Word: geminis
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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...
Using the powerful, 16,000-lb.-thrust engine of their captive Agena, the Gemini 11 astronauts also reached the highest altitude ever flown by man. While consuming nearly three-quarters of a ton of fuel in a 25-second burn, the engine increased the Gemini-Agena's speed by 620 m.p.h. and shoved it into an orbit with an apogee of 850 miles-far exceeding Gemini 10's record height of 476 miles. As his ship approached maximum altitude, Conrad could not contain his excitement. "It's fantastic," he radioed to controllers at Carnarvon, Australia. "You wouldn...
Skip Rope Outside. By managing to secure the Dacron tether between the Agena and Gemini 11 before abandoning his space walk, Gordon had set the stage for the most spectacular of Gemini's maneuvers. On the third day of the flight, Conrad undocked Gemini and used his thrusters to back slowly away from the Agena until the 100-ft. rope was taut between them. As soon as the thrusters were shut off, however, both ships began to gyrate erratically, the rope oscillating between them. "It's like the Agena and I have got a skip rope between...
...Manned Spacecraft Center, immediately conjured up "colonies of vehicles fastened together in ways like this." The slow rotation of the system also provided a bonus: a small centrifugal force that acted like a weak gravitational pull, causing objects to drift toward and finally "fall" on the rear wall of Gemini's cabin. It was the first artificial gravity created during a manned orbital flight. After three hours of tethered orbiting, Conrad flipped a switch that jettisoned Gemini's docking bar, freeing the spacecraft from the connecting rope. As Gemini drifted away, the tether-now attached only...
...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...