GEMINI 8: PRE-EMPT ANYTHING, BUT NOT “BATMAN!”

 

Command Pilot Neil Armstrong and Pilot Dave Scott had taken their Gemini 8 spacecraft and accomplished something that had never been done before by the U.S. They had docked with another spacecraft in orbit. The date was March 16^th, 1966, and as their spacecraft flew high over the Tananarive tracking station the crew proudly reported that they were going through the planned yaw maneuver with their Agena target vehicle secured to their spacecraft’s nose.

 While all of this was happening on the other side of the planet, I was just settling in at our warm little house in Sheridan Park in Saginaw, Michigan. It was just a bit after 7:00 in the evening Lexington Drive time and we had just returned from my Cub Scout “Spaghetti Dinner” that had been held in the common-purpose room at St. George’s Church.

 

My entire after-school time that day had been taken up preparing for the dinner. Since my Dad was the troop leader, not only did I have to attend, but I had to set-up, serve and then clean up! Gee, I’d always thought that Cub Scouting was about camping and junk… but fund raising? Ugh. Still, I returned home with a belly full of pasta and a face full of tomato sauce.

 

Now it was time to settle in by our black and white living room TV and watch my then most favorite show in the whole world- “Batman.” The show had only been running since January, but it hooked me like a drug. Everything I played somehow turned into Batman and so did everything I drew or talked about. Thus, no one else on Earth, or off of the earth existed from 7:30 until 8:00 on Wednesday and Thursday evenings- there was just me and the TV.

 

The Wednesday episode was presented with its cliff-hanger, then there was the following Thursday at school when we all discussed how Batman and Robin were going to escape Thursday evening in the conclusion. There followed six days of waiting for the following Wednesday to come and another “Batman” episode. If my third-grade teacher thought I was distracted before the “Batman” series came along, she was now without hope that I would ever recover.

 

“Batman” had just gotten started, the episode was called “The Purr-fect Crime” and Cat Woman looked quite fiendish tonight. Then, suddenly, just when things were getting good the ABC TV Network’s “SPECIAL REPORT” screen popped up!

 

What?! Not now! Not during “Batman!” What could this be? An atomic strike by the Soviets? Perhaps, but at least wait until after the cliff-hanger to tell us about it. Maybe it was just a short report and then we’ll be back to the caped crusader. Nope- there was Jules Bergman breathlessly announcing that something had gone terribly wrong on Gemini 8. Worst of all, the report eventually totally pre-empted the entire episode of “Batman.” No cliff-hanger, no Cat Woman, no Commissioner Gordon, no Bat-poles, no Bat-Cave… whatever had gone wrong with Gemini 8 could have at least waited until 8:00 when that stinking “Patty Duke Show” came on.

 

Additionally, the news people did not know much at all about what had happened, yet they talked on and on. I was beyond totally ticked off- I mean, pre-empt anything, but not “Batman.”

 

Launch time for Gemini 8 was 11:41:02 Nelle Haley Elementary School time on Wednesday morning. The whole event took place while I was sloshing my way home for lunch through the half-melted winter snow. Temperatures were hovering just above freezing and a gray overcast sky showed that winter was not yet willing to release its grip on the Great Lakes area. The whole launch was over by the time I came through the front door and the news folks on our living room TV were talking about the rendezvous and illustrating it with all sorts of gadgets.

 

NBC channel 5 had a model train set with a Gemini and Agena on rail cars going in circles. CBS had an actual computer with an animated set of orbits all of which could have held my attention all afternoon when I was back in school… except for the fact that Annex 3 where my classroom resided did not have a TV.

 

Later that day Gemini 8 went ahead with their mission and acquired Agena 5003. Once in the sunlight, Gemini 8 was also passing into range of the tracking ship ROSE KNOT VICTOR (RKV) at 06:32:17 mission elapsed time.

 

“We’re sitting about two feet out,” Armstrong reported as soon as communications were established.

 

“Go ahead…” the RKV controller, Keith Kundel, began.

 

“We’ll go ahead and dock.” Armstrong replied.

 

“Roger,” Kundel replied and then thought better of what he had just said, “Stand by for a couple of minutes here.”

 

It took 18 seconds for the RKV controllers to verify that they had good telemetry from both spacecraft in order to give the final permission to actually dock.

 

“Okay Gemini 8,” Kundel came back on the radio with confidence, “You’ve got T/M solid. You’re looking good on the ground. Go ahead and dock.”

 

Once cleared, Armstrong thrusted ahead and gently eased the nose of the Gemini 8 spacecraft into the docking cone of the Agena; it was 06:33:52 mission elapsed time. Everything looked fine for nearly a half hour- then Scott glanced at his attitude indicator.

 

“Neil,” he said casually, “we’re in a bank.”

 

Thinking Scott’s attitude indicator may have tumbled, Armstrong looked at his own and saw that the spacecraft was indeed in slight roll. He corrected with his hand controller, but as soon as he let go of the handle Gemini 8 snapped back into a bank and continued diverging. Thinking the trouble was in the Agena, which had caused trouble on its previous flight, Scott shut down the target vehicle. The roll, however, continued to increase. Now Armstrong became concerned that the tumbling may stress the nose of Gemini, which was rigid in the docking adapter. So, he decided to undock and thrust away. But with Agena’s mass gone the Gemini went completely out of control.

 Neither Armstrong nor Scott had recorded the exact moment that the two spacecraft began their un-commanded roll, and they were out of ground contact as it rapidly went out of control. Estimates are that about 20 minutes of normal flight went by before all hell broke loose. Gemini 8 soon came into acquisition range of the tracking ship Coastal Sentry Quebec (CSQ). James R. Fucci, CapCom aboard the ship, was concerned and perplexed. He could not get a solid electronic lock-on the spacecraft, and a blinking light signal indicated that the craft had undocked. Unaware that the spacecraft was rolling, so the antennas could not remain in position, he put in a call to the crew to try to find out about these strange signs he saw on his console.

 

Fucci: “Gemini 8, CSQ Cap Com. Com check. How do you read?”

 

Scott: “We have serious problems here . . . we're tumbling end over end up here. We're disengaged from the Agena.”

 

Fucci: “Okay. We got your SPACECRAFT FREE indication here. What seems to be the problem?”

 

Armstrong: “We're rolling up and we can't turn anything off.

Continuously increasing in a left roll.”

 

Fucci: [37 seconds later] “Roger, Gemini 8. CSQ.”

 

Armstrong: “Stand by.”

 

Scott: “We have a violent left roll here at the present time and we can't turn the RCS's off, and we can't fire it, and we certainly have a roll… stuck hand control.”

 

Once the crew realized that it was their own thruster and not those of the Agena that was acting upon them, they tried to quickly troubleshoot the problem. For a moment it seemed like a stuck hand-controller. Finally, Armstrong decided that he needed to shut down the OAMS thrusters completely and work with the RCS thrusters. That simple act under the current conditions was almost super-human. With his vision blurred and tunneling and the sun flashing into the spacecraft through the windows like a high intensity strobe light plus every loose object pinned to the walls, Armstrong had to reach into a panel of 64 switches and flip the correct one.

 

Upon accomplishing that task Armstrong activated both RCS rings and immediately went to work with the hand controller. Indeed, it was not stuck and was working just fine. In short order he had the slowed the rate of tumble and was regaining control of Gemini 8.

 

Once it was clear that he had control, Armstrong shut down one RCS ring in order to save fuel. Those thrusters, located in the nose of the Gemini spacecraft, were intended for reentry use only and were also the only form of attitude control the spacecraft had once the adapter section was jettisoned. If they were to begin to leak or fail in some other way, the crew would be doomed to stay in orbit. Armstrong then carefully reactivated the maneuver thrusters until he was able to tell that No. 8 was the culprit. It had failed in the “on” mode- meaning it had stuck open!

 

So… why had thruster No. 8 failed in the open position? After splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, the spacecraft had been hauled back to its place of birth-the McDonnell plant in St. Louis- so the engineers could analyze its problems. Set up in a controlled laboratory where the investigations could proceed unmolested, the spacecraft was checked over completely for more than a month. Since the adapter section containing those thrusters had been jettisoned before reentry, only the most probable cause of the trouble could be identified. The evaluation team decided that the valves on thruster 8 opening unintentionally was probably caused by an electrical short. There were, however, several locations in the spacecraft at which such a fault could have occurred. To prevent a recurrence of the thruster problem, McDonnell changed the attitude control circuit switch so that when it was in the "off mode” no power could go to the thrusters. Formerly, turning off power to the electronics packages did not stop power going to the thrusters. Thus, they could still fire.

 

When I woke up the next morning the whole Gemini 8 business was over.  Armstrong and Scott were safely aboard the destroyer MASON and all was well. It all happened in the middle of the night while most of America, including myself, was asleep. Even my morning cartoons were not interrupted. So, I busied myself at the task of flunking the third grade. You may scoff, but it was not easy. Mrs. Bechtol was constantly on my case. One day she even had me up in front of the entire class so that she could ridicule my new Batman T-shirt and compare me to the class smart kid in order to set an example of what a failure looks like. I was often scolded for always looking out the window and she loudly chided me saying that no one would ever give me a job where I looked out the window all the time. Three decades later, while flying as an commercial pilot I sat there looking out the window of a Falcon Jet- and getting paid to do it. I always snickered thinking about that.

Me in the summer of 1966 wearing

the Batman shirt that so annoyed

my 3rd grade teacher.