Word: astronaut
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...attendant, he checked the spacecraft's thrusters, wiped its windshield. Ordered to get back into the capsule, he protested like a scolded kid. "I'm doing great," he said. "It's fun. I'm not coming in." When, after 20 minutes of space gymnastics, U.S. Astronaut Edward Higgins White II, 34, finally did agree to squeeze himself back into his Gemini 4 ship, he still had not had enough of space walking. Said he to Command Pilot James Alton McDivitt: "It's the saddest day of my life...
...while stationed in Germany, White read about the U.S.'s embryonic astronaut program, decided that he would one day get into it and, in the process of preparing himself, took a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan-at the same time Jim McDivitt was there. After Michigan, White went to test-pilot school, later was assigned to a necessary but frustratingly tangential job having to do with the space program. At the controls of a jet cargo plane, he would go into a screaming, precisely plotted dive that would create the zero-gravity...
...ward the end of its first orbit. The ship's OAMS fuel supply had gone from 410 Ibs. to 228 Ibs. in the hide-and-seek game with the booster. Director Kraft told McDivitt to take it easy on the fuel in chasing the errant booster. The astronaut replied: "It's out farther than we expected." A little later he asked Houston, "Do you want a major effort to close with this thing or save the fuel?" The instant answer: save the fuel and forget about the booster. Resigned, McDivitt said, "I guess we're just going...
Tethered to his Gemini space ship by a thin gold cord, astronaut Edward H. White II stopped into the void yesterday and became the first American to float alone in the hostile emptiness of space...
...Foolish!" barked NASA Manned-Flight Director Robert Gilruth. "I think maybe this will not happen again." Growled NASA Director James Webb, "This was not an adequate performance by an astronaut." Gemini Pilots Virgil Grissom, 38, and John Young, 34, were on the carpet for something they did on their recent three-orbit mission. Gilruth and Webb told a congressional committee that the corned-beef-on-rye sandwich Young smuggled into their Molly Brown capsule and fed Grissom instead of the scientifically prepared flight diet was strictly unprogrammed. Mincing no words, the administrators decreed that henceforth "corned-beef-sandwich incidents" will...