Shuttle/Shuttle Concept Restart: Fwd: NASA marks 50 years since first U.S. spacewalk

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: June 4, 2015 at 2:43:10 PM CDT
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Subject: FW: NASA marks 50 years since first U.S. spacewalk

By William Harwood
CBS News
June 3, 2015, 10:53 AM
NASA marks 50 years since first U.S. spacewalk
41 Photos
NASA is marking 50 years of spacewalks. In this photo, mission specialist Piers J. Sellers participates in a 7-hour, 11-minute spacewalk at the International Space Station on July 13, 2006. NASA/Getty Images
Two-and-a-half months after cosmonaut Alexey Leonov became the first human to walk in space, NASA astronaut Ed White floated out of his cramped Gemini 4 capsule 50 years ago Wednesday to become the first free-flying American in orbit.
In the five decades since then, astronauts and cosmonauts have chalked up 413 spacewalks, including 187 totaling a combined 49 days to build and maintain the International Space Station and 23 covering nearly seven days to service the Hubble Space Telescope.
While spacewalks have become a relatively common part of modern spaceflight, working in the vacuum of space while moving at five miles per second and experiencing 500-degree temperature swings passing into and out of Earth's shadow will never be routine.
"Every time we send our astronauts outside the International Space Station, we're doing risk trades to make sure they're going to be safe and accomplish the tasks they need to accomplish," astronaut Mike Foreman, veteran of five spacewalks, or EVAs, said in an interview. "Spacewalking will probably never get routine, at least not in the foreseeable future."
Ed White, floating outside the Gemini 4 capsule on June 3, 1965, during the first U.S. spacewalk. White was the second man to walk in space after cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, who ventured outside his Voskhod 2 spacecraft the previous March.
NASA
And it certainly wasn't routine for Leonov, a 30-year-old cosmonaut who became history's first spacewalker on March 18, 1965. Leaving crewmate Pavel Belyayev behind inside the Voskhod 2 spacecraft, Leonov spent about 12 minutes floating outside, marveling at the view, before heading back to a makeshift airlock.
"The ability to see the whole Earth as a globe, pretty much, is something that was extremely attractive," he said in a recent NASA interview. "And I could easily recognize the Black See, the Crimea, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, (the) Baltic Sea, and it was all within minutes, if not seconds."
Equally impressive: the "enormous, unbelievable silence."
"I heard how my heart was pounding," he recalled. "I could hear myself breathe. I remember Arthur Clark and Stanley Kubrick who, while doing 'Space Odyssey,' they worked a lot on the sound track, and the way the crew members used to breathe during this movie was very impressive."
And the stars, he said, "were very bright, there were a lot of them. What was interesting is they were everywhere, they were above and they were beneath. On the ground, we can only see stars up in the sky. In space, they are everywhere."
The thrill quickly turned into drama on the high frontier. Because of the stiffness of his pressurized suit, and because his fingers had worked their way out of place in the suit's gloves, he could not get into the airlock feet first as planned. Sweating with exertion, he eventually had to partially deflate his suit before managing to pull himself in head first and then struggling to turn around and secure the outer airlock cover.
"I knew I might be risking oxygen starvation, but I had no choice," he wrote in an article for the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space magazine. "If I did not re-enter the craft, within the next 40 minutes my life support would be spent anyway.
"The only solution was to reduce the pressure in my suit by opening the pressure valve and letting out a little oxygen at a time as I tried to inch inside the airlock. At first I thought of reporting what I planned to do to mission control. But I decided against it. I did not want to create nervousness on the ground. And anyway, I was the only one who could bring the situation under control."
Finally, he managed to pull himself inside and "curl my body around in order to close the airlock," he wrote. "Once Pasha (Belyayev) was sure the hatch was closed and the pressure had equalized, he triggered the inner hatch open and I scrambled back into the spacecraft, drenched with sweat, my heart racing."
40 Photos
50 years of stunning spacewalks

White's spacewalk came on June 3, 1965, during NASA's Gemini 4 mission with crewmate James McDivitt. In a NASA oral history, McDivitt recalled the crew had problems closing the Gemini hatch during a vacuum chamber test before launch. During the flight, the hatch mechanism refused to open, but McDivitt and White, familiar with the mechanism, finally coaxed internal gears to engage and White floated outside.
"When Ed went to open up the hatch, it wouldn't open," McDivitt recalled in a NASA oral history. "I said, 'Oh my God,' you know, 'it's not opening!" And so, we chatted about that for a minute or two. And I said, 'Well, I think I can get it closed if it won't close.' But I wasn't too sure about it. I thought I could. ... So anyway, we elected to go ahead and open it up."
The crew did not tell mission control about the glitch. "I mean, there was nothing they could do," McDivitt said. "They would've said, 'No,' I'm sure. Anyway, we went ahead and opened it up; and Ed went out and did his thing."
During a 23-minute EVA marred by spotty communications, White tested a compressed-gas maneuvering gun, gained experience moving about in weightlessness and posed for iconic photographs by McDivitt. Finally, approaching the terminator and orbital darkness, he was told to get back inside the Gemini capsule.
White was reluctant to end the excursion.
"It's no sweat," White radioed. "Actually, I'm trying to get a better picture."
"No, come on in," McDivitt replied.
"I'm trying to get a picture of the spacecraft now," White said.
"Ed, come on in here!"
"All right," White agreed. "Let me fold the camera and put the gun up."
Handing a camera in to McDivitt, along with his maneuvering gun, White managed to work his way into the cramped capsule feet first. But when they attempted to close and lock the hatch, the mechanism did not engage.
"It wouldn't lock," McDivitt said. "And so, in the dark I was trying to fiddle around over on the side where I couldn't see anything, trying to get my glove down in this little slot to push the gears together. And finally, we got that done and got it latched."
A NASA history describing the scene said "White sat back, physically exhausted, sweat streaming into his eyes and fogging his faceplate. McDivitt also felt tired, so they rested before extending a radio antenna to find a ground-based voice and tell Earth all was well. ... The crew of Gemini IV had almost circled the globe in an unpressurized spacecraft."
Leonov, now 81, went on to make a second trip into space in 1975, participating in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. White was in training for the first piloted Apollo test flight when he and two crewmates -- Virgil "Gus" Grissom and Roger Chaffee -- were killed in a launch pad fire on Jan. 27, 1967.
Foreman praised both men for their courage, saying "comparing the risks those guys took back in the day to what we take now is just night and day."
"They were really hanging it out there," he said. "Slipping outside and then trying to force your way back inside the space vehicle with that pressurized suit and trying to get the hatch closed (was difficult). Of course, you're pretty motivated to get back inside and get that hatch closed! But still, they were hanging it out there."
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© 2015 William Harwood/CBS News

Five Floating Facts for the 50th Anniversary of the 1st American Spacewalk
by Robert Z. Pearlman, collectSPACE.com Editor | June 03, 2015 10:22am ET

Astronaut Edward H. White II performed the first American spacewalk during the Gemini 4 mission on June 3, 1965.
Credit: NASA View full size image
Ed White may not have been the first man to walk in space, but his extravehicular activity, or EVA, 50 years ago Wednesday (June 3) was no less historic.
The first U.S. astronaut to exit a spacecraft while in orbit, White spent more than 20 minutes floating in the vacuum of space, protected only by a spacesuit. He moved about using a "zip gun," a hand-held maneuvering unit, while still attached to Gemini 4 by a tether and umbilical.
"I feel like a million dollars!" White exclaimed to his crewmate James McDivitt, who was snapping photos from his seat on the spacecraft. That excitement lasted until White was ordered back inside by Mission Control. [The 1st American Spacewalk in Photos]
"I'm coming back in... and it's the saddest moment of my life," White radioed.
Paired with his predecessor, Soviet-era cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the two were written into the history books as the world's first spacewalkers. But there was more to White's walk than the floating feat alone.
During the EVA (spacewalk), astronaut Ed White was connected to the Gemini 4 capsule by a 25-foot-long umbilical and a 23-foot-long tether.
Credit: NASA
View full size image
Paving the way for Apollo's missions to the moon, the Gemini program provided much-needed experience for astronauts in space. See how NASA's Gemini spacecraft worked in our full infographic.
Credit: By Karl Tate, Infographics Artist
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"Gemini 4, Houston"
Half a century later, mention of "Mission Control," usually brings to mind Houston. But it wasn't always that way. For all of NASA's Mercury missions and its first Gemini flight, the ground controllers were located near the launch site at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
"The Gemini 4 mission marks the first time that mission control will be exercised at the Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston," NASA's 1965 press kit for the Gemini 4 mission stated, referring to the center that eight years later would be renamed the Johnson Space Center.
With flight director Christopher C. Kraft leading the room, it fell to Gemini 3 commander and original Mercury astronaut Virgil "Gus" Grissom to deliver the first words spoken from Houston to a manned spacecraft.
"Gemini 4, Houston Cap Com," Grissom, as the mission's capsule communicator, radioed 2 minutes and 10 seconds into the flight. At the time, the Titan rocket that was lofting Gemini 4 into space was ready for first stage separation. [Video: NASA Astronaut Recounts 50 Years of Spacewalks]
Patriotic patch
Visit any NASA center or museum gift shop and you will likely find a red and white embroidered patch depicting an astronaut on an EVA and the words "Gemini 4 First Space Walk." Neither McDivitt nor White had anything to do with this souvenir design.
NASA's first crew-created mission patch came on the next mission, Gemini 5. The Gemini 4 crew set a different first.
"Ed White and I used the American flag on our shoulders as our patch," McDivitt said, according to Dick Lattimer in the book, "All We Did Was Fly to the Moon."
Gemini 4 marked the first time that the U.S. flag had been worn on a spacesuit, a tradition continued ever since, said McDivitt. Later flags were embroidered; the Gemini 4 flags were made of nylon.
"The flags we had sewn on we purchased ourselves," the Gemini 4 commander recalled. "Later on, of course, NASA made this an integral part of the pressure suit."
A more traditional Gemini 4 patch, based on the design of the crew's American eagle-adorned medallions, was made with McDivitt's endorsement decades later. (White died in 1967 in the Apollo 1 pad fire.)
Seedy souvenir
Both McDivitt and White had small pouches packed with mementos on Gemini 4. The two flew silver medallions (of the aforementioned American eagle design) and state and international flags, among other trinkets, to gift to friends, family and supporters after the mission was over.
All of the souvenirs remained inside the capsule, with the exception of a small stash of seeds.
As he was walking in space, White carried mustard seeds in his spacesuit's pocket. The seeds were a symbol of his religion, in reference to the New Testament's description of Jesus using the mustard seed as a model of the growth of the Kingdom of God, from an extremely tiny seed to the largest of all garden plants. They were also an example of the tiny amount of faith needed to accomplish much.
"You don't need to take a mustard seed with you as a symbol of your faith," minister and author Norman Vincent Peale wrote to White prior to the flight. "You have the faith itself, and the inner sturdiness that will carry you through this tremendous and rewarding experience."
"There goes your glove ..."
One artifact that did not return to Earth with White was his right comfort glove. [The Evolution of the Spacesuit in Photos]
"Oops, there goes your glove," McDivitt stated as he saw the optional over-glove float out the hatch while White was already out on his spacewalk.
White wore the matching glove pulled over the pressure gauntlet on his spacesuit, to help keep his hand warm.
"I had one thermal glove on the one hand, my left hand," he said after returning to Earth. "I always wanted my right hand to be free to operate that [zip] gun and the camera."
The right thermal glove seemed to take on a mission of its own.
"It floated out over my right shoulder and out," described White during a technical review. "It looked like it was on a definite trajectory going somewhere. I don't know where it was going."
"It floated very smartly out of the spacecraft and out into space," he said.
Mission Control in Houston as seen staffed for the Gemini 4 mission when it became active for the first time in NASA's histo
Credit: NASA
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Go for EVA
Since Alexei Leonov and Ed White completed the first two spacewalks, more than 375 have followed, with some 260 of them by American astronauts.
The "go" for the first American spacewalk came only about a week before Gemini 4 was ready to launch. The mission plan originally called for White to only stand up on his seat and pop his head out the hatch, while McDivitt held onto him — or perhaps vice versa.
"Ed White will probably be the standee and I probably will hold onto him," McDivitt told the media at their pre-launch press conference.
"Yes, I'm the standee and he is the holdee," White added.
The move to go full EVA was made in direct response to Leonov's spacewalk on March 18, 1965. It still took NASA more than two months to decide White would float out of the capsule.
"We only had one final week of training when word came down from headquarters: 'We're go for EVA,'" flight director Gene Kranz recalled.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Click through to collectSPACE to see photos of Ed White's mustard seeds, lost comfort glove and "patriotic patch."

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