Armstrong and Scott weren’t sure if the problem was the Agenda or the Gemini capsule, so they undocked from the Agenda. But that didn’t help. So they docked again…but still no fix of the problem. Finally, on the edge of unconsciousness, Armstrong and Scott aborted the mission and came home, safely.
Alexei Leonov became a very historic cosmonaut—he became the first person to do a spacewalk. While it may have been fun at the start, it was quite the challenge coming back into the spacecraft. He almost didn’t make it. Thankfully he finally managed to squeeze back inside. But then as he and his commander were preparing for re-entry, the automatic landing system went zonkers, so the cosmonauts had to control the landing manually. When the team finally made it safely to earth…they came down in one of the most hostile portions of this globe—right in the middle of Naturally the Soviets didn’t let on that anything had gone wrong—as live video of Leonov spacewalking was beamed down to earth, the Soviets said “everything was going fine.” Uh-huh! At that time, anyway! The Americans didn’t know about Leonov’s troubles till years afterwards.
Which happened to be about 1975.
The Cold War had subsided enough for the
Before flying on ASTP, Deke ran the Astronaut Office. This meant he would pick and choose the crews of the different missions, and right before launch he would report to NASA brass that the astronauts were ready. Slayton would say it in two words: “They’re ready.”
Well, training and being with Leonov a lot preceding ASTP the two space people got to talking. Leonov became the equivalent of Slayton in Russia
One day Leonov decided to have some fun with the Russian government. Instead of giving his typical long speech, he said what Deke Slayton would: “They’re ready.”
The Russian government people responded, “You sound like Deke Slayton!”
Anyway. Sorry I got off on the tangent of Deke Slayton! Back to Two Sides of the Moon. Dave Scott had a very exciting Apollo career. He was command module pilot on Apollo 9, and commander on Apollo 15. Apollo 9 was critical to landing a man on the moon. (Now that I think of it, all the missions were critical to the success of NASA reaching Kennedy’s goal.) Apollo 9 was the first mission to have both the command module and the lunar module, which was going to on later missions land on the moon. Since there were going to be two distinct, different spacecraft flying in space at the same time, the Apollo 9 crew needed to come up with call signs, or names for each of the spacecraft.
The Lunar Module (or LM, pronounced lem) was a funny looking thing. Everyone thought it looked like a bug, so the Apollo 9 crew christened their LM, “Spider”. The conical shaped command module was called “Gumdrop”. Apollo 9 went out into deep space. While Dave Scott stayed in Gumdrop, Scott’s commander Jim McDivitt and crewmate Rusty Schweickart crawled into the LM and flew over a hundred miles away, before reuniting with Scott and coming home.
But for me, my favorite mission in Two Sides of the Moon was Dave Scott’s Apollo 15 mission. Apollo 15 was the fourth landing on the moon, and in my opinion, the first true scientific exploration of our satellite. With his crew of Jim Irwin and Al Worden, Scott flew to the moon. Worden kept the crew’s command module, Endeavour, in orbit while Scott and Irwin flew Falcon (the LM) down and landed at Hadley Rile. Unlike previous stays, Apollo 15 stayed on the moon for three whole days, not mere hours. Another addition was the Lunar Rover, a strange, funny, but useful little vehicle which the two astronauts drove around the moon, making much more accessible to collection. I know it’s funny to some people—but I just think that Apollo 15 is the coolest mission! In fact, I think it’s my favorite. :D
Okay, okay. I know I have shared maaaaaaaany stories from Two Sides of the Moon, but I must share just one more before I am done with telling you about this book. Here it is: in the beginning of the book Alexei Leonov shared stories of the early Soviet space program and what they did before manned missions. A good in-between step between unmanned and manned missions was sending man’s best friend into space. The Soviets send several dogs into space, including one Chernushka on Sputnik 9. If I remember correctly, the original cosmos-canine ran off as they were strapping it into to the capsule…and this dog had been trained to hit the controls with its snout, etc. Then Soviet officials saw decided that a stray dog they had seen, Chernushka, would do. They asked her, “Would you like to go into space?” and she replied “Woof, woof, woof!” They took that as a “yes.” (Just kidding on that conversation, however, they did send Chernushka into space.) Actually, Chernushka performed quite excellent in space. When the Soviets recovered her successfully, she ran away barking…much to dismay of the medical people who wanted to do tests on her. (If I were her, I’d probably run from the doctors too! ;D)
To be continued.....
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