Space: Closing the Gap

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Yet at other times during the first two days of the flight, the ground-to-space communications system was as chatty as a rural party line. At one point, Gus Grissom sent up to McDivitt the news that his son's Pee Wee League team, the Hawks, had defeated the Pelicans 3 to 2, and to White the fact that his son had got a hit in a Little League game that day.

Both the astronauts' wives got on the line for four minutes.

When McDivitt's wife Pat came on the radio, he said, "I'm over California right now." She said, "Get yourself over Texas." He asked her: "Behaving yourself?" She said, "I'm always good. Are you being good?" McDivitt replied, "I don't have much space. About all I can do is look out the window." When White's wife, also named Pat, got the mike, she said, "It looked like you were having a wonderful time yesterday."

White said, "Quite a time. Quite a time." Mrs. White said, "I can't wait to talk to you about it." White replied, "O.K., honey, I'll see you later."

The girls came on the line later with some advice that sounded more official than wifely. Said Pat White to her husband: "Now have a drink of water." White answered: "Roger. Standing by for a drink of water." Pat McDivitt told Jim, "Disconnect your headset communications at the neck ring from now on at the start of your sleep period. No static on that. Did you get the message to disconnect your headset?" McDivitt came in loud, clear and obedient: "I sure did."

On their 22nd revolution, White and McDivitt broke the American record in space—34 hr. 20 min.—set by Gordon Cooper's Faith 7 flight on May 15, 1963. "I would like to congratulate you on the new American space-flight record," said the controller in Houston.

Laconically, White said, "We got a few more to go."

Ready for More. As the flight sped into its third day, the orbit held fairly firm with a 173-mile apogee and a 101-mile perigee, indicating that Gemi ni 4 could stay aloft well into this week.

Life aboard Gemini 4 settled into a 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.

After the Project Gemini series will come Project Apollo, aimed at landing an American man on the moon in its first shot some time in 1970. But the man on the moon is only the beginning of the Apollo program. After that, it will send the spaceship many millions of miles on the way to the planets.