Word: geminis
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...unbelievably calm. But behind every word was an unmistakable note of triumph. From 185 miles above the earth, Air Force Major Thomas Stafford reported that he and his fellow astronauts had just made the first manned rendezvous in space. Moving with exquisite precision across the night sky, the spacecraft Gemini 6 tracked down its partner, Gemini 7. As the two ships edged closer to fly in formation, then circle each other in a stately orbital ballet, Stafford and Command Pilot Wally Schirra joined Gemini 7's Lieut. Colonel Frank Borman and Commander James Lovell at the farthest reach...
...more of a problem than parking a compact car; rescue of astronauts adrift in space became a definite possibility. A manned orbiting laboratory suddenly seemed more than an imaginative scheme; a space station that can be constructed aloft seemed within man's grasp. And the men of Gemini 7 who had blasted off eleven days earlier to spend a full two weeks above the atmosphere had vastly extended the known limits of human endurance...
Handel, Glinka and Dvorak. Against this soothing background, Astronaut Lovell was allowed to strip off his space suit and fly in his underwear. He thus became the first U.S. astronaut to fly without a pressurized suit, which affords the only protection against a sudden, accidental decompression of the Gemini spacecraft...
Higher in Orbit. The Gemini 7 astronauts chalked up some other, more significant firsts. Once in orbit, they fired thrusters to turn Gemini and adjust its velocity, then flew in formation with their detached, third-stage booster for 16 minutes. By aligning the spacecraft with setting stars on the earth's horizon, they were able to navigate precisely without aid from computers on the ground. They were also able to track the first three minutes of the spectacular flight of a Polaris missile as it was fired from beneath the Atlan tic by the nuclear submarine Benjamin Franklin...
Late in the week, when accelerated preparations at Cape Kennedy all but guaranteed that Gemini 6 and Astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford would be ready to blast off by Sunday, Gemini 7 was ordered into a new orbit...