Word: geminis
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Electronic Tag. At Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center, unflappable Chris Kraft every day faced the decision of whether to keep Cooper and Conrad going for still another day. From start to finish, the "go-no go" decision hinged on Gemini's cantankerous fuel cell. A failure in its liquid oxygen supply tank nearly terminated the mission on the first day, and the faulty heating unit that caused the problem never did kick on. As the flight soared into the second day, the oxygen pressure slowly moved upward-and optimism soared at Houston command. "The morning headline," broadcast Kraft...
...Gemini 5 had more military research assignments than any previous civilian space flight-a fact that caused Moscow to talk and squawk more about Gemini 5 than any earlier U.S. space mission. Moscow's Tass at first charged that the U.S. was recklessly gambling with the lives of the spacemen on an ill-prepared mission. When it became clear that Gemini would succeed and lead the U.S. far along on its timetable for reaching the moon, the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Mstislav Keldysh, tried to deflate the news by proclaiming that nobody knows enough about...
...hydrogen to produce the electricity to run the craft's computer, radar, communications and environment-control systems. For reasons not yet fully understood, the pressure inside the oxygen tank increased as the volume of liquid oxygen decreased while it was being used. Soon the fuel cell was supplying Gemini with all the electricity it needed, and the astronauts began switching their systems back on. Fuel-cell experts had actually underestimated the system's efficiency, were surprised that they could get sufficient power with such low pressure and so little oxygen fueling the cells. Had they known this beforehand...
...third day up, the astronauts did the next best thing: they played a game of electronic tag. In an imaginary chase across the heavens, Cooper, in four precise maneuvers, closed the gap between the orbit of Gemini 5 and the simulated orbit of a phantom Agena rocket plotted by a computer...
First (see diagram below) he fired a short burst of backward burn from the thrusters, lowering Gemini's apogee by 13 miles. Almost 40 minutes later, he triggered a forward burn to raise the perigee ten miles. Next he yawed the spacecraft and fired the aft thrusters to move it onto the same orbital plane as the phantom. After one last forward thrust to raise the apogee, Cooper had his craft in a co-elliptical orbit with the phantom Agena-close enough so that the pilot, using on-board radar and computer, could eventually bring his craft to within...