Down the Pickle Barrel

"Have you got us in sight?" asked Astronaut Tom Stafford as Gemini 9 dropped toward the choppy Atlantic Ocean under its 84-ft. orange-and-white-striped parachute.

"The whole world has you in sight," answered a communicator aboard the aircraft carrier Wasp.

For the first time in the U.S. manned-space program, a returning spacecraft was landing close enough to the recovery carrier to permit television coverage of its splashdown. Cameras on the deck of the Wasp picked up Gemini as soon as it loomed below the clouds, photographed its recovery by the carrier, and sent the telecast live via Early Bird satellite into millions of American and European homes. For Stafford and Co-pilot Eugene Cernan, who came "right down the pickle barrel"--within four miles of the Wasp--it was a rewarding finish to a flight that had been marred by failure and frustration.

Umbilical Dynamics. Plagued by abortive launchings, prevented from docking with the Augmented Target Docking Adapter (ATDA) because its protective shroud had not shaken loose, the two astronauts were exhausted by three difficult but largely successful rendezvous attempts (TIME, June 10). Even so, the Gemini 9 crew hoped to salvage most of the mission by successfully completing their last and most dramatic assignment: Astronaut Cernan's scheduled 21-hour walk in space. "Hallelujah!" shouted Cernan as he opened his hatch and emerged into space on schedule.

Clad in his cumbersome space suit and connected to Gemini by a white, 25-ft. oxygen and communications cord, Cernan methodically began his work. He attached a rearview mirror to the docking bar near Gemini's nose so that Stafford could watch and photograph him through a forward-facing window while he maneuvered near the aft end of the craft. Just behind the hatch, he clamped a 16-mm. movie camera into place.

Swiveling his shoulders and hips, Cernan inched cautiously around the craft and tried to familiarize himself with the strange dynamics of the umbilical cord in the vacuum of space. At one point, the cord wrapped itself around him. "The snake's all over me!" shouted the surprised astronaut. For still unexplained reasons, Cernan--like Ed White before him--had to struggle constantly against a tendency to soar above the spacecraft at the end of his cord.

Fogged-Up Experiment. After 55 minutes, and just as Gemini passed over the dark side of the earth, Cernan moved into position to prepare for his Buck Rogers-like flight in the jet-powered Astronaut Maneuvering Unit (AMU), stowed in the equipment section on Gemini's tail end. Struggling mightily, he pulled off the AMU's thermal cover, which had not been automatically jettisoned as planned after Gemini passed through the atmosphere on its way into orbit. Working with a check list calling for 32 separate operations, he began testing the AMU's propulsion and oxygen systems, pushed its arm controls into place, and prepared to strap himself in. The job required unexpected exertion. "He's doing four or five times more work than we anticipated," radioed Stafford.

Breathing heavily and perspiring, Cernan soon saturated the atmosphere inside his space suit with more moisture than the suit's evaporator unit could handle. Moisture condensed and then froze on the cold plastic of his helmet visor, almost totally obscuring his vision. After increasing his oxygen flow in a vain attempt to clear his visor, Cernan continued to check out the AMU. But just before he was scheduled to emerge from the adapter and jet off into space, Commander Stafford reluctantly scrubbed the experiment. "No go for the AMU," he reported to Houston. "The pilot's fogged up completely."

As Cernan groped his way back to the open hatch, Gemini circled into daylight again. Sunlight hitting the visor warmed it, but failed to evaporate the moisture. "I can see through my nose, but I can't see through my eyeballs," cracked Cernan. Then, two hours and nine minutes after he had stepped out into space, he climbed back into his hatch, panting with exhaustion.

Though Cernan recovered quickly and appeared to be in good physical shape when he returned to earth the following day, his experiences suggested to most NASA officials that they had been too optimistic in estimating the amount of work man can do in space. The knowledge that space flight's zero gravity actually makes a task harder, rather than easier, will probably force them to scale down astronaut spacewalk assignments on future missions. Says NASA's Dr. Charles Berry: "Men will be able to work, but I don't think we'll be working an eight-hour day outside in space."

Incandescent Re-Entry. Like almost everything else on Gemini 9's glitch-filled flight, space photography fell short of expectations. Just as he was about to close the hatch, Astronaut Cernan lost the film magazine and a lens from the movie camera that had recorded his space walk. As lens and film floated out of the spacecraft and into orbits of their own, he grabbed for them but missed. Understandably, Cernan did not follow. "I didn't feel like any more extravehicular activity," he explained. In addition, many of the 17 magazines of color film shot from inside Gemini were poorly exposed or taken through fogged spacecraft windows.

The film that did survive was remarkable nonetheless. With their ship facing backward during its return into the earth's atmosphere, the astronauts took some vivid color movies of a sheath of gases glowing with purple, blue and green incandescence as it was heated by the friction of the spacecraft's passage. They were the first re-entry photographs ever taken. As Gemini plunged into denser atmosphere, the colors increased in brilliance: a sharply defined blue shock wave expanded, and hot, golden fragments ripped loose from the glowing heat shield to shoot past the window in a dazzling stream.

A set of still pictures shot through a Gemini window with a hand-held Hasselblad 70-mm. camera showed the rendezvous with the target satellite that Stafford had dubbed the "angry alligator." There was such clarity of detail that NASA experts used the pictures to confirm the reason why the ATDA had failed to shed its heat shroud. The ATDA ground crew had not connected four lanyards that would have assured proper jettisoning. Certain that the lanyards were merely leads for ground-test instruments, the crew had taped them uselessly to the side of the shroud.

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