Gemini Ten: Photography on the Climb to Agena Eight

Transcript

On July nineteenth, nineteen sixty-six, Gemini Ten was climbing toward Agena Eight. The day before, Michael Collins and John Young had docked with Agena Ten. A trajectory correction had left them with only half their planned fuel at docking, and they repeatedly fired Agena Ten’s engine to match orbits with Agena Eight. Collins’s first planned spacewalk was a stand-up EVA: he remained at the open hatch rather than moving away from the spacecraft. It lasted forty-nine minutes. With a seventy-millimetre camera, he took twenty-two ultraviolet images of the southern Milky Way. As the docked spacecraft entered daylight, he also photographed a coloured plate to test how accurately film recorded colour in space. For the planned second EVA, Collins put on the ELSS chestpack and unstowed an umbilical, a line carrying oxygen, communications, and nitrogen. The nitrogen was stored under pressure in the adapter section and would power the hand-held maneuvering unit, a small device for moving an astronaut with gas thrust. Fuel remained scarce. The crew rendezvoused with Agena Eight about ninety minutes before the planned EVA, shaping the timing of the next spacewalk around the mission’s limited fuel.