Neil Armstrong is best known as the first person to set foot on the Moon. But even before that, he was a member of the Gemini 8 mission, which nearly ended in disaster. New photos taken after the astronauts were rescued were recently discovered.
Neil Armstrong after his rescue. Source: phys.org
Adventures of Neil Armstrong
New photos have recently been released showing astronauts David Scott and Neil Armstrong in a rather unusual situation. They were photographed shortly after American sailors pulled them from the water when they failed to return to Earth in 1966.
Even before becoming the first person on the Moon, Armstrong ran a serious risk of becoming the first person to die in Earth’s orbit , rather than during landing or takeoff. This happened during the seventh mission of the Gemini program, which you can read about in detail here. The two astronauts were tasked with docking with the unmanned Agena spacecraft.
They succeeded, but then one of the commands malfunctioned, causing the vehicle to spin out of control, and Armstrong, on the verge of losing consciousness, had to stop the rotation manually. He succeeded, but the spacecraft ended up on an unplanned trajectory with insufficient fuel, and he had to make an emergency landing in a remote area near the Okinawa Islands.
But no one there was really prepared for their return. As a result, they had to spend three hours floating in the not-so-inviting March sea until they were picked up by the ship Leonard F. Mason. American sailors pulled the two astronauts and their capsule out of the water.
Gemini 8 capsule. Source: phys.org
New photos
Actually, these are the very moments captured in the new photos. Actually, images of this relatively unknown event had existed before. They were taken by Ron McQueeney, an American soldier and photographer. At the time, he was assisting with the rescue efforts and documenting the process.
McQueeney’s photographs were later partially published, and it is largely thanks to him that we know so much about those events. However, some of the photographs remained in his archive. And only now, 60 years later, they have been made public by his widow.
She gave them to the Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Armstrong’s western Ohio hometown. The photos show the astronauts on board the spacecraft after their rescue, smiling and interacting with others despite all the difficult trials they had endured. There is also a capsule visible on them that was retrieved from the water.
According to phys.org