the countdown were static firings of both spacecraft rocket systems. This had been a matter of dispute between the astronauts and the program office. They agreed on plans to fire one ring of the reentry control system but not on OAMS firing. GPO, backed by the Preflight Operations Division, preferred to fire only the lateral thrusters, but the pilots wanted to fire the aft thrusters too. The matter was settled in May 1964, when NASA Deputy Director for Gemini William Schneider decided both would be fired. Although he knew that the extra test time might affect the launch, he believed “that this will save time in the long run and will increase the confidence in flying a successful mission.”⁴²

Grissom and Young, who had reviewed their flight plan and gone to bed about 9 o’clock the night before, were awakened shortly before 5 a.m. After steak and eggs, a launch-day breakfast tradition inherited from Mercury, they were driven from their Merritt Island quarters to pad 16, site of the preflight ready room. They arrived about 6 and had their suits on about 45 minutes later. Shortly after 7, a van bore them to pad 19. They mounted the elevator for the 11th level, where their spacecraft awaited them. At 7:30, they were inside with the hatches sealed. Because the so-far flawless countdown had moved faster than expected, they were about 20 minutes ahead of schedule. Young later complained about this extra time spent flat on his back and fully suited; the planned wait was bad enough.

Weather was still the big question mark, the overcast not having lifted as expected. Grissom and Young had been in the spacecraft less than an hour when the count was halted, just 35 minutes before launch, because the first-stage oxidizer line had sprung a leak. A handy wrench applied to a poorly seated nut solved the problem, but the count was held for 24 minutes to make certain the leak had stopped. By the time the countdown resumed, the clouds over the Cape had begun to scatter. Thirty-five minutes later, at 9:24 Tuesday morning, 23 March 1965, the sky was almost clear when the engines of GLV-3 burst into life. With a “You’re on your way, Molly Brown,” from CapCom (capsule communicator) L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., the third flight of Gemini, the first to which men entrusted themselves, began.⁴³

Officially the flight of Gemini 3, unofficially it was the voyage of “Molly Brown.” During Project Mercury, each pilot had named his own spacecraft, although Cooper had some trouble selling NASA on Faith 7 for the last spacecraft in the program. Grissom and Young now had the same difficulty with “Molly Brown.” Grissom had lost his first ship, Liberty Bell 7, which sank after a faulty circuit blew the hatch before help arrived. “Molly Brown,” the “unsinkable” heroine of a Broadway stage hit, seemed to Grissom the logical choice for his second space command. NASA’s upper echelons thought the name lacking in dignity; but since Grissom’s second choice was “Titanic,” they grudgingly consented, and the name remained “Molly Brown,” though only quasi-officially. Later spacecraft were officially referred to by a Roman numeral, although a few had nicknames as well.⁴⁴

"Molly Brown” lifted off so smoothly that neither Grissom nor Young felt anything. Their real cues were seeing the mission clock on the instrument panel start running and hearing Cooper announce it from mission control. There was less noise than they had heard on the moving-base simulator in Dallas. When the first-stage engine cut off two and a half minutes later, acceleration plunged from six gravities to one. The second-stage engine ignited, bathing the spacecraft in a flash of orange-yellow light that disconcerted Young for the moment it took him to realize that this was a normal product of fire-in-the-hole staging - that is, second-stage ignition before, instead of after, separation. The launch vehicle had slightly exceeded its predicted thrust, but a warning from Cooper prepared the pilots for the larger than expected pitchdown when the second stage took over the steering. Young, who had never been in space before, was entranced by his view of Earth’s horizon and the sense of rapid motion as second-stage thrust built up.⁴⁵

Five and a half minutes after launch, the second-stage engine shut down. The pop of the pyrotechnics that severed spacecraft from launch vehicle sounded like the bark of howitzers to Young. Grissom fired the aft thrusters to kick the spacecraft into orbit. He lost track of the time and fired too long, ending up with his incremental velocity indicator showing 2 a slight overspeed. But he wound up with an orbit of 122 by 175 kilometers, very close to the intended 122 by 182 kilometers. Gemini 3 was off to a good start - to an almost troublefree flight that closely matched the planned mission.⁴⁶

The match was not perfect. About 20 minutes into the first orbit, just after “Molly Brown” passed beyond range of the mid-Atlantic Canary Island tracking station, the oxygen pressure gauge in the environmental control system reported an abrupt drop. Young, assigned to watch this gauge, naturally assumed that something was wrong with the system. But a quick glance showed odd readings on several other meters and suggested that the real trouble might be in the instrument power supply. Young switched from the primary to the secondary electrical converter to power the dials, and the problem vanished. The whole episode, from Young’s first notice of the anomalous reading to his shift from primary to secondary power, took 45 seconds, one clear payoff from intense preflight training.⁴⁷

Grissom’s attempt to run the cell-growth experiment was a failure - perhaps, as he remarked later, because he had “too much adrenalin pumping” and twisted the handle too hard. Whatever the reason, the handle broke, ruining the experiment. The radiation experiment gave Young some trouble, but he managed to complete his task. Results were suggestive but inconclusive. Exposed to nearly identical doses of radiation, the inflight blood samples showed more damage than the control samples on the ground. While the effect was small, it did point to interaction between radiation and some aspect of space flight, though just which aspect and how it acted could not he answered. Both Grissom and Young believed that most of the trouble with the experiments stemmed from differences between the packages they flew with and those they had trained with. But they also admitted that they “were not quite as fascinated by sea urchins . . . as . . . by the chance to carry out some real ‘firsts’ in space flight.”⁴⁸

And the Gemini 3 crew did chalk up at least one historic first by maneuvering in orbit. The first OAMS burn came an hour and a half after launch and lasted a carefully timed 75 seconds, cutting spacecraft speed by 15 meters per second and dropping it into a nearly circular orbit. Three quarters of an hour later, during the second revolution, Grissom fired the system again, this time to test the ship’s translational capability and shift the plane of its orbit by one-fiftieth of a degree. During the third pass, Grissom completed the fail-safe plan with a two and a half minute burn that dropped the spacecraft’s perigee to 72 kilometers and ensured reentry even if the retrorockets failed to work.⁴⁹

They did work, however. As the three-orbit mission neared its close, Grissom and Young ran through the retrofire checklist. With everything ready, the pilot fired the pyrotechnics that separated the adapter from the reentry module, giving the two spacemen their biggest jolt so far. He then armed the automatic retrofire switch. One after the other, the four rockets exploded into life and burned themselves out. Another set of pyrotechnics cut loose the expended package as “Molly Brown” arced back toward the planet she had left four and a half hours before.⁵⁰

Reentry produced some surprises. At the outset, it matched the simulations both men had been through in training, even to the color and pattern of the plasma sheath that surrounded the spacecraft. Young threw the switch to start the reentry communications experiments just over a minute after the plasma had formed and communications had blacked out. The results were encouraging; at high rates of water flow, both UHF and C-band signals from the spacecraft were picked up by ground stations.⁵¹

But “Molly Brown” seemed to be off course. The initial computer reading showed that she would miss her planned landing point by more than 69 kilometers, and Grissom’s best efforts to reduce that gap were fruitless. Theoretically, the Gemini spacecraft had enough lift to be piloted to a relatively precise landing, but its real lift fell far short of what had been predicted from wind tunnel tests. As a result, Gemini 3 was about 84 kilometers short of the intended splashdown point. Before they touched down, however, the astronauts suffered another jolt when the spacecraft assumed its landing attitude. After the main parachute deployed, the spacecraft hung from it vertically, with its nose suspended at a single point. Before landing, throwing a cabin switch shifted the spacecraft to a two-point suspension with its front end forward and some 35 degrees above the horizontal. When Grissom hit the landing attitude switch, “Molly Brown” literally dropped into place, pitching both men into the windshield, breaking Grissom’s faceplate, and scratching Young’s.⁵²

The jolt when they hit the water a few minutes later was mild by comparison. Although Gemini was designed to float, all Grissom saw out his window was water. He realized that the still attached parachute was being dragged by the wind, tugging the nose of the spacecraft down. With memories of the ill-fated Liberty Bell 7 momentarily staying his hand, Grissom released the chute and “Molly Brown” bobbed to the surface, having shown herself fully watertight. The mission plan called for the crew to remain on board until the spacecraft was picked up, a short wait if the recovery ship, the aircraft carrier Intrepid, was only about eight kilometers away, as Grissom and Young had last heard before they splashed down. When they learned that the real distance was closer to 110 kilometers, Grissom asked for a helicopter to pick them up and take them to the carrier. Still thinking of Liberty Bell 7, however, he refused to crack a hatch until Navy swimmers had attached a flotation collar to “Molly Brown.” This spacecraft was not going to sink, but the crew endured a long 30 minutes as the sealed spacecraft grew hotter inside while it pitched and tossed on the long Atlantic swells. “That was no boat,” recalled Young. Heat and motion took their toll of Grissom, although Young managed to keep his breakfast down. Once the collar was in place and a swimmer opened a hatch, the two men lost no time in getting out and putting on the “horse collar” hoists that lifted them to the helicopter.⁵³

Medical examinations and debriefings began as soon as the two astronauts were in the helicopter and went on for several days. A brief stir ensued when Grissom and Young had little to say to scientists about their observations, mainly astronomical, while in orbit. Other questions were raised about the failure of the cell-growth experiment, but most of the fault could be ascribed to a poorly designed package that was installed in the spacecraft barely a week before flight - a matter of “too little, too late.” In any case, the brief mission had centered on engineering evaluation of the spacecraft, with a full schedule that left little time for extra work.

Something of a storm later blew up when the press got wind of Grissom’s having eaten part of a corned beef sandwich during the flight. Schirra had bought it at “Wolfie’s” on North Atlantic Avenue in Cocoa Beach and given it to Young, who smuggled it on board the spacecraft. When it was time for the crew to eat the space food they carried, Young brought out the sandwich and handed it to Grissom, who ate only a few bites as he wanted no crumbs floating around the cabin. When the news got to Congress, the lawmakers were upset. What was not made clear, apparent to either the legislators or the press was that the official food was only there for evaluation of its taste, convenience, and reconstitution properties and had nothing to do with any scientific or medical objectives of the mission. No one expected to learn very much about the effects of space food on so short a flight. The fracas did, however, produce some new and more stringent rules about what the astronauts might take with them on future missions.⁵⁴

Despite its minor problems, Gemini 3 was a complete success as far as its major objectives were concerned. There could he no doubt that Gemini was ready for its role in the manned space flight program. The time of testing was over.⁵⁵