Apollo 11 by David Whitehouse

Author:David Whitehouse [David Whitehouse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785785139
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

As if the conditions weren’t bad enough for Cernan, they were having problems with the radio. Stafford continues:

I think we went south of Hawaii, then, before we hit the West Coast of the U.S. We went a long time. It was night time. We saw the Southern Cross go by. What a hell of a lonely place this is. Here you’re 165 miles up, you know, flying, pressurized. Your buddy’s 25 feet back there. He can’t see, and we’d lost one way of two-way com. There’s not a thing you can do until you get daylight. So it came up daylight. He could see it was daylight. I said, ‘Okay, Gene. If this doesn’t burn off fast, we’re going to call it quits and get out of there.’ So after five or ten minutes, nothing happened. So I said, ‘Okay. Call it quits, Gene. Get out of there.’ He couldn’t see. He was absolutely blind and 145 feet away. […] I started reeling in the tether. […] He grabbed a hold of it. I said, ‘Just walk hand over hand.’ So he walked hand over hand, blindfolded. Then I kept pulling. I had this big 125-foot snake in the Gemini cockpit. I kept trying to get it down. […] I said, ‘Look. Take one of your hands and pull down on the helmet as much as you can and put your head up and see if you can take your nose and rub a hole on it.’ So he did that, and he could find a little hole he could see. […] My main thing is to get him in before the next sunset. […] So he came in closer, and I just reached over and grabbed this over-the-center [door] mechanism and slammed it. […] So finally he got back in his seat, raised his visor, and his face was pink, like he’d been in a sauna. He says, ‘Help me get off my gloves, too.’ So I helped him get his gloves off, and his hands were absolutely pink. So I took the water gun and just hosed him down. You shouldn’t squirt water around in a spacecraft. Turns out he lost about ten and a half pounds in two hours and ten minutes outside. […] We landed the next day. […] Finally, after we did splash down, after the final thing, we’re back in the crew quarters having a drink, I told him what Deke had said.

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