Word: armstrong
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That ominous message from the two-man spaceship Gemini 8 alarmed a nation grown accustomed to uninterrupted space success. Off Formosa, aboard the tracking ship Coastal Sentry tense NASA technicians followed the approaching capsule by radar and urgently queried Astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott for additional information. In the Mission Control Center near Houston, flight controllers huddled over their consoles and studied telemetered data in a desperate effort to track down the trouble. Millions of Americans listened in startled silence as NASA's Paul Haney, his usually calm voice urgent and shaken, announced over television and radio that...
Gemini 8's ordeal began shortly after its docking triumph, when Armstrong and Scott began a program of planned maneuvers to test the stability of the Gemini-Agena system. As they passed within range of the tracking station at Tannanarive, in the Malagasy Republic, Command Pilot Armstrong reported that he had easily swung the Gemini-Agena combination around 90°. "It's gone quite well," he reported, just before he passed out of radio range...
...start the Agena's tape recorder, already programmed to fire the Agena's attitude thrusters and begin a series of gentle maneuvers. Instead, the Gemini-Agena began to gyrate violently through space, yawing and rolling at a rapidly increasing rate. Unable to stabilize the joined spacecraft, Armstrong resorted to a last-ditch maneuver: he undocked...
...Violent Oscillations." High over Southeast Asia, the tumbling spacecraft came into range of the Coastal Sentry. "It's in a roll, and we can't seem to turn anything off," Armstrong informed the shipboard controller, who reported to Houston that Gemini was now "showing' pretty violent oscillations." It seemed to Armstrong that Gemini's No. 8 thruster -one of the small rockets used to turn or yaw the craft-had stuck open and was pushing the craft into an uncontrollable spin, which at one point reached a critical rate of a complete revolution each second...
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). The Five Pennies. This movie biography of Jazz Musician Ernest Loring ("Red") Nichols is laden with heroics and sentimentality, but Danny Kaye and Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong have a ball and save the show...