Doorway to the Moon with Michael Collins

whether up to regular program so the ABC news can bring you in color this special report on the Germany Tim Mitchum for ABC Space headquarters here is ABC correspondent Peter Jennings good afternoon everybody exactly four minutes and six seconds as we go to the Atlas Aegina liftoff and everything is going very smoothly as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration prepares its most ambitious manned space flight to date Gemini 10 to astronauts both 35 years old a naval commander John Young an Air Force major Michael Collins John Young making his second flight into space having been a part of Gemini 3 with Gus Grissom Michael Collins making not only his first flight into space but going to make his first spacewalk in the days ahead well gemma knee was very small it was bigger than the mercury those people like John Glenn who were shoehorned into a mercury would probably have considered Gemma to be almost spacious it was about that's pretty close to the size of a Volkswagen Beetle two front seats but with a big console in between the two seats I thought it was Germany was a misnomer it was of course named because it was a two seater and Gemini twins I thought it should be named Janis which I think is he was the god of a doorways Germany was really the length the extremely important link between our first attempt to go into space Mercury and then our lunar program Apollo so Janus looked both ways and when he was in his doorway he saw the old mercury he saw where he had to go with a new Apollo and then he designed this program to make the bridge from one to the other and in that sense Germany was essential to landing on the moon at the end of the decade as as President Kennedy had said we should do this is Germany control at 16 hours 29 minutes and 37 seconds after liftoff crew of Gemini 10 has a full day's work cut out for them here in Mission Control the flight plan have come up with the today's flight plan activities if you were conservatively putting together the the Gemini 10 flight plan I'd say we probably had about five or six days worth of work to do and we were trying every John was especially commodious and I was trying to be as helpful as possible so on the ground in our preparations anybody who had some idea that we ought to do this or do that or perform this experiment or take or do this one twice to check against prior results or whatever we said sure we'll do it okay we'll do it so we ended up being almost frantic for three days trying to work through all the things that we had been given to do and we got through most of them okay some of them we just really didn't have time for but the important things I think we got accomplished effectively and 1:00 a.m. Houston time a crew was scheduled to begin a sleep period and a few moments ago during the Passover the Hawaii tracking station the spacecraft communicator at fin del out there said that the crew was resting quietly but not sleeping yet I was worried the first night and if something I had never never would have ever considered it was that without any gravity my arms just kind of rose up like this and there I was there's nothing wrong with that except like maybe two inches in front of these fingers there's some switch on the instrument panel that is a big no-no to turn so I just didn't feel comfortable drifting off I tried to you know kind of move him down but gravity was or the lack of gravity would take him floating but and I was I guess eventually I got that out of my mind and I fell asleep some 45 seconds ago we heard from John Young via the Cana the canary station that the crew had depressed the spacecraft and opened the hatch at the time 23 hours two seven minutes it was a dark when I opened the hatch the hatch open this way I stood up in this seat and one of the the really strange but nice things about it it was was totally unappealing like in an airplane rule number one keep the pointy end forward and we were turned 90 degrees so the earth the horizon and everything was going by sideways and that was such a strange direction to point and to be moving but that in itself was really arresting but the other thing was that the Stars of course without any interference from our atmosphere the stars were not twinkling but they were extra bright and my job was to take photographs signatures of the the ultra violet and the and the reddish stars and compare what I saw with my camera versus what the people on the ground were seeing the scientist was with there's my columns reports he has taken his first exposure an ultraviolet picture of beta Centauri the crew is looking the south and Collins will attempt to photograph three see the three stars in the Southern Cross his primary target will be beta Cruces you'll also have other target stars Alpha Crucis and beta Centauri the sky was dark black except for the stars earth below curved beautifully and the lights of the cities you know kind of twinkling down there I mean I could have stayed up for a couple of days just looking around but we you know in space you always got something else you have to do so be quiet get back in get the door closed and go back to work I'm about five ten five ten and a half I could not stretch out all the way in the Gemini head would be banging on the roof or my feet would be up under the instrument panel banging against the floorboards coming back in I'm in this balloon suit now so I'm bigger than I normally would be in a lot less facile in my ability to move the trick to getting in was you just couldn't get in and close the hatch you'd bump your head against the still open hatch which is not good what you had to do was maneuver your legs until your knees were just under the lower rim of the instrument panel and then use that as a pivot point and having anchored yourself there then you could stretch back and then you could bring your legs out about a quarter of an inch of clearance above your head it was very tight and and then you close the hatch and you had a lever you couldn't see what you're doing because it's out of your view you have the visor down here so you would close the hatch until you felt you were on the latches and then you would grow up for the lever and you'd crank crank crank and you could feel it coming down you hope and and then when it came down you locked it and John threw a switch and lo and behold the cabin pressure was going from zero to point one to point two all the way up to I think we were five psi I've forgotten I think this is inside the suit I think we were 3.7 and then we pumped up I think to 5 psi was where that was we were home-free then we could take the helmet off and so forth rendezvous with the Agena was was simple and difficult the pathway to the Agena that the germany took there was only one true and holy pathway that was going to get you there without burning any extra fuel and that meant that you were in a lower orbit and it precisely the right instant pointed in exactly the right direction at precisely that altitude you ignited your rocket engine for precisely the number of seconds that would put you on a trajectory going from that lower orbit up to an intersecting trajectory where the Agena was and you didn't have to do anything if you'd done all that properly you would just come up until there the Agena was burnt I'll give you a time back at one minute prior to your GE PP have a little trouble with the chip nights on opportunity a jeana's real solvent let's pit hold the attitudes real time what happened to us the up and the down part were absolutely perfect but the left and the right part we were off slightly to one side so when we came to performing our braking maneuver with the Gemini we weren't right at it we were it was over to one side and that forced us to make really what turned out to be some fairly severe corrections and we we we did a maneuver that we affectionately called in the simulator the woofer Dyl and so we did a woofer till around the yemeni and then we stopped and from then on it was textbook kind of stuff but in that whiffer deal we use more fuel than we should have or that we had expected to use and that curtailed some of our later activities it's three primary objectives were rendezvous and docking a long-duration spaceflight and Frank Borman sat there for 14 days and inside of something the size of a Volkswagen Beetle slightly smaller but we did the long-duration successfully we did the rendezvous and docking and and the third was this was the EBA or the spacewalks at which of course you have to get out of the moon we weren't quite as good on the EBA we were very sophisticated about rendezvous and docking we had our mathematicians had thought that through we were very well equipped to cope with various things that might have gone wrong during the the rendezvous or the docking procedure spacewalks we were pretty crude about those jiminy 10 Houston were about a minute 1/2 of lol the gun really thought through being in weightless outside the vehicle because of course on the moon they have 1/6 gravity and they didn't have to worry about it but we should have thought some of those spacewalk chores through a little bit differently and we didn't this is generally control Houston during this lull it's worth noting that surgeon reports that both pilots during the liftoff phase showed a heart rate of approximately 100 beats 100 beats on E both young and kahlan's they come in it that this is a extremely low and I very is the first flight we can recall where both pilots ran about the same rate I think the main thing was as just as a crew follow 11 crew any of the Apollo crews we'd all flown in space before we knew it was like to sit on top of rocket and go blasting off we weren't all nervous and uptight as well I shouldn't say that we were nervous and uptight but not nearly as much so had that been our first flight experience so having flown in space once before I thought in intrinsic ways was it was very helpful for the Apollo you know I'll be outside some night and wandering around I look uh nice moon I think oh nice moon I went up there one time you know and it kind of so there's sort of like two moons we all have and we see that we like it's silvery and then and then the one that I remember from up closer you know I say oh yeah yeah one degree north of the Equator 23 degrees east daughter Joey yeah that's what I was right there you know and that's that's kind of strange that's strange be it's like there's two different moons [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Cosmosphere

Views: 28,095

Keywords: Gemini X, Michael Collins, Moon, Space

Id: CeiN-h5j0e4

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 19 2018