Space: The Moon in Their Grasp

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Son of a World War I fighter pilot and a mother who had been a wing walker in a flying circus, Schirra took to the air naturally. An Annapolis graduate who flew 90 combat missions in Korea, he is a fast mover on the earth, too, in a maroon Maserati.

Schirra's quiet but effective copilot, Tom Stafford, 35, is a topflight aeronautical engineer. His rapid slide-rule calculations supplemented the information supplied by the ship's on-board computer and helped keep the crew and the men in Houston on top of the spacecraft's rapidly changing position. Also an Annapolis man, Stafford decided to make his career in the Air Force, has written two handbooks on flight-testing programs.

We Made It. In their less glamorous, but physically more demanding roles aboard Gemini 7, Frank Borman and James Lovell demonstrated a neat combination of endurance, stoicism and humor that was vital to their mission's success. Like Schirra, Borman, 37, was air-oriented from youth, building model airplanes and later selling newspapers to pay for flying lessons. He ranked eighth in his graduating class at West Point before he joined the Air Force. Then an eardrum broken during a practice dive-bombing run made him doubt that he would ever fly again. He was delighted when recovery proved him wrong. Lovell, also 37, has been involved in launches since he was 16 and designed a rocket that rose 80 ft. In a term paper at Annapolis in 1952, he predicted that rockets would finally have their day when man penetrated space. He still builds model missiles for his son, bubbles over with so much nervous energy that fellow astronauts call him "Shaky."

While the four astronauts soared toward their meeting in space, their wives made their own rendezvous at the Stafford home in El Lago, near the space center. There they sipped coffee, listened to announcements, and followed air-to-ground conversations piped into a loudspeaker from Mission Control. "Whee! We made it!" shouted Susan Borman as she congratulated Faye Stafford, who had nearly jumped off her living-room couch at lift-off and was still jumping up and down an hour later. Marilyn Lovell, expecting her fourth child soon, was also in high spirits. "I'm just stopping by on my way to the hospital," she joked. Jo Schirra tried to take the excitement in stride, sent her two children to school after Gemini 6's blastoff. But the following morning, when Schirra stepped aboard the Wasp, Jo Schirra admitted that she had found "every bit" of the mission exciting. The flawless recovery, she said, was "even more than I expected."

Public Sensors. Though Gemini 7 Astronauts Borman and Lovell were the only humans in space during most of the 14-day flight, their mission, which was primarily medical, was also very public. Nearly all of their important body functions—from thinking to urinating—were monitored through sensors attached to their bodies, recorded on instruments in the spacecraft, or relayed to Houston where batteries of doctors pored over telemetered data. Each man was required to bag and date his own solid and liquid wastes, to be turned over to doctors at flight's end. For want of a more descriptive term, Borman and Lovell described their extended mission in the cramped capsule as "two weeks in a men's room."