LIMA — While Wapakoneta native Neil Armstrong is known worldwide for his first steps on the moon in 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission, he also made an earlier contribution to the space program as commander of Gemini 8, a mission that 50 years ago this month set the stage for Armstrong’s historic moon landing.
To commemorate the anniversary, Greg Brown, a volunteer at the Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta, gave an overview of the Gemini program, including Gemini 8, Sunday at the Allen County Museum.
“Gemini was America’s second manned space program” after Mercury, he said. “We had to take the objectives of the Apollo program and achieve them with another program. So Gemini and Apollo were launched the same year, in 1962, and Gemini was to focus on the techniques and skills necessary to reach the moon, while Apollo would focus on the space vehicle, the guidance systems and that sort of thing.”
The goals of the Gemini program were to develop the techniques to rendezvous two spacecraft in orbit, dock the two spacecraft together, and conduct long-term manned space missions. The program would also perfect extravehicular activity, in which an astronaut would perform tasks in space outside the module, as well as precision water landings in the ocean.
“So that laid the foundation for Apollo to take that knowledge and those skills and techniques and apply it to go to the moon,” Brown said.
Armstrong, along with astronaut David Scott, were launched into space in Gemini 8 on March 16, 1966, a mission that was cut short due to what could have been a disastrous malfunction.
“They were able to rendezvous [with the Gemini Agena Target Vehicle] and then dock, and then not long after, they had a thruster that stuck on the spacecraft and they went into a wobbling spin,” Brown said. “They almost lost consciousness and died.”
That malfunction cut the mission short and ended up landing them in the Pacific Ocean rather than the Atlantic, as first intended. Despite the setback, however, Armstrong and Scott came away unharmed, with NASA assured that they had a capable, level-headed commander in Armstrong.
“It was NASA’s first in-flight emergency,” Brown said. “They knew that their astronauts were able to handle the problem pretty much on their own, and I think that helped solidify Armstrong’s reputation as an astronaut and a pilot.”
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