Abstract
“It was a great spacecraft,
but it was no boat.”
John Young, recalling the
seaworthiness of Gemini 3.
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Notes
- 1.
Haney’s comment implies that there were considerably more onboard than the actual complement for Intrepid (as built) of 2,600 officers and enlisted men, which was not the case.
- 2.
President Johnson was referring to a previous meeting with John Glenn at Grand Turk Island in February 1962 when, while he was Kennedy’s Vice President, he accompanied the astronaut back to the United States after Glenn’s historic three-orbit mission as the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth.
- 3.
These debriefing notes were later released by NASA as Gemini Working Paper #5025, dated June 3, 1965.
- 4.
No one outside the Soviet space program was aware at this time that Voskhod was not the step forward that the Soviets wanted everyone to believe. It was not a new, large spacecraft, but was instead a stripped down Vostok. It had no rescue capability, was limited in duration and did not have a maneuvering system. The mission was dangerous (for the crew) and essentially motivated by propaganda, rather than the technical advances of performing the first, limited EVA.
- 5.
The exception, perhaps, would have been a mission to land on the Moon and while Grissom was unaware that he was less than two years away from his planned third mission (Apollo 1), that mission was ironically developing into a 14-day open-ended flight.
- 6.
Young’s two children remained at home in Houston for this trip recovering from a bout of chickenpox. Another infectious disease, German measles, would feature in John Young’s astronaut career four years later, during preparations for Apollo 13.
- 7.
Following the construction of a new visitor center, Space Center Houston, the museum in Building 2 was closed down and the exhibits, including the Gemini flag, were placed in storage. Unfortunately, after years in storage the historic significance of the flag was apparently forgotten, or it was loaned for some unrecorded exhibit on Gemini, because its current location is unknown.
- 8.
Wally Schirra was nominated for promotion at the same time as Young, to the rank of Captain, USN. Like Young, Schirra had been in his present rank – in his case Commander – since 1961.
- 9.
The Gemini book by Grissom was a project by Field Enterprises and World Book Encyclopedia, probably sanctioned by Time-Life but not produced by them, as it was aimed at a younger market. Grissom was assisted by Jacab Hay (1920-1976) as ghost writer. Hay subsequently co-authored the 1969 space thriller Autopsy For A Cosmonaut with John M. Keshishhian (b. 1923), in which a fictitious Gemini mission (Gemini 12A) is launched to investigate a fatal Voskhod mission.
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Shayler, D.J. (2018). The Unsinkable Molly Brown . In: Gemini Flies!. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68142-9_9
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