Word: cooperating
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Electronic Tag. At Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center, unflappable Chris Kraft every day faced the decision of whether to keep Cooper and Conrad going for still another day. From start to finish, the "go-no go" decision hinged on Gemini's cantankerous fuel cell. A failure in its liquid oxygen supply tank nearly terminated the mission on the first day, and the faulty heating unit that caused the problem never did kick on. As the flight soared into the second day, the oxygen pressure slowly moved upward-and optimism soared at Houston command. "The morning headline," broadcast Kraft...
Static from Moscow. They were, indeed. The astronauts carried out 17 experiments-ten more than Gemini 4. Five of them involved photography. Clicking away with a modified Hasselblad 70-mm. reflex camera and a 35-mm. camera, Cooper and Conrad photographed the moon, the eye of Hurricane Doreen east of Hawaii, and the zodiacal light above the horizon just after twilight and just before dawn-gaining invaluable information for meteorologists and astronomers. They sighted and photographed the firings of two Minutemen missiles, launched to coincide with Gemini's passover. They took infra-red measurements of volcanoes, land masses...
...third day up, the astronauts did the next best thing: they played a game of electronic tag. In an imaginary chase across the heavens, Cooper, in four precise maneuvers, closed the gap between the orbit of Gemini 5 and the simulated orbit of a phantom Agena rocket plotted by a computer...
...apogee by 13 miles. Almost 40 minutes later, he triggered a forward burn to raise the perigee ten miles. Next he yawed the spacecraft and fired the aft thrusters to move it onto the same orbital plane as the phantom. After one last forward thrust to raise the apogee, Cooper had his craft in a co-elliptical orbit with the phantom Agena-close enough so that the pilot, using on-board radar and computer, could eventually bring his craft to within 17 miles below and 38 miles behind the phantom. "Mission accomplished," announced the ground controllers. To have completed...
...Usually Cooper was the taciturn, matter-of-fact command pilot, Pete Conrad the ebullient space tourist. On one pass he chattered with Astronaut Jim McDivitt, sitting as capsule communicator at Houston...