{"id":16717,"date":"2012-08-31T10:30:52","date_gmt":"2012-08-31T15:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16717"},"modified":"2012-08-31T10:30:52","modified_gmt":"2012-08-31T15:30:52","slug":"colby-cosh-on-neil-armstrongs-finest-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/31\/colby-cosh-on-neil-armstrongs-finest-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"Colby Cosh on Neil Armstrong’s finest moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, it’s not what you think<\/a> at all:<\/p>\n

On March 16, 1966, Armstrong and future Apollo 15<\/em> moonwalker David R. Scott became the first human beings to dock an orbiting spacecraft with an independently launched satellite, the Agena<\/em>. (As proofs-of-concept go, this one has been more important to spaceflight than the moon landings.) The procedure proved surprisingly unchallenging; when the Gemini<\/em> capsule nosed into place, Armstrong blurted out, \u201cIt\u2019s really a smoothie!\u201d The Gemini-Agena combo \u2014 mankind\u2019s first \u201cspace station\u201d \u2014 moved out of radio contact with mission control 28 minutes later. When it came back in range after another 15, Armstrong\u2019s first words were, \u201cWe have serious problems here.\u201d A wiring problem had left one of the attitude thrusters on Gemini<\/em> stuck in the \u201con\u201d position \u2014 firing continuously and causing an increasing left roll. Unsure what was causing the problem, Armstrong made the snap decision to separate from the Agena<\/em>. But the problem was on their side, and without the Agena<\/em>\u2019s inertia, the Gemini<\/em> craft began to spin even faster.<\/p>\n

Press accounts said the pair were spinning at about one revolution per second. Senior mission controller Chris Kraft has since noted that their peak rotation was actually 550 degrees a second. Only a trained test pilot could make good decisions while whirling around in freefall 90 times a minute \u2014 and Armstrong justified the use of test pilots in space for all time by using Gemini<\/em>\u2019s re-entry thrusters to dampen the roll and save himself and Scott. By rule, the use of those thrusters meant the mission had to be aborted early. Armstrong and Scott suffered tense hours as they waited to see if they would splash down short of their Pacific landing zone, on the soil of Communist China.<\/p>\n

Armstrong was rueful about the abort, which cost Scott the chance to make a spacewalk and cut short the experiment with Agena<\/em>. But NASA was impressed. One of the agency\u2019s main concerns before the moon missions was that astronauts trying to set down the lunar module would refuse to abort the landing, even if they ran too short on fuel to leave the moon. Armstrong, alone among astronauts of the time, had established a record of outstanding sanity in the face of an emergency. He would probably like to be remembered for that \u2014 for making the right choice, a pilot\u2019s choice \u2014 at least as much as for the trail he left in the dust of the moon.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, it’s not what you think at all: On March 16, 1966, Armstrong and future Apollo 15 moonwalker David R. Scott became the first human beings to dock an orbiting spacecraft with an independently launched satellite, the Agena. (As proofs-of-concept go, this one has been more important to spaceflight than the moon landings.) The procedure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,44,15],"tags":[722,70,69,716],"class_list":["post-16717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-space-science","category-technology","tag-lowearthorbit","tag-moon","tag-nasa","tag-spacecraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4lD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16718,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16717\/revisions\/16718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}