The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

In May 1963 Gordo Cooper made the last flight of Project Mercury. Glenn:

I was aboard the Coastal Sentry near Kyushu, Japan in May of 1963 when Gordo made his twenty-two orbit flight in Faith 7. He had to come down early after his spacecraft lost orbital velocity and I helped talk him through the retro fire sequence. He fired the retros “right on the old gazoo,” as I reported, and came down in the Pacific near Midway thrty-four hours and twenty minutes and 546,185 miles after liftoff, ending what proved to proved to be the last and most scientifically productive flight of Project Mercury.

Glenn was not assigned another flight but he acted as a kind of ambassador for NASA. At the end of 1963 he decided to leave NASA and enter politics. When a domestic accident left him with concussion and inner ear problems, he was forced to withdraw as a candidate. He retired from the US Marine Corps on 1 January 1965.

During the spring of 1965 NASA began a programme of two-man flights called Project Gemini.

Chapter 3 Man in Space – The Glory Days

Project Gemini

The Gemini program was designed as a bridge between the Mercury and Apollo programs, primarily to test equipment and mission procedures in Earth orbit and to train astronauts and ground crews for future (Apollo) missions. The general objectives of the program included: long duration flights in excess of the requirements of a lunar-landing mission; rendezvous and docking of two vehicles in Earth orbit; the development of operational proficiency of both flight and ground crews; the conduct of experiments in space; extravehicular (EVA) operations; active control of re-entry flight path to achieve a precise landing point; and onboard orbital navigation. Each Gemini mission carried two astronauts into Earth orbit for periods ranging from 5 hours to 14 days. The program consisted of 10 crewed launches, 2 unmanned launches and 7 target vehicles, at a total cost of approximately 1,280 million dollars.

Project Gemini and the bush telegraph

Hamish Lindsay was an Australian who worked for NASA Carnarvon, one of the NASA tracking stations in Australia. Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director, described him as “one who lived through the Camelot period of space in the 60s and knows the trauma we all endured”.

The tracking station at Carnarvon was built for the Gemini missions. Carnarvon was an outback town with a population of 2,200, 965 kilometres north of Fremantle on the west coast of Australia.

The first Gemini trial was on 8 April 1964 and was an unmanned test of the structural integrity of the new spacecraft and its launch vehicle, the Titan II. Lindsay: