Word: astronaut
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Seventeen news photographers drown or die of concussions as Lynda Bird Johnson spends a holiday surfing in California. Spacecraft Gemini 8 and Gemini 9 establish an historic orbital link-up. Astronaut Roger Overendhout, clad in red, white, and blue underwear, is able to crawl from one capsule to another. Playing a tube he had carefully smuggled aboard in his space suit, he performs a riotous impromptu strip-tease for the laughing crew of Gemini 8. Astronaut Kirwood Derby Jr., using a small NBC-TV camera he was carefully paid $10,000 to smuggle aboard in his spacesuit, records the whole...
Calm & Effective. Perhaps. But there was little doubt last week that much of the credit for the successful rendezvous belonged to casual Wally Schirra, who, at 42, is the oldest astronaut flying. It was his cool and seasoned performance during the abortive Sunday launch of Gemini 6 that made the midweek triumph possible. Had he panicked and pulled the Dring ("chicken switch") that would have ejected him and Copilot Stafford from the Gemini capsule, the mission could probably not have been sent aloft on time. His superb piloting of the capsule, perfected in long hours of practice in the Houston...
Handel, Glinka and Dvorak. Against this soothing background, Astronaut Lovell was allowed to strip off his space suit and fly in his underwear. He thus became the first U.S. astronaut to fly without a pressurized suit, which affords the only protection against a sudden, accidental decompression of the Gemini spacecraft...
Only a few minor troubles marred the otherwise perfect flight. A fuel-cell warning light flashed on, but the cell itself appeared to be operating perfectly. The astronauts were unable to spot another light-a laser beam projected from a station in Hawaii-and thus could not conduct a planned laser voice-communications experiment. Astronaut Borman also sheepishly reported that a urine-sample bag had come apart in his hand...
Schirra, theoretically just nine days away from the launching of his own Gemini 6, was by far the most relaxed of the group. He was the only one without a certain wild-eyed look that seems to reflect the two-sided nature of the astronaut's world--half survival training in the desert and half telling college editors at cocktail parties what it's like to have been in space...