Space: The Moon in Their Grasp

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Navy frogmen were already there; a flotation collar was lashed into place and a plugged-in telephone provided close-up communication with the astronauts even before they opened their hatches. TV brought its fans as close as any Wasp crewman when the capsule was finally hoisted on deck, and as his hatch opened, Wally Schirra gave the familiar thumbs-up signal of success. Then, while the band played Anchors Aweigh, the two space travelers walked briskly down the red carpet of welcome between lines of cheering sailors and marines.

At week's end, viewers saw a nearly identical telecast as Borman and Lovell—despite bouts of trouble with thrusters and fuel cells—splashed down only 7.6 miles from their planned impact point, winning a bet made with Schirra and Stafford that they would land closest to the target. There was one notable difference. After a 330-hour, 5.7 million-mile journey, the Gemini 7 astronauts were understandably anxious to leave their cramped quarters as soon as possible. Shortly after they opened their hatches, they were hoisted aboard a helicopter and flown to the deck of the Wasp. Though few would have been surprised if Borman and Lovell had found it difficult to unbend and walk, both climbed unaided from the helicopter, chipper and in remarkably good shape.

No Place to Go. Return to earth after their demanding ordeal in space was obviously a relief for the travel-jaded astronauts. But for them, as for Schirra and Stafford, the biggest moment had already passed. That was the historic instant when the two space capsules eased into sight of each other. For Gemini 7, it marked the end of a long loneliness; for Gemini 6, it meant the end of a long period of misfortune. Until then, its mission had seemed dogged by failure.

In October, when an Agena rendezvous rocket "backfired" and disintegrated in space, Schirra and Stafford were left sitting in Gemini 6 atop a Titan II on a Cape Kennedy launch pad. They were all dressed up with no place to go. Last week their first attempt to launch was frustrated when a monitoring-cable plug was accidentally jarred loose from the Titan II's tail, causing an automatic shutdown of its engines only two seconds before liftoff. Later investigation disclosed that the engines would have shut down anyway—on either of the first two launching attempts. Workmen had forgotten to remove a thimble-sized plastic dust cap used during the shipment of an engine part. That cap would have prevented lift-off by blocking the rapid buildup of thrust.

Wally Schirra, to be sure, had never succumbed to the growing pessimism. "If we had 999 chances out of 1,000 of having a successful flight," he explained, in a preflight interview for the National Broadcasting Company, "no one would want the 1,000th flight. But you don't add up a whole bunch of flights and say we're due for a failure. It's 999 out of 1,000 on each flight."

Schirra's statistics sounded like whistling in the dark. Even the omens were bad. During the aborted launch attempt, a Cape Kennedy rescue helicopter crash-landed in nearby Banana River. Then word was received that NASA's respected director of space medicine, Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace, and his wife were missing on a private plane flight. Search parties later found their bodies beside the plane's wreckage near Aspen, Colo.