The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Conrad enjoyed this mission. “We got to fly the whole thing, which was the closest to the world I had left, that is flying airplanes. Like the M equals one rendezvous without help from the ground; we hand flew most of the burns – they weren’t controlled by the computer; that sort of thing. It was a great flight.”

The Soviet’s new G-1 booster was vertically staged, using lox, kerosene and clusters of RD-7 (Semyorka) engines. They were hoping it would enable them to make a circumlunar flight in 1967.

Gemini XII: Aldrin space walks on his first flight

Lovell commented, “This mission was supposed to wind up the Gemini Program and catch all those items that were not caught in previous flights.” Such as sorting out the Cernan and Gordon spacewalk problems. The Air Force wanted to try the Astronaut Manoeuvring Unit (AMU) from the Gemini IX mission again, but it was decided to limit Aldrin’s space walk to conducting set tasks. Although Lovell was now a seasoned space traveller with the 14-day mission behind him, it was Buzz Aldrin’s first flight. Lindsay:

Unfortunately they weren’t able to boost themselves up to the planned 740 kilometres high orbit due to a suspected faulty fuel pump in the Agena engine, so they were reassigned to witness a rare eclipse of the sun, west of the Galapagos islands, ending near Brazil. The two astronauts enjoyed a box seat view of the 8 second eclipse, 274 kilometres above the 800 scientists gathered below to watch the event in South America. Aldrin took excellent photographs of the eclipse, unaffected by the Earth’s atmosphere.

“We hit the eclipse right on the money, but we were unsuccessful in picking up the shadow,” Lovell announced to Houston.

Using the experience and advice of Cernan in Gemini IX, Aldrin worked tirelessly training himself in a tank of water before the mission to work at all the experimental tasks until he felt he was perfect. During his long space walk Aldrin moved to a panel where he plugged in electrical cables, turned bolts, snapped hooks through rings, peeled off velcro strips, while experimenting with foot holds and his tether cable. He was able to complete all the tasks and suffered none of the fogging, perspiring, and tiredness of some of the earlier missions, although he did complain of cold feet.

Aldrin described:

In the first EVA I mounted a telescoping hand rail that went from one end of the spacecraft to the other; then I did some night photography, pretty much just standing up and shooting for ultraviolet light. In the longest EVA I had activities with the docked Agena. I used the handrail to try to move up hand over hand to the Agena at the nose and there I tested a number of different fasteners and tethers and handholds, and attached a tether to the docking adapter. Then I went to the back of the spacecraft and did extensive evaluations of the foot restraints using one and two restraints that were excellent in their tight and positive control.

I used a lot of different connectors and fastenings and tried a lot of work tasks primarily to evaluate how well those foot restraints went. The last EVA was just doing a dump of things overboard.

I didn’t have trouble such as fogging up with my suit – it was a question of managing energy – I just didn’t fight the problem. I got good restraints and managed to get good control of inertia and balance so I was exerting myself less – I just didn’t fight the problem.

Gemini XII splashed down and was picked up by the aircraft carrier USS Wasp. As soon as it had left the launch pad demolition crews began to dismantle the launch complex for scrap. All the Gemini astronauts became Apollo astronauts.