Both he and crewmate Tom Stafford knew Cernan would have to make his way back inside on his own since Stafford couldn’t leave his post. Sweat stung his eyes, and his visor fogged. Cernan’s exertions-a heart rate maxing out at 195 beats per minute and heavy breathing-overwhelmed his suit’s cooling system. It might have been funny if not for the mortal danger. Worse news was that Cernan’s suit was unexpectedly stiff once pressurized due to extra fabric to protect him from the heat of the jetpack’s thrusters.Īnd so Cernan clumsily pawed at the exterior of the capsule, spun himself around, and tried to grab at anything while barely able to move his arms and legs. Bad news was that these holds were too few.
To reach the pack, he needed to use the hand- and footholds bolted to the exterior. Cernan, unlike White, had no propulsion gun. NASA wanted Gene Cernan to try out a full-fledged jetpack, built by the air force and stowed outside and at the back of his Gemini IX spacecraft. Space walk as cakewalk, mission accomplished.Ī year later, the second American space walk nearly ended in disaster. Twenty-three minutes later, over the Gulf of Mexico, White tugged on his umbilical and floated back inside the craft. His main task was to test a handheld propulsion gun, which would blast him to the end of his tether and back three times before it would run out of fuel.
There were clouds in the Hawaiian sky on the morning of June 3, 1965, and beyond them, two hundred miles up, astronaut Ed White floated through the hatch of his Gemini IV capsule and became the first American space walker.
0 kommentar(er)
