Word: geminis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nothing in the mass of telemetered data, no comment in the yards of tape-recorded communications brought back the drama of the three-day flight of Gemini 11 with quite the same impact as the remarkable color pictures shot by the astronauts. The movie footage and still shots released by NASA last week give an astronaut's clear-eyed view of everything from the weird undulations of the tether that briefly connected Gemini and the Agena target vehicle, to vast panoramas of the earth seen from altitudes never before attained...
Devoid of Life. In the most spectacular movie sequence, shot with a camera fixed in the left cabin window, Gemini and Agena gyrate erratically at opposite ends of the oscillating Dacron tether while the earth swings dizzyingly below. Gradually, as Command Pilot Pete Conrad fires short blasts of his thrusters, the two ships settle down into stable rotation. The tether stretches taut between them. Frames taken after the tether is cut loose show the long Dacron strap winding in haphazard fashion around Agena...
Other shots from the cabin window show Gemini in a successful rendezvous and docking maneuver with Agena. As the coupled craft soar toward their record apogee of 850 miles, the curvature of the earth's horizon becomes more pronounced, and the earth assumes an unmistakably globelike shape. Though the pictures are sharp and show geological features plainly, the earth seems devoid of life; it offers no visible evidence of its teeming population, its great cities, its bridges or its dams...
Movies of Richard Gordon's unsuccessful space walk, shot automatically from a camera he mounted on Gemini's hull, graphically illustrate the already familiar difficulties of extravehicular activity (EVA). As he moves slowly toward Gemini's nose, the astronaut is clearly out of his element; his movements are labored and uncertain. The simple task of clamping Agena's tether to Gemini's docking bar is an exhausting struggle. As Gordon attempts to straddle Gemini's nose, cowboy-fashion, he proves unable to assume a stable position. There is every indication that...
...they had used their fuel so efficiently that they had enough left to make a final and unscheduled rendezvous with the Agena. At reentry, Conrad and Gordon were relieved of their duties by a new, automatic re-entry system that the astronauts sarcastically call "the chimp mode." Controlled by Gemini's onboard computer, it fired the spacecraft's thrusters at the proper time to correct its attitude and direction. Its value was evident. For it guided the relaxed astronauts to a splashdown closer to the recovery carrier than ever before in the U.S. manned spaceflight program...