Gemini 4

This second book on the Gemini mission offers a detailed account of the Gemini 4 mission which saw the first extra vehicular activity by an American astronaut. The mission also attempted a station keeping exercise with the spent upper state of the Titan launch vehicle and extended the US duration record to four days. This was as important as the EVA in that it was a significant step in increasing the orbital experience of American astronauts from a few hours on earlier missions to a few days, something the Soviet cosmonauts had demonstrated two years previously. On Gemini 4 this was only the first step to gradually increasing the duration to eight and then to fourteen days by the end of 1965. The flight of Gemini 4 in June 1965 stands as a bold step by NASA to push the endurance of their missions, and the pictures of Ed White conducting his short spacewalk remain iconic images from the early space program. His experiences on that short journey together with those of subsequent Gemini spacewalkers raised confidence that EVA would be possible during Apollo in the vacuum conditions on the lunar surface. This mission also discovered that developing the techniques of rendezvous with another object in space would not be so straightforward as originally hoped for, that living in a small spacecraft for four days was a challenge in itself, and indicating what might be expected on future planned long flights. This book continues the Pioneers in Early Spaceflight series to examine each flight in the Mercury and Gemini series. Despite the challenges, Gemini 4 and its two-man crew undertook a huge gamble, and one which fortunately paid off. The mission was also the first time the mission control center at the Manned Spacecraft Center, near Houston, Texas, was utilized for monitoring the mission, commencing a tradition that continues today with the International Space Station program.