First US spacewalk happened 60 years ago • The Register
It is 60 years since Ed White became the first American to float outside a spacecraft.
Gemini 4 launched on June 3, 1965, with the goals of demonstrating that the US was capable of mounting a multi-day crewed mission, sending one of the crew outside the capsule on an extravehicular activity (EVA), and attempting a rendezvous with the spent Titan II second stage.
The USSR had already managed an EVA a few months earlier, sending Alexei Leonov on a spacewalk outside Voskhod 2. However, Leonov’s jaunt outside the Soviet capsule was later revealed to have almost ended in disaster after his suit ballooned, requiring the cosmonaut to bleed off pressure to return to the vehicle.
Keen to demonstrate that the US was closing a perceived gap with the Soviet space program, NASA slipped in the EVA relatively late in the day. In an interview, Gemini 4’s commander, James McDivitt (who would go on to fly on Apollo 9), recalled the EVA was added “about two months or maybe even less [before the flight].”
While the Voskhod had an inflatable exterior airlock, the Gemini 4 astronauts had to open a hatch for White to float out. Famously, they struggled to get the hatch open. A similar issue, including difficulties locking the hatch afterward, had happened on a ground test, and the commander had sought out an engineer working on the hatch to understand the problem — a wise decision, as it turned out.
Once out, White floated freely, using a Hand-Held Maneuvering Unit (HHMU), aka “the zip gun,” to maneuver outside the spacecraft. He took pictures and, by all accounts, had a whale of a time, although the gas in the HHMU ran out after a few minutes, forcing him to pull himself back and forth along the tether.
“I feel like a million dollars,” he said. “This is the greatest experience. It’s just tremendous.”
“He was just having a ball out there,” McDivitt recalled in the interview. “He didn’t want to come back in. I wanted him to come back in because I didn’t want to have to work on that hatch in the dark. But, even if he’d have come back in when I told him to come back in, we would’ve still been working on the hatch in the dark…”
Controllers on the ground also wanted White to return to the capsule before the spacecraft passed into darkness and before the loss of signal occurred from ground-based tracking stations. Communications issues meant the crew of Gemini 4 did not respond to calls from the ground, culminating in a terse “Get back in!” from CAPCOM Gus Grissom when McDivitt eventually checked in.
All told, White spent approximately 23 minutes floating outside the capsule.
Securing the hatch proved challenging, as it had on the ground, but McDivitt overcame the difficulties. Attempting a reentry without it secured would have had catastrophic consequences.
“I knew more about that hatch than probably anybody in the world, other than the technicians who’d built it,” recalled McDivitt, “I made the decision to open it. And fortunately, I got it closed!”
Prior to the EVA, Gemini 4 had failed to achieve the goal of a successful rendezvous with the spent upper stage. McDivitt’s attempts did, however, teach NASA some important lessons about orbital mechanics. At four days, the mission was the longest for the US before Gemini 5.
White never flew in space again, and perished in the Apollo 1 fire on January 27, 1967. Just more than four years after that first EVA, NASA would launch Apollo 11 to the Moon.
“We would’ve never gotten to the Moon when we did if we’d taken baby steps all the way,” McDivitt told the interviewers. ®
