Space: Toward the Moon

Only three years ago, Astronaut John Glenn and his Friendship 7 capsule were the symbols of American adventure in space. Today, Glenn is a 43- year-old soft-drink company executive in Texas, and Friendship 7 is on display in the Smithsonian Institution. Both the man and his machine are honored relics of the infancy period of U.S. space travel.

That period is over—as proved by Astronauts James A. McDivitt and Edward H. White II in their Gemini 4 flight, which ended successfully last week. Glenn and his Project Mercury colleagues showed that man can get into outer space and get safely back to earth. McDivitt and White showed that man can endure in space, that by his own skills he can cope with mechanical failure with little more danger (although sensing the same frustrations) than the ordinary Sunday-afternoon motorist. The historian of the future may well look back on the flight of Gemini 4 as the time when man erased most doubts about his ability to fly to the moon—and beyond.

The Best of Both. "Gemini 4 demanded the best of men and machines," said Dr. Robert R. Gilruth, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston, after the successful completion of the flight. And it got the best. Except for a few relatively minor flaws, the space capsule functioned magnificently; even in the searing heat of reentry, the cabin stayed around 70°F., with humidity of about 60%—just like a crisp June day in Denver. As for the men, Command Pilot McDivitt and Copilot White survived more than four days of weightlessness in such good shape that space doctors were amazed. Each logged 97 hr. 56 min. in space—just 21 hr. 10 min. less than the record set by Soviet Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky in June 1963. Together, they were aloft three times longer than all eight U.S. astronauts who preceded them. They covered 1,609,684 miles in their 62-orbit flight. Not only did White spend 20 minutes floating alone outside the capsule, but as a bonus the space twins returned to earth with a breathtakingly brilliant series of films of the space stroll (see color pages).

Swift Kick. On the capsule's third day in space, nearing the end of the 48th revolution around earth, its IBM computer went on the blink. Even though the computer was necessary to help the pilot guide the capsule back to earth with pinpoint accuracy, the failure caused no great alarm. At the Houston Control Center, Mission Director Christopher Kraft blamed "glitch"—a computer-age gremlin that causes an abrupt change in power, fouling up delicate circuits. Kraft turned to Astronaut John Young, who used a similar computer on the earlier Gemini 3 flight, asked if a swift kick might revive it. Said Young, "Yes, if everything else fails." Nothing would get it going again, but Kraft declared that the failure would have "absolutely no effect on the safety of the flight."

What the computer's failure did mean was that McDivitt would not be able to "fly" the capsule back to earth. Kraft therefore advised him that ground computers would have to help steer Gemini 4 for him, as they did in Mercury flights.