Wally Schirra, pictured during training for Gemini VI. He also wanted a firing of the Agena’s less powerful secondary propulsion system, although this was not initially incorporated into the Gemini VI flight plan. Some managers felt that it could not be trusted to execute maneuvers with a docked Gemini, although Wally Schirra lobbied for it to fly. Following Gemini VI would come the 14-day Gemini VII, sometime early in 1966, with Borman and Lovell.Īlthough the so-called Gemini-Agena Target Vehicle (GATV) was a fundamental aid in demonstrating rendezvous, docking, and performing linked exercises in space, doubts about its reliability were prevalent within NASA. In his autobiography, We Have Capture, Stafford noted that although Young sat through simulations with them, Grissom was often absent, racing cars or boats. Having said this, Grissom wanted command of the first Apollo mission and pursued it relentlessly. Although it would be Tom Stafford’s first mission, he was already recognized as an expert in space rendezvous. The importance of the flight was such that both the prime crew and their backups, Gus Grissom and John Young, were highly experienced. Yet the Gemini success came at the end of two disappointing months which saw a rocket explode, a pair of manned missions combined into one, a vice president fall asleep in the simulator … and a hairy on-the-pad launch abort which could easily have spelled death for Schirra and Stafford.įlying for longer periods in space, according to flight surgeon Chuck Berry, had “qualified man to go to the Moon.” In August 1965, astronauts Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad returned in good physical shape after eight days in orbit. Next up, in late October, Schirra and Stafford would spend just two days aloft, but would actively bring their Gemini VI craft close to a Lockheed-built Agena-D target vehicle, launched atop an Atlas booster. Although the Soviet Union had managed to bring two spacecraft close together during the Vostok era, they had not performed true rendezvous. It was a critical step toward achieving the late President Kennedy’s goal of human bootprints on the Moon before 1970. Aboard Gemini VII, astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell were midway through a record-breaking 14-day mission to spend the equivalent of a long-duration lunar voyage in Earth orbit, whilst aboard Gemini VI-A fellow astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford had taken the lead in executing the world’s first rendezvous between a pair of piloted vehicles in space. Two weeks before Christmas in 1965, a pair of Gemini spacecraft-sleek little black-and-white capsules, which John Young once dubbed “Gusmobiles”-serenely circled the Earth together and in close proximity. This mission, in December 1965, marked the first ‘true’ rendezvous between two piloted vehicles in orbit. Gemini VII, bearing astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell on a record-breaking 14-day mission, is seen through the windows of Gemini VI-A, with fellow spacefarers Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford.
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