Word: geminis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gemini 11 's successful flight last week (see SCIENCE) underscored the space race's most tantalizing puzzle: What are the Russians doing? During the past 18 months, while the U.S. has conducted nine Gemini missions and captured virtually all important space records, the Soviet Union has not announced the launching of a single manned space flight...
...Like all Gemini missions before it, last week's flight of Gemini 11 was a carefully planned practice session de signed to teach U.S. spacemen as much as possible about the techniques they must master and the troubles they must overcome before landing men on the moon and returning them safely to earth. The practice paid off handsome ly. From its improbably precise launch, made within a tiny, two-second "win dow" of time, to its all-but-perfect splashdown 21 miles from the recovery carrier Guam, Gemini 11 proved to be an able instructor indeed...
Temporary Blindness. Only minutes after he emerged from Gemini's open hatch, Astronaut Gordon was in trou ble. Though he had done nothing more than detach a cosmic-ray counter from the spacecraft's hull and mount a movie camera on a bracket behind the hatch, his heart was beating wildly, he was bathed in perspiration and panting for breath. "I've got to rest a minute," he gasped. "I'm pooped." After regaining his breath, he inched forward to Gemini's nose, which was securely locked in the docking collar of the Agena target...
From a box behind the Agena's docking collar, Gordon pulled out the looped end of a 2-in.-diameter, 100-ft., Dacron rope, slipped it over the end of Gemini's l-ft.-long docking bar and clamped it tight. As he crawled back toward his hatch, exhausted by that seemingly simple task, perspiration temporarily blinded his right eye. With that, Conrad ordered him back into Gemini's cabin, wiping out planned exercises with a hand-held jet maneuvering gun and a power tool for tightening bolts...
Equipped with everything that it will carry to the moon except the astronauts and their sleeping couches, the Apollo system, weighing 56,900 lbs., or more than seven times the Gemini spacecraft, blasted off from Cape Kennedy riding the nose of a 22-story-high Saturn 1 rocket. After separating from the Saturn booster, Apollo fired its own rocket engine and soared to a peak altitude of 706 miles over South Africa. Then, as the space ship began to descend, its engine was fired three more times in successful tests of its capabilities...