Busy Flight For Gemini Crew

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31062, 18 May 1966, Page 17

Busy Flight For Gemini Crew

(N Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) CAPE KENNEDY, Mav 17.

Gemini IX is “primed and ready to go” for a three-day flight into space tomorrow, the “New York Tinies” news service reported.

In a final pre-launching news conference, space officials called the preparations for this flight smoother than those for any of the six Gem inis that have alreadyflown.

The astronauts, Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan. will chase an unmanned Agena rocket that will be launched into space an hour before their scheduled blastoff time of 4.39 New Zealand time on Wednesday. Then, for three days, they will practise the techniques needed later to take men to

and from the moon in the larger Apollo spacecraft. They will have the busiest flight plan of any astronauts. Gemini IX will set the pattern for Geminis 10, 11 and 12, all scheduled for this year.

Each flight will last three days and will include long excursions by an astronaut outside the protection of his capsule, as well as rendezvous and docking manoeuvres with other vehicles. The Gemini IX flight will involve two new types of rendezvous. One will simulate the take-off of the two lunar explorers in their small Lunar Excursion Module to meet the larger Apollo mother ship in orbit about the moon. This will be done in the original launching, with Gemini representing a L.E.M. taking off from the moon and the agena representing the Apollo ship. Gemini will try to make the space meeting in about the same time and with about the same workload for the crew as would be done at the moon. On Thursday, the roles will

be reversed. Agena will represent a L.E.M. that has descended almost to the lunar surface but has decided not to land.

Gemini will represent the Apollo mother ship, and will drop to a lower altitude to “rescue” the L.E.M., since Apollo will have much more manoeuvring capability than the smaller vehicle.

Dr. George Mueller, chief of manned space flight for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said today that this “rescue” was the most important aspect of the Gemini IX flight. Dr. Mueller also said the agency’s “best estimate is that there is not an increased risk to the crew” in having Cernan spend two and a half hours outside the capsule, the longest such excursion attempted so far. But he said: “When you do more things, you always lay yourself open to more things going wrong.” Cernan will try out a 166pound astronaut manoeuvring unit, a back-pack that carries its own rocket power, oxygen supply, running lights and warnings system.