"We've got serious problems here. We're tumbling end over end, and we've disengaged from the Agena."
That ominous message from the two-man spaceship Gemini 8 alarmed a nation grown accustomed to uninterrupted space success. Off Formosa, aboard the tracking ship Coastal Sentry tense NASA technicians followed the approaching capsule by radar and urgently queried Astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott for additional information. In the Mission Control Center near Houston, flight controllers huddled over their consoles and studied telemetered data in a desperate effort to track down the trouble. Millions of Americans...