All images courtesy NASA |
At 5:53 a.m. the astronauts left the operations building and
entered a waiting automobile for the six-mile trip to the medical trailer
parked near Pad 16, where they had biomedical sensors attached to their skin,
slipped on their “long john” undergarments, and donned their spacesuits for the
flight.
Meanwhile, at Pad 19, the site of the launch for the
three-orbit Gemini 3 mission, backups Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford were busy
setting switches inside the Molly Brown
as the countdown for the mission continued. The backups had also prepared a
couple of surprises for the prime crew. The day before, Schirra and Stafford had stopped at Wolfie’s Deli on North Atlantic
Avenue in Cocoa Beach. “We were both irked by the fact that Gus and John
weren’t going to have real food on their flight, so Wally had a corned beef
sandwich [with pickles] made up,” said Stafford.
As Grissom and Young finished suiting up for their trip in their
immaculate white pressure suits, Young had stowed the corned beef sandwich in
the leg pocket of his suit. The astronauts were greeted by Schirra clad in his
tattered old Mercury training suit and wearing approximately twenty assorted
security badges around his neck. “If you’re not feeling up to it,” Schirra told
a laughing Grissom, “I’ll be happy to take this one.”
At 7:06 a.m., the astronauts left the medical trailer in an
air-conditioned van headed to Pad 19. Once there, they took the elevator for
the hundred-foot ride up to the white room, and entered the Molly Brown, Young first, followed by
Grissom. “There were plenty of smiles, but not much of the joking that we had
on some of the Mercury flights,” said Guenter Wendt, pad leader. “Gus and John
were serious about the flight and had little room for levity.”
After his team of technicians completed a test to see if the
crew’s spacesuits had any leaks, Wendt removed the seven safety pins on
each of the ejection seats, reported his action to the blockhouse, and closed
the hatches at 7:34 a.m. Following a check of the spacecraft for any leaks from
the cabin, Wendt and his team cleared the area. The countdown ran like
clockwork until 8:20 a.m., when mission control called a hold to check on a
possible leak in an oxidizer line in the Titan II’s first stage. Pad
technicians solved the problem and the countdown proceeded smoothly until
liftoff at 9:24 a.m. Grissom reported to Gordon Cooper, serving as capsule
communicator at the control center, that the clock had started and the Gemini-Titan
configuration had entered its roll program. “There was not a distinct feeling
when lift-off occurred,” Grissom reported. “It was a gentle, smooth lift-off
with no jolt or disturbance.” As the craft entered its pitch program, Cooper
called out: “You’re on your way, Molly
Brown.”
For the first fifty seconds of the mission, Grissom had both
hands on the ring triggering the ejection seats in case of an emergency. Young
also had a ring, but when Grissom glanced over at his partner he noticed his
hands resting in his lap. He may have seemed casual, Young later said, but he
watched Grissom carefully and if the commander had experienced any problems
with his ejection ring he planned on yanking his with dispatch. “During this
time we didn’t say a word to each other because there was so much to do so
fast,” Young noted, “but once we got into orbit we could relax just a little.”
The Titan II booster had exceeded its estimated thrust, placing the astronauts
into a higher-than-expected orbit.
As they left the Canary Islands behind on their first orbit,
the astronauts experienced a moment of alarm when they noticed the pressure in
the oxygen system, supplying air to the cabin and to their suits, suddenly drop,
and other instrument readings also registering oddly. Grissom acted quickly,
snapping the visor down on his helmet. “If the oxygen pressure is really gone,”
he thought to himself, “it won’t make any difference. You’ve had it already.” With
the experience he had gained through hours of work in the Gemini simulator,
Young, in just forty-five seconds, diagnosed the problem—the primary electrical
converter system had malfunctioned—and switched to the backup system.
Another problem arose with the planned sea urchin egg
experiment. For the procedure, Grissom had to turn a knob that would activate a
device to fertilize the eggs, which would later be studied to see how their
cells had been effected by weightlessness. “Maybe, after our oxygen scare, I
had too much adrenalin pumping, but I twisted the handle so hard that I broke
it,” Grissom said. (After their flight, the astronauts learned that a
controller on the ground, duplicating the experiment, had also broken the
handle.) Although he discovered that the clearance between the hatch and
radiation experiment proved to be “much smaller than on the mission simulator,”
Young managed to complete the task.
The evaluation of meals undertaken by Young for future
long-duration flights on Gemini proved to be one of the high spots for Grissom
during the mission. Sealed in plastic bags, the dehydrated food had to be
reconstituted using a water gun. Young reconstituted packages of applesauce and
grapefruit juice, and opened a package of chicken bits, which “were not very
tasty and were rather difficult to get out of the package while wearing
pressure-suit gloves,” he said. The brownies provided for dessert proved to be
the “best-tasting thing on the flight,” according to Young.
Young also had another item, not on NASA’s official menu, to
sample. As Grissom monitored Molly Brown’s
performance, he was surprised to hear Young nonchalantly inquire: “You care for
a corned beef sandwich, skipper?” Grissom, who noted that if he could have
fallen out of his couch he would have, thanked his crewmate for the treat and
took a bite. Crumbs from the rye bread, however, started floating around the
cabin, and the overpowering aroma of kosher corned beef proved too much for the
spacecraft’s life-support system to handle, so Grissom put the sandwich away.
(According to Wendt, Young later told him Grissom had jokingly complained that
the sandwich had no mustard.) For an additional taste treat, he also sampled a
bit of Young’s applesauce.
Experiments with sea urchin eggs and a chance to eat the
first corned beef sandwich in space paled in comparison with the opportunity
the astronauts had to investigate the worthiness of America’s new space
vehicle. One hour and thirty-three minutes after liftoff, Grissom achieved a
space first when he fired the Orbital Attitude and Manuevering System to slow the
spacecraft’s speed to fifty feet per second, changing its path into nearly a
circular orbit. Over the Indian Ocean on Molly
Brown’s second orbit, the commander tested the ship’s translational
movement, using the forward and aft thrusters to change its orbital path by
one-fiftieth of a degree, paving the way for future Gemini rendezvous and
docking missions. Finally, four hours and twenty-one minutes into the flight,
Grissom again activated the OAMS in a preretrofire maneuver to ensure reentry
in case of a problem with the retro-rockets. “Gus felt so good about all this
that he even let me fly the Molly Brown for a few minutes,” said Young. “I
thought I’d have to break his arm to take over even for that long.”
The final maneuver proved to be unnecessary as the
spacecraft’s retro-rockets fired on schedule and the astronauts were pushed
back into their couches by the g forces caused by reentry. Both astronauts
reported that the view they had of reentry matched the simulations they had
gone through during training, including the color pictures taken from the
unmanned Gemini 2 mission. Molly Brown’s onboard computer indicated
to the astronauts they would land short of the expected splashdown point near
the recovery carrier, the USS Intrepid.
Grissom performed two banking maneuvers to correct the error, but discovered that
the lift predicted in wind-tunnel tests did not match real-world results. The
crew experienced another surprise when the spacecraft’s main parachute
deployed. The parachute’s harness was designed to change from a vertical
position to a forty-five degree landing attitude. “John and I were both thrown
against our windows, and I banged into a knob that punctured my face plate,”
Grissom noted. “John’s face plate was scratched.”
At 2:17 p.m., four hours and fifty-three minutes after
liftoff, Molly Brown splashed down
near Grand Truk Island in the Bahamas about nine-and-a-half miles from the
Coast Guard cutter Diligence,
stationed fifty miles up range from the Intrepid.
Grissom’s first thought when the spacecraft hit the water
flashed back to his experience in Mercury: “Oh my God, here we go again!”
Gemini had been designed so that the left window, the one Grissom looked out of,
would be above the water after landing. Instead of looking at blue sky,
however, the astronaut saw nothing but seawater. Grissom soon realized he had
not yet cut loose the main parachute that had been catching the twenty-knot wind,
dragging the spacecraft “underneath like a submarine.”
With the memory of his LibertyBell 7 mission still fresh in his mind, Grissom mustered his nerve, reached
out, and triggered the parachute-release switch. “But with the parachute gone,”
he said, “we bobbed to the surface like a cork in the position we were supposed
to take.” As Grissom and Young breathed easier, an Air Rescue Service C-54
aircraft dropped a pararescue team near the spacecraft to render assistance if
needed. Five minutes later, a navy helicopter dropped another team that secured
a flotation collar around the spacecraft.
An early communication to the astronauts had indicated the Intrepid only five miles away from the
spacecraft, prompting Grissom and Young to remain in Molly Brown until the carrier’s arrival. Twenty minutes later,
however, they learned of the carrier’s true position, approximately fifty-five
miles away, and that the ship would take almost two hours to reach their
position. “We were getting extremely uncomfortable in our suits; so we elected
to take the suits off, egress, and be picked up by helicopter,” said Grissom,
who kept the hatches closed so as to not repeat his Mercury misadventure. (The
astronaut said if the Gemini spacecraft had sunk, he would have “jumped right
off that carrier.”)
The hot temperatures in the closed cabin, combined with
five-foot swells, caused both astronauts to become seasick. Navy veteran Young barely
held onto his meal, but Grissom vomited into a plastic bag stowed for just such
an emergency. “It’s a wonderful spacecraft, but it’s not much of a boat,” said
Young. Navy frogmen assisted Grissom in opening his three-hundred-pound hatch
and exiting the capsule. “That’s the first time I ever heard of a skipper
leaving the ship first,” Young said. Grissom responded by joking that he made
his partner captain when he left the spacecraft. With his new title, Young
renamed the spacecraft the USS Molly
Brown.
Safe aboard the recovery helicopter, Grissom and Young
donned regulation navy bathrobes to cover their space long johns. The outfits
gave the duo the “appearance of a couple of guys waking up after a big night at
a convention,” Grissom noted as they landed on the carrier and underwent a
postflight medical examination and debriefing. The Intrepid hoisted the Gemini capsule onto its deck at 5:01 p.m. The
astronauts received a congratulatory ship-to-shore telephone call from
President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had watched the mission on a television in his
office. After expressing his and the nation’s pride in their accomplishment,
Johnson told Grissom, first on the phone, that “apparently the Molly Brown was
as unsinkable as her namesake and we are all mighty happy about it.” The only
problem with the flight was that it did not last long enough, Young told the
president, who responded by telling the astronaut he’d try to work something
out in the days ahead. Johnson also invited both men to visit him at the White
House—quite an honor for two men whose pay for the day, according to Associated
Press figures, totaled just seventy dollars ($37.25 for Grissom and $32.75 for
Young).
Upon their return to Cape Kennedy from the Intrepid via a navy S2 aircraft, Grissom
and Young were greeted by their family members and an air force band playing
the theme song from the musical The
Unsinkable Molly Brown before being whisked away to undergo additional
physical examinations. After the medical probing, the astronauts were upbeat
and talkative during a press conference about their mission. Evert Clark,
covering the event for the New York Times,
noted that the reticent spacemen “turned out to be two of the funniest on the
ground,” joking and feeding each other “straight lines like two comedians.”
Asked about the change in their demeanor, Young explained:
“I think Zero-G flight could make an extrovert out of anybody.” He became particularly
verbose when talking about the tremendous view from space, drawing applause
from the gathered reporters and space officials, prompting Grissom to reply
dryly, “Well, to carry on with the flight—.” Grissom made sure to praise the
Martin Company, the manufacturer of the Titan II rocket, and had nothing but
high marks for the McDonnell Aircraft–produced Gemini.
On March 26, Grissom, Young, and their families journeyed to
Washington, D.C., for a ceremony with President Johnson in the East Room of the
White House (cloudy weather had forced the proceedings inside from the Rose
Garden). Calling the duo “two brave, patriotic, gallant, exceptional young
Americans,” Johnson presented each with NASA’s Exceptional Service Award, with
Grissom receiving another citation for becoming the first person to fly in
space twice. The astronaut accepted the honors as “tokens of affection of this
nation” for the entire space effort. Young became so wrapped up in the
proceedings that he forgot to shake the president’s hand until prompted to by
the crowd. “I didn’t have this kind of heart beat before the launch,” joked
Young.
The honors continued in the next few days as Grissom and
Young were treated to ticker-tape parades in New York City and Chicago. Grissom
attributed the outpouring of goodwill the astronauts received to the public’s
relief at having America “back in the manned-space-flight business with
probably the most sophisticated spacecraft in the world, or out of it.”
Despite the tributes paid to the astronauts, controversy soon
developed after the flight concerning the corned beef sandwich briefly enjoyed
by Grissom on Molly Brown. At first,
the astronauts had no inkling that the nonregulation food might cause any fuss,
as they joked about it while discussing the flight in Life magazine just a week after the mission’s conclusion. Some
members of Congress, however, failed to see any humor in the situation, with
NASA administrator James Webb being peppered with complaints at an
appropriations subcommittee hearing that the space agency “had lost control of
its astronauts.” Flight Controller Christopher Kraft noted that some
congressmen and doctors had the mistaken idea the astronauts had compromised
medical tests by ingesting the sandwich, which they had not. The complaints
eventually made their way to Slayton, who had given Young permission to take the
sandwich on the flight. Slayton officially informed the astronauts they could
not take “unauthorized items, especially food, aboard the spacecraft. I even
had to give poor John a formal reprimand . . . not that it affected his
career.”
In addition to the textbook flight of Molly Brown, the year 1965 saw NASA launch four more Gemini
missions, achieving several triumphs in the process, including Ed White’s space
walk on Gemini 4 and the first true
rendezvous in space with Gemini 6,
crewed by Stafford and Schirra, meeting up and flying with Gemini 7’s crew of Frank Boorman and Jim Lovell.
As the Gemini program continued, Slayton turned his attention
to the future Apollo missions, scheduled for earth orbital flights before the
end of 1966. With Shepard still out of commission due to his medical condition,
Slayton again turned to Grissom to take command of the new space program’s
first mission. Because the flight would take place without a lunar module, the
remainder of Grissom’s crew included astronauts with little experience,
including rookies Donn Eisele and Roger Chaffee. Eisele injured his shoulder in
a zero-g flight in a KC-135 aircraft and had to be replaced. “He was going to
be behind the training curve right from the start, so I simply swapped him with
Ed White, who I’d originally had down as senior pilot of the next crew, Apollo
2,” said Slayton, who called Grissom, Chaffee, and White into his office to
inform them privately of their selection for the mission.
Gaining the plum Apollo assignment caused Grissom to begin
thinking about the dream of every astronaut—becoming the first man to walk on
the moon. Jim Rathmann, the racecar driver and Grissom friend, remembered
sharing many flights in his airplane with Grissom where the astronaut often talked
about the possibility. “We’d all talk about it quite a bit,” said Rathmann, who
along with Grissom and Cooper twice sponsored a car at the Indianapolis 500.
“He wanted to be the first man on the moon and I thought he was the logical guy
because of his attitude, his motivation and everything.”
In the backs of everyone’s minds, however, lurked the
dangers involved with space travel, especially the approximately 239,000-mile
trip to the moon. Rathmann and Grissom were returning home one day from
Milwaukee aboard Rathmann’s aircraft when the astronaut realized they were not
far from Mitchell. “You know,” said Grissom, “they’re going to name that
airfield down there after me. Man, I don’t like that. They just name those
airports after dead people.” Grissom even confided to his wife that if NASA
ever had a serious accident, it would likely involve him because of his long
service with America’s space program.
Grissom was proved tragically right—as he and his fellow
crewmates lost their lives on January 27, 1967, in the tragic Apollo 1 fire.
Grissom had known the risks involved with spaceflight, telling reporters: "If
we die, we want people to accept it, and hope it will not delay the space
program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of human life."
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