Sixty Years Ago Today – Gemini VI and VII Rendezvous in Space
This view of the Gemini VI spacecraft taken from Gemini VII show a prominent “Beat Army” sign in the window. The message from the on-board crew of Walter Schirra and Thomas Stafford, who, along with Gemini VII pilot Jim Lovell, were all graduates of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. Gemini VII command pilot, Frank Borman, was an alumnus of the US Military Academy at West Point. That year’s football match-up between the two service academies was played on November 27, 1965, and ended in a 7-7 tie. (Content Credit: John Uri, NASA Johnson Space Center) (Image Credit: NASA)
Sixty Years Ago Today – Gemini VI and VII Rendezvous in Space
The primary goal of Project Gemini was to demonstrate NASA’s ability to perform all the basic capabilities that would be required for the Apollo Program in order to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s. Paramount among those capabilities was the rendezvous and docking of two spacecraft, required for the future Moon landing missions. An additional goal was to ensure that spacecraft and astronauts could function for at least eight days, considered to be the minimum time for a round-trip mission to the Moon. On December 15, 1965, Gemini VI and VII accomplished these two important milestones...But not as originally envisioned by NASA.
The original Gemini VI mission plan involved completing a rendezvous and docking with an Agena target vehicle launched 101 minutes before the Gemini 6 liftoff. On October 25, 1965, an Atlas-Agena rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Pad 14, just a few miles from Pad 19 where astronauts Walter Schirra and Thomas Stafford sat inside their Gemini capsule atop its Titan booster. However, within six minutes it was clear that something had gone wrong. The Agena’s engine had exploded and the vehicle did not reach orbit. Schirra and Stafford had no target to chase, so they climbed out of their spacecraft.
But all was not lost. To salvage the situation, NASA management decided to proceed with the next mission as planned -- the 14-day Gemini VII endurance flight in early December. And as a twist, they decided to use the Gemini VII manned capsule as the rendezvous target for Gemini VI.
Workers replaced the Gemini VI Titan rocket on Pad 19 with the rocket for Gemini VII, stacking that rocket on Oct. 29. Engineers developed procedures to ensure that a second rocket could be stacked on the pad within a few days following the launch of the first, allowing the rendezvous to take place within the 14 days that Gemini VII would be in orbit.
NASA selected Frank Borman as the command pilot and James A. Lovell as the pilot for the 14-day Gemini VII endurance flight. Although both were making their first spaceflight, they had served as the backup crew for Gemini IV. Gemini IV veteran and first American spacewalker Edward H. White and rookie Michael Collins served as the backup crew. To aid in their comfort during the lengthy flight, Borman and Lovell wore lightweight suits that they could easily remove, roll up, and stow under their seats. The suits had no hard helmet or neck ring, with the visor held in place with a zipper. The cramped spacecraft created a challenge for stowage of all the necessary equipment for a two-week mission, including the required food, and then for the garbage the crew generated. Unlike previous crews in which one astronaut always kept watch, Borman and Lovell coordinated their sleep-work cycles. During the flight, Borman and Lovell conducted 20 experiments, eight of them medical to evaluate their responses to long-duration weightlessness, more than any previous flight.
Following a nearly flawless countdown, Gemini VII took to the skies on December 4, 1965. Shortly after reaching orbit, they turned their spacecraft around and attempted to stay in formation (i.e., station-keep) with their Titan rocket’s spent second stage, a task made difficult by its venting of excess fuel. That activity completed, Borman and Lovell began their experiment program and settled in for their 2-week stay in space. Two days into the flight, Lovell took off his suit, greatly increasing his comfort level, while Borman remained warm and uncomfortable in his suit. It took another two days for mission managers to relent and allow him to remove his suit as well, following which he felt much more comfortable. The pair continued their suite of experiments and took photographs of the Earth, awaiting the arrival of Gemini VI.
Launch Pad 19 suffered minimal damage from the Gemini VII liftoff and workers erected Gemini VI’s Titan rocket the next day. On December 12, Gemini VII’s ninth day in space, Schirra and Stafford strapped into their spacecraft for a second launch attempt. The countdown clock ticked down to zero, and the Titan’s first stage engines ignited. And then immediately shut off after just 1.2 seconds, resulting in the first on-the-pad abort of the US space program. Although the mission clock aboard the spacecraft had started, the rocket had not lifted off, and Schirra made the split-second decision not to eject himself and Stafford from the spacecraft. Engineers traced the cause of the abort to a dust cap inadvertently left in the engine compartment. After workers took care of that issue, Schirra and Stafford tried to launch again on December 15, and the third time proved to be the charm. When they reached orbit, for the first time in history, four people were in space simultaneously.
Over the next six hours, Schirra and Stafford aboard Gemini VI conducted a series of orbital maneuvers to catch up with Borman and Lovell awaiting them aboard Gemini VII. At a distance of 270 miles, Gemini VI’s rendezvous radar established a solid lock on Gemini VII. Once the distance between the two spacecraft had closed to 60 miles, Schirra could see Gemini VII, exclaiming, “My gosh, there is a real bright star out there!” At a distance of 3000 feet, Schirra began braking his spacecraft to slow the approach. He halted the approach at a distance of 130 feet, with no relative velocity between the two spacecraft, accomplishing the world’s first space rendezvous. Flight controllers in the Mission Control Center at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now NASA’s Johnson Space Center) in Houston, erupted in cheers while managers lit celebratory cigars. For the next three orbits around the Earth, the two spacecraft stayed at ranges of 300 feet to as close as one foot from each other, with Gemini VI doing most of the maneuvering for station-keeping, fly-arounds, formation flying, and parking the spacecraft in specific relative positions. As the astronauts’ sleep period approached, Schirra backed away to a safe overnight position about 10 miles away.
With the rendezvous successfully completed, it was time for Gemini VI to come home. Schirra called to Gemini VII, “Really good job, Frank and Jim. We’ll see you on the beach.” He jettisoned the spacecraft’s equipment section and fired the retrorockets to drop them from orbit. After a nominal entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft deployed first its drogue parachute at 45,000 feet in altitude and then its main parachute at 10,000 feet. Gemini VI splashed down eight miles from its target point in the western Atlantic Ocean southeast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, and within view of the prime recovery ship, the USS Wasp (CVS-18). Gemini VI had completed 16 revolutions around the Earth in a flight lasting 25 hours and 16 minutes. Schirra elected to remain inside the capsule as recovery team members lifted it out of the water and onto the carrier’s deck, where a throng of cheering sailors greeted them. By the next day, Schirra and Stafford had returned to crew quarters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC).
In orbit, Gemini VII astronauts Borman and Lovell still had three more days to go before their own homecoming. They continued with their experiment program and dealt with minor issues with some of the spacecraft’s thrusters and an errant fuel cell. On their last day in space, they packed up and tidied up the capsule that had been home for two weeks, often described as having as much room as the front seat of a Volkswagen Beetle.
On December 18, Borman jettisoned the spacecraft’s instrument section and fired its retrorockets. Reentry and parachute deployments took place as expected with no issues, and Gemini VII splashed down southeast of Cape Canaveral, about seven miles from the target point. They had orbited the Earth 206 times and spent a record-setting 13 days, 18 hours, and 35 minutes in space, a mark that stood for more than 4 years. Helicopters from the USS Wasp, performing its second crew recovery in two days, retrieved Lovell and Borman from the sea and delivered them to the deck of the carrier. A little shaky after two weeks in weightlessness, they were otherwise in good health although both had lost weight.
Sailors retrieved the capsule from the sea, and two days later, offloaded both spacecraft at Mayport Naval Station near Jacksonville, Florida. Borman and Lovell reunited with Schirra and Stafford at KSC’s crew quarters the day after splashdown. After a few days of post-mission debriefings, the crews returned to Houston and gave an overview of their historic mission to reporters on December 30th.
On February 15, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he was sending Schirra and Borman on a three-week, eight-country goodwill tour to promote the scientific, technological, and educational values of the US space program. Accompanied by their wives Jo Schirra and Susan Borman, they departed on February 21 aboard a presidential jet. Their itinerary took them to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. As they were leaving Taipei, Taiwan, on March 1st, they learned of the deaths the previous day of Elliot M. See and Charles A. Bassett, the prime crew for the upcoming Gemini IX mission, in an airplane crash in St. Louis. Upon their arrival in Hawaii on March 16, they learned of the aborted Gemini VIII mission. Schirra traveled to Okinawa, Japan, to escort fellow astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and David R. Scott back to the US after their harrowing spaceflight, first landing at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu before returning to KSC.
The Gemini VI and VII spacecraft can be viewed at the Stafford Air and Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma, and the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, respectively.
For more information:
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/gemini/dual-gemini-flights-achieved-crucial-spaceflight-milestones/
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/worlds-first-space-rendezvous
https://www.nasa.gov/history/55-years-ago-the-spirit-of-76-the-first-rendezvous-in-space/
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