One of the basic maxims of space travel, says Flight Director Chris Kraft, is: "If you don't know what to do, don't do anything." Then, if the problem does not correct itself, there is almost always time enough to take remedial action−as there was last week when the gremlins of Gemini 5 battled against the determined ingenuity, intelligence and hardheaded courage of crack U.S. spacemen.
Launch to Retrofire. Command post of the tense scientific conflict, where Chris Kraft and his crew matched wits with the unpredictable troubles plaguing a pair of orbiting astronauts, was the brand-new $170 million Manned Spacecraft Center southeast of Houston, near Galveston Bay (see color). Started only three years ago, the center now has more than 30 completed buildings that rise like an attractive college campus above the dreary salt flats where scraggly Brahman cattle used to graze. Another 15 buildings are planned or under construction.
Inside the center, out of the blazing Texas sun, every corridor hums with space-age intensity. Besides directing spacecraft in flight and training astronauts, the Houston center also develops new engineering techniques and supervises the testing of every piece of equipment that will be used−from transistors to space-suit zippers to fuel cells. A vibration laboratory shakes the very innards out of equipment; a thermochemical complex tests rocket thrusters. In the simulation and training building, an astronaut can climb inside a spacecraft and practice all the functions of a mission, from launch to retrofire.
A computer-controlled centrifuge will soon be available to determine how crews and their systems stand up under the G forces of rapid acceleration. The world's largest vacuum chamber, which bulges into the shape of a 120-ft. stainless-steel beer keg and is big enough to swallow an entire Apollo moonship, will go into operation later this year. At the edge of the space center, a field covered with heaps of steel-mill slag and pumice is used as a practice area for simulated exploration of a crater-pocked lunar landscape.
Operational heart of the whole place is Chris Kraft's Mission Control, a $7,000,000 building crammed with $100 million worth of electronic equipment. It is a mass of dull grey cabinets, closed-circuit TV equipment and banks of computers−all linked together by more than 10,000 miles of wire and 2,000,000 cross connections. The ground floor houses IBM 7094 II computers that monitor on-board systems of telemetry. On the second floor of the windowless structure is a master control room, with four rows of 20 consoles facing a huge world map on which the path of a spacecraft is projected. Above, on the third floor, is a second control room, permitting the center to run simulations of future flights while a real flight is in progress.