Word: spacecrafts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While Gemini 4 was in one of its last revolutions around the earth, Command Pilot Jim McDivitt allowed as how he and Co-Pilot Ed White were a little tired but feeling fit. From Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center, Gemini 3 Astronaut John Young joked that the tough part would come back on earth...
...Best of Both. "Gemini 4 demanded the best of men and machines," said Dr. Robert R. Gilruth, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston, after the successful completion of the flight. And it got the best. Except for a few relatively minor flaws, the space capsule functioned magnificently; even in the searing heat of reentry, the cabin stayed around 70°F., with humidity of about 60%-just like a crisp June day in Denver. As for the men, Command Pilot McDivitt and Copilot White survived more than four days of weightlessness in such good shape that space doctors...
Near Guaymas, Mexico, McDivitt fired four retrorockets, each with a 2,500-lb. kick, to put the slowly spinning cabin into the proper trajectory. At 400,000 ft., the spacecraft re-entered the atmosphere, and communications, as expected, went out in the intense heat of friction. In his last garbled transmission, McDivitt could be heard to say, "O.K." Outside, the heat shield glowed red-hot as the temperature rose to 3,000° F. The astronauts were enthralled. "The prettiest part of it all is re-entry," said McDivitt afterward. "We saw pink light coming up around our spacecraft...
White confessed that during his "extravehicular activity," his 25-ft. tether gave him considerable trouble, kept tugging him toward the very spot he had been warned to avoid-the spacecraft's adapter section. There, two-foot-long plumes of burning fuel shot out from the thruster rockets fired by McDivitt to stabilize the capsule, and White at times drifted as near as five or six feet above them...
...routine that seemed almost mundane after Ed White's excursion into raw space. Yet even as the mission con tinued to circle the earth, there was new Project Gemini activity. Work had begun at Cape Kennedy to mount and prepare another Titan II missile, topped by another spacecraft: Gemini 5, which will carry Astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad on a seven-day space expedition in late August...