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"With us also through this morning is, uh, Peter Akis, who had, uh, who had been covering from NBC, uh, News Space Center here, and he's down there now with, uh, with the models, of the mated, uh, spacecraft. Pete! You wanna do a little, uh, recap of what we covered?"

"Well, uh, it's, uh, I think we've gone over it a number of times. I might point out one or two things, Hugh. Uh, it has been mentioned that there was some fault with one or more of the thrusters, that is to say the yaw thruster or the roll thruster or many or some or all of them. Uh, I-I think we oughta stress that it's really, uh, still far too early to pinpoint any kind of trouble."

"America's Gemini VIII space team's safe aboard the destroyer Leonard Mason steaming toward an evening landfall at Okinawa and the Pacific Ocean. Command pilot Neil Armstrong and his partner on the history of making spaceflight, David Scott, made an emergency splashdown, as Hugh said, at 10:23PM last night, that's Eastern Standard Time, about 500 miles east of Okinawa. The landing came slightly less than eleven hours after liftoff on what was to have been a three day mission. It was to have included a walk around the world in space by Scott, but that was scrubbed! The mission had to be cut short before the spacewalk because of trouble in the orbital docking. When the spacecraft linked up with the Agena target, a runaway thruster rocket on the Gemini capsule sent the two vehicles spinning wildly. The command was given to disengage, and an emergency landing was ordered. Shortly after the spacecraft hit the water in the Pacific, frogmen parachuted from an Air Force transport plane and attached a floatation collar. Not long afterward, the destroyer Mason pulled alongside."

"At any rate, it made a violent, sudden lunge, either this way or this way, and then began to move...in a...completely random way. Uh, normally, if it were some, this kind of a--minor motion, there'd be no panic about it. And I don't think there any panic, in fact, yesterday. But uh, the two things that were noticed on the ground where the fact that the voices of the astronauts rose, and their heartbeat became very fast. And very shortly thereafter, the command pilot, Neil Armstrong, decided, apparently on his own, that he better get out of there in a hurry, and he backed out. Shortly thereafter, the motion of the Agena was righted, probably from signals from the ground. But, at that point, Gemini went into an uncontrolled motion."

"After, uh--"

"After separation. It took them a half hour to get this thing straightened up."

"This is probably the only thing where we can speculate with a certain degree of accuracy."

"Yeah."

"Both of these vehicles were on automatic pilots at the time this trouble started. Now, the automatic pilots would fight each other, locked together. You kick them apart, and this one would stabilize on its own gyros, and it would take longer to stabilize this one on its gyros, much longer."

"In order to...right themselves, which is absolutely necessary, when you can just say so much of this, they had to use this series of thrusters, which is called the RCS system, the Reentry Control System. Normally, this system of thrusters, in addition to the ones that are back here, these are not used until reentry. Now, when you use up the fuel that's in these...thruster system--in this thruster system, before you get to re-entry, you don't have any fuel left for guiding yourself down during re-entry. So, it has become, this is the first time it's ever been used, but it's a, it's a rule in the rulebook! Written and unwritten, that whenever you use some of your fuel in your RCS system in advance, you just get down the next possible opportunity."

"Now, am I right that the danger then is that the, even correcting these, uh, wild motions in the vehicle, if they had attempted to redock and go through the maneuver again, there was danger then of, uh, di-, uh, diminishing the fuel too much to make a safe reentry?"

"Well, there was a point here that Peter was just about to tell you. It, apparently was command pilot's option to separate. In an emergency separation, you destroy part of this nose! You use explosive charges to back off right--"

"So you couldn't re--"

"And you couldn't--you could, but you have damaged your collar--"

"You couldn't, as they say, rigidize. In other words, you couldn't put it in and make it strictly--you could, you could dock like this, but you couldn't tie up tightly."

"So if this had gone right, it would have been a one dock, uh, and then, uh--"

"Right. And there were four dockings, uh, planned, two rendezvous, four dockings."