Word: geminis
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...three networks will provide live coverage of the Gemini 8 launch scheduled for Tuesday, March 15, and, if all goes as planned, will follow the three-day mission with films of the farthest and fastest walk in history-one and a half times around the world...
...months, Astronauts Elliot M. See Jr. and Charles Bassett had been regular commuters between Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center and McDonnell Aircraft's St. Louis plant, where the Gemini 9 capsule they were to pilot next May was abuilding. To both, the flight had become almost as routine as driving to work. To both, the twin-engine T-38 jet trainer they boarded last week for the 90-minute hop to St. Louis must have seemed about as tame as a tricycle...
...earnest, self-effacing civilian engineer who was to have commanded the Gemini 9 mission, had spent six years checking out the hottest planes aloft as a General Electric test pilot when he became an astronaut in 1962. Bassett, an outgoing Air Force major who was to have taken a 60-minute walk in space during the flight toting an instrument-crammed, 166-lb. pack on his back, served as a fighter pilot in Korea and a test pilot at California's Edwards Air Force Base before joining the space program...
...days of training with a "rendezvous simulator" machine in preparation for the chief goal of their space flight-a complex docking maneuver with an Agena rocket-the astronauts left Houston at 7:35 a.m., with See at the controls. Right on their tail in another T-38 was the Gemini 9 backup crew, Air Force Lieut. Colonel Thomas Stafford, who copiloted December's Gemini 6 flight, and Navy Lieut. Commander Eugene Cernan. Though an enormous cloud canopy hovered over much of the Midwest, it was strictly a run-of-the-mill flight...
...Exactly what went wrong may never be known. The plane's right wing glanced off the metal roof of McDonnell's Building 101-where the Gemini 9 capsule was being readied for shipment to Cape Kennedy later in the week. The plane bounced, hit the building again, then plummeted into a parking lot, bursting into flames. Bassett was decapitated. See was hurled through the shattered fuselage and killed instantly. Stafford and Cernan, unaware of the crash, touched down safely on a runway nearby...