The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

On 23 March 1965 the first manned flight in the Gemini program was launched, the crew being Gus Grissom, commander and John Young, pilot. Because he had nearly drowned after his splashdown in Liberty Bell 7, Grissom was allowed to name his spacecraft “Molly Brown” from a musical about a survivor of the Titanic disaster. It was the only spacecraft to be named in the Gemini program. Lindsay:

In the initial orbit over Texas, Grissom fired two 38.5 kilogram rockets for 75 seconds to slow Molly Brown down by 15 metres per second and dropped it down into a nearly circular orbit. In the second orbit Grissom fired the rockets again, and shifted the plane of their orbit. Both manoeuvres were firsts for a manned spacecraft. “This was a big event, really a big event,” Grissom said later.

Another event that seemed minor but became big with repercussions reverberating all the way up to Congress, was John Young’s corned beef sandwich from Wolfie’s delicatessen at Cocoa Beach.

Young said: “It was no big deal – I had this sandwich in my suit pocket. The horizon sensors weren’t workin’ right so I gave this sandwich to Gus so he could relax – there was nothing he could do in the dark to make that thing work, until we got back into the daylight.”

“It negated the flight’s protocol,” thundered the doctors. “The crumbs could have got into the machinery,” complained the engineers. “NASA has lost control of the astronaut group,” boomed hostile voices around the floor of Congress. Grissom later admitted that the sandwich was one of the highlights of the mission for him.

In the third orbit Grissom completed a fail-safe plan with a two-and-a-half-minute burn that dropped the spacecraft perigee to 72 kilometres to make sure of re-entry even if the retrorockets failed to work. This was added to the flight plan to protect the Gemini 3 crew against being stranded in space in case of a failure of the retrorockets, prompted by Martin Caidin’s novel Marooned.

Just before landing, Grissom threw a landing attitude switch, and Molly Brown snapped into the right angle to land, pitching both men into the window and breaking Grissom’s faceplate, before they dropped into the Atlantic, 111 kilometres from the US Intrepid. The Gemini spacecraft had produced less lift than predicted so it landed about 84 kilometres short of the target. As they landed the spacecraft was dragged along nose under water by the parachute. All Grissom could see through the window was sea water, and with his Mercury flight still fresh in his mind, he released the parachute, but this time was not going to “crack the hatch”, so the two astronauts suffered a miserable 30 minutes sealed in a “can” that was getting hotter by the minute, and being tossed around by the seas.

Young: “It was a really good test mission. Gus performed more than 12 different experiments in the three orbits – he did a really great job – I don’t think he really got enough credit for the great job he did. He proved that the vehicle would do all the things needed to stay up there for fourteen days. We changed the orbit manually, the plane of the orbit, and we used the first computer in space.”

Mission Control was moved from Cape Canaveral to Houston, Texas between the Gemini III and Gemini IV missions. The Mission Control staff was expanded from two to four teams to cover the longer Gemini missions. The new Flight Directors were Gene Kranz with his White team and Glynn Lunney with his Black team, the new teams being added to the existing Red and Blue teams.

Gemini IV: the first US space walk