Word: cernan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Adapter (ATDA) because its protective shroud had not shaken loose, the two astronauts were exhausted by three difficult but largely successful rendezvous attempts (TIME, June 10). Even so, the Gemini 9 crew hoped to salvage most of the mission by successfully completing their last and most dramatic assignment: Astronaut Cernan's scheduled 21-hour walk in space. "Hallelujah!" shouted Cernan as he opened his hatch and emerged into space on schedule...
Clad in his cumbersome space suit and connected to Gemini by a white, 25-ft. oxygen and communications cord, Cernan methodically began his work. He attached a rearview mirror to the docking bar near Gemini's nose so that Stafford could watch and photograph him through a forward-facing window while he maneuvered near the aft end of the craft. Just behind the hatch, he clamped a 16-mm. movie camera into place...
Swiveling his shoulders and hips, Cernan inched cautiously around the craft and tried to familiarize himself with the strange dynamics of the umbilical cord in the vacuum of space. At one point, the cord wrapped itself around him. "The snake's all over me!" shouted the surprised astronaut. For still unexplained reasons, Cernan-like Ed White before him-had to struggle constantly against a tendency to soar above the spacecraft at the end of his cord...
Fogged-Up Experiment. After 55 minutes, and just as Gemini passed over the dark side of the earth, Cernan moved into position to prepare for his Buck Rogers-like flight in the jet-powered Astronaut Maneuvering Unit (AMU), stowed in the equipment section on Gemini's tail end. Struggling mightily, he pulled off the AMU's thermal cover, which had not been automatically jettisoned as planned after Gemini passed through the atmosphere on its way into orbit. Working with a check list calling for 32 separate operations, he began testing the AMU's propulsion and oxygen systems...
Breathing heavily and perspiring, Cernan soon saturated the atmosphere inside his space suit with more moisture than the suit's evaporator unit could handle. Moisture condensed and then froze on the cold plastic of his helmet visor, almost totally obscuring his vision. After increasing his oxygen flow in a vain attempt to clear his visor, Cernan continued to check out the AMU. But just before he was scheduled to emerge from the adapter and jet off into space, Commander Stafford reluctantly scrubbed the experiment. "No go for the AMU," he reported to Houston. "The pilot's fogged...