The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Armstrong didn’t have to be reminded. He struggled with his hand controllers to keep the cumbersome composite vehicle stable. He had to break away or the roll would become violent enough to damage the neck of the spacecraft where their parachute was stored. Neil fired the thrusters to undock, but the roll increased. The Gemini’s antennas would not stay in alignment, cutting off communication with the Earth station below, the tracking ship Coastal Sentry Quebec.

Finally, Scott got through. “We have serious problems here,” he announced. “We’re tumbling end over end up here.”

One of their RCS thrusters was stuck open, tossing the Gemini in an accelerating spin, which was now one revolution per second. Dave and Neil were having their vision blurred and they became dizzy.

Finally Armstrong broke the spin by completely shutting down the spacecraft’s orbital attitude and maneuver system and activating the separate reentry control thrusters. But this meant they would have to descend from orbit quickly because this thruster system could develop leaks once it had been fired.

The Mission Control room was on full alert. Around the country, NASA managers quickly consulted with each other then told Armstrong to go for an emergency retrofire with a descent trajectory into the western Pacific. Gemini VIII was above the Congo River when Gene Kranz and his flight controllers ordered the burn. The combined flame of the solid-rocket retros and the control thrusters dazzled the two pilots as they slid through the starry night. For the next 15 minutes they stared anxiously out their windows hoping to see the Pacific Ocean through the bright orbital dawn ahead. They still didn’t know if their retrofire had been accurate and whether they would land in the ocean or in some remote jungle – or maybe in enemy territory in Indochina.

As the sun climbed above the Pacific, Gemini VIII descended by parachute several hundred miles southeast of Japan. A search aircraft from Okinawa spotted their parachute and dropped rescue frogmen, who struggled to attach a flotation collar to the spacecraft as it rolled in the nasty 15foot swells. Several hours later Neil and Dave were aboard the destroyer Mason, seasick but otherwise okay. Their flight had lasted less than 12 hours.

Docking meant nothing if the composite vehicle could not be controlled. Lunar Orbit Rendezvous during an Apollo mission would depend on a perfectly controlled flight of the composite command and service module and the lunar module. But our first attempt at this had failed dangerously. No one was cheering in Mission Control.

After intensive investigations engineers at McDonnell, the manufacturers of the Gemini spacecraft, decided that a control thruster had stuck in its firing position due to an electrical short circuit. They modified the circuit to prevent any possibility of the thruster firing with the switch off.

Gemini IX and the angry alligator

Aldrin:

On the next Gemini mission, number nine, Jim Lovell and I were backup crew to Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan. Their job was to rendezvous and dock with a stand-in spacecraft, the Augmented Target Docking Adapter (ATDA), because they’d lost their Agena target when its Atlas booster had malfunctioned on the first launch attempt.

Launch morning, June 3, 1966, Jim and I checked out the spacecraft before the astronauts were sealed inside. It was great being at the Cape and working on an actual mission with real flight hardware – which had an oily, ozone-tainted smell – rather than with the simulators. The flight lifted off beautifully at 8:39 am, and once the orbital insertion was accomplished, Jim and I headed back to Houston in our T-38 to support the mission from there.

While we were in the air, however, Tom and Gene ran into the first of several problems. The rendezvous itself went smoothly, with the spacecraft radar coupled perfectly to the onboard computer. But as Tom fired his thrusters to ease up alongside the slowly tumbling ATDA, he exclaimed, “Look at that moose!” The target spacecraft presented a weird spectacle; instead of the circular docking throat at one end, the crew saw the conical white fiberglass launch shroud half open, gaping at them like the jaws of an “angry alligator.”