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Remembering Ed White
It was just 60 years ago today, on June 3, 1965 (I was ten, and already fully engaged on the “current events” front), that Edward H. White, a US astronaut on Gemini 4, became the first human to walk in space:
It was only a little more than eighteen months later that Ed White-at the age of 36–died in a cabin fire, alongside astronauts Virgil (Gus) Grissom and Roger Chaffee, during a pre-flight test of the first mission of the subsequent Apollo (three-man) trials, designed with the intention of landing a man on the moon.
I remember both events, the spacewalk broadcast to the world in real-time, and the Apollo 1 catastrophe, which we learned about after the fact. And how the nation first celebrated, and then mourned, as one.
Such risk-takers. So brave. “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” all of them.
Two-and-a-half years later (another worldwide event!) we watched the “giant step,” when Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong moved out of the landing module to plant his foot on the moon:
“LIVE FROM THE MOON” indeed. Thanks, Dad, for the “pictures or it didn’t happen” moment. (Although when his children got Dad’s slides digitized after he died, I must say that I spent some time trying to figure out these weird blobby images and wondering if they were mistakes.)
Here’s the moon, from the garden of the UK family home, at the exact time that Armstrong and Aldrin were bouncing around down below while Collins was orbiting above:
They made it. I hope Ed White was applauding from the wings.
And I hope (although I sometimes worry otherwise) that such a brave, enterprising–and sometimes dangerous–spirit hasn’t been lost in the weeds of narcissism, self-involvement, and driveling testosterone-hating lunacy, forever.
I love the fact that Ed White was having so much fun during his spacewalk, he had to be ordered back inside.
I’ll never forget walking home from school and seeing the headline about Apollo 1 on a paper in a rack outside our local ice cream shop. I went inside, gave Ari a nickel for the paper, went outside, sat on the step, read the story and cried.
Just as I’ll never forget walking home with my mother from my fourth-grade class at Edward Devotion School in Brookline Massachusetts, on the day that JFK was shot. We came across the janitor for the apartment building in which we were living. He was crying, howling, prostrate, in the street. “What on earth is the matter?” my mother asked. “The President has been shot,” he replied. “Drunken old fool,” said Mum.
It was November 22, 1963.
Is it true that Candace Owens doesn’t believe anyone walked on the moon? Maybe she should be interviewed by Tucker Carlson.
If such a thing is true when it comes to her own belief, then I think it speaks more WRT Owens than it does the rest of us. (BTW, I think Tucker has interviewed Candace on a number of other sites more often than I care to contemplate.)
There’s a point at which (it’s been discussed in other desirability/undesirability factors, when it comes to membership on this site) the book simply isn’t worth the candle.
I’m all about the book being worth the candle. Have at it.
Sorry. Duplicate. Second time it’s happened in a week. I thought it was fixed.
It’s a coincidence that I had just read a comment on another site that brought this up. I don’t mean to hijack your post. If need be, I can delete my comment.
No need. Have at it!
Back to your post…these men are incredible. Just the intestinal fortitude to spend all of that time crammed into such a tiny space in search of infinite space is difficult for me to grasp.
Yeah. I sat in a Gemini simulator once. I can see the problem with getting a leg cramp; there was no way to stretch out. They were wearing space capsules tight around the hips that season.
Ugh!
In those days newspapers were strictly black and white. The country’s best selling paper, The New York Daily News, went with a full color front page for the first time. Imitating its four-star movie review scale, the headline was:
(Four stars)–“A Walk in Space”.
The Soviets were first to do a space walk (Alexi Leonov, IIRC), so we were still in catch-up mode, but we wouldn’t be for long.
You should read the story of Leonov’s spacewalk. It’s in the book The Wrong Stuff, which I reviewed for Epoch Times (at the link). Leonov almost died trying to reenter the space capsule because he had to depressurize his suit to turn around.
When I was in Junior High (no middle school back then) me and a bunch of my friends played a version of fantasy baseball with astronauts. We each picked two and got points for each spaceflight they went on, double points for a spacewalk, triple for getting to the moon. I had Lovell and Anders. (Only the first three astronaut groups.) Followed them like other kids followed baseball players.
In August (2010), Felix Baumgartner, who parachuted from the edge of space, met with astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon, and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space, during an event for Armstrong’s 80th birthday.
“I find it interesting that we have fliers here, all of which are better known for getting out of something than for flying it,” Armstrong said in a statement at the time.
McCandless 1984.
Epic picture:
As Norm MacDonald once said, about another astronaut, he’s less famous than a woman (Kardashian) who’s known for her large posterior.
A shame.
Also incredibly scary. If something went wrong, the Orbiter would need a whole lot of delta V to go get him. Orbital mechanics ain’t simple. Ask Buzz Aldrin.
That said, I wish we had the guts to do this more and get good at it. Maybe develop a one-man reentry system to come home in emergencies. I’ve seen interesting design studies for orbital life rafts. E Ticket ride, that would be.
I’ve written before about 1950’s Destination Moon, the first relatively realistic Hollywood space movie. One of its suspense scenes is the difficult rescue of an astronaut whose magnetic shoes momentarily lost contact with the ship. He’s only a hundred or so feet way but it takes another astronaut “riding” an oxygen tank to bring him in. (IIRC, Gravity also uses the idea of an oxygen bottle as emergency transport).
I’m not kicking the Shuttle while it’s down, now widely considered far too costly and dangerous. The decision to build it was sensible, and every promised technology worked. But some of them were premature. It wasn’t robust.
What if we’d taken the admittedly deflating-seeming alternative of following Apollo with low cost, Gemini based proven technology? It would have seemed awfully minimal to space fans, me included. Sure, replacing expendables with reflyable hardware looked like a no-brainer. But not at any price.
I understand the Russian cosmonauts made a point of not warning their American counterparts of the danger.
Regarding that fire. Unfortunately, it too often requires a disaster to result in an industrial change. The high concentration of Oxygen was clearly a hazard. As I recall, there was no escape release from the inside either. An absolute nightmare situation. But the space program was moving along at a pretty quick pace, so the fact that there were not more frequent serious mishaps is a testament to those running the programs.
I love the Shuttle but most of the criticism is valid. It was designed by Congress. We should have had a full flyback vehicle with a manned first stage that was a big ol’ fuel tank like the first stage of Saturn V, that would carry an orbiter up to speed and altitude, which would use rockets to finish the climb to orbit. Land, refuel, load up another orbiter and fly again. The orbiter has stubby X-15 wings and a robust heat shield. It can land on runways all over the world, no cross range capabilities necessary. Max Faget wanted to build it but Congress wouldn’t fund it. So we wound up with solid boosters, a throwaway fuel tank and a big wing because the Air Force wanted one (they later lost interest and focused on Titan III). The result was the most complex system ever created. It is to our credit that we flew 120+ missions even losing two Orbiters and crews.
They had operated with an oxygen enviroment all the way through Mercury and Gemini. The equipment required to provide an atmospheric mix of O2 and nitrogen would have been heavy and expensive. So they pressurized the capsules, and over the flight it either leaked out or left when they opened the doors. A lot easier to handle one gas.
As for the door, the Apollo capsule was mostly designed by Max Faget, who was a submariner. Maintaining integrity was a lot more important than opening quickly, so the hatch was basically a plug held in place by internal pressure. Once the fire started there was just no way to get them out.
Apollo 1 was a Mark 1 capsule. Mark 2 was a lot different.
Thanks for the reminder, Gary, and the additional info, SW. I had forgotten about Leonov, who beat Ed White to the spacewalk by eleven weeks. Here’s a bit of video from the Smithsonian archives:
I’ll take a look at The Wrong Stuff. Just the Wikipedia entry about Leonov’s life makes for some fascinating reading. He died at the age of 85 in 2019.
I never got the sense that the Russians were particularly interested in the welfare of the astronauts, or the animals, they fired into space.
I agree with your comment, which is factually flawless. But I’ll play devil’s advocate on blaming Congressional compromises. It wasn’t Congress that decided to go with delta wing, or eliminating jet engines for loitering. They didn’t dictate ceramic tiles versus titanium shingles. Congress can be blamed for not wanting to spend enough money, but they accurately reflected public opinion after Apollo. Democrats took the lead in cutting space budgets, but much of the GOP was also looking to make cuts. For better or worse, it was largely a consensus by then. We had massive crime in the streets, we were losing Vietnam, the stock market was falling.
Max’s straight wing orbiter–yes. Far lighter, too. But the only reason they gave the Air Force almost everything they wanted was money. NASA needed USAF buy-in.