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He stood on top of his spaceship's white titanium hull. He touched it with his bulky thermal gloves. He burned around like Buck Rogers propelling himself with his hand-held jet. He floated lazily on his back. He joked and laughed. He gazed down at the earth 103 miles below, spotted the Houston Galveston Bay area where he lives and tried to take a picture of it. Like a gas station attendant, he checked the spacecraft's thrusters, wiped its windshield. Ordered to get back into the capsule, he protested like a scolded kid. "I'm doing great," he said. "It's fun. I'm not coming in." When, after 20 minutes of space gymnastics, U.S. Astronaut Edward Higgins White II, 34, finally did agree to squeeze himself back into his Gemini 4 ship, he still had not had enough of space walking. Said he to Command Pilot James Alton McDivitt: "It's the saddest day of my life."
White's exhilarating space stroll provided the moments of highest drama during Gemini 4's scheduled 62-orbit, 98-hour, 1,700,000-mile flight. White spent twice the time outside the spacecraft that Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov did last March 18, and he had much more maneuverability; all Leonov did was somersault around at the end of a tether, getting dizzy, while White moved around pretty much at will.
Second Generation. Still, Gemini's planners would have scrubbed White's EVA (for Extra-Vehicular Activity) expedition in a second if they had thought it might detract from the flight's basic missions.
In Gemini 4, the U.S. took a big step toward closing the gap in the man-in-space race, in which the Soviet Union got off to a head start. More important, the flight signaled the advent of the second generation of U.S. spacecraft and spacemen. The two-man Gemini capsule is to the old Mercury capsule what a Thunderbird is to a Model T. Almost all previous U.S. space flights were preplanned to the second, and any deviation meant trouble; in Gemini 4, the astronauts were given considerable flexibility, could and did change their plans and improvise at short notice. For the first time, a U.S. space flight was controlled from Houston's supersophisticated Manned Space Center, which makes Cape Kennedy almost as obsolete as a place once called Canaveral.
Moreover, the spacemen themselves were second generation. Project Mercury's pioneers were national legends almost before they got off the ground. Yet who, before last week, knew very much about Jim McDivitt and Ed White?
The Team. The pair made an almost perfect space team. Inside Man McDivitt is a superb pilot and a first-class engineer who is the son of an electrical engineer. Outside Man White is a daring flyer, a fine athlete, a military career-man who is the son of a retired Air Force major general who flew everything from balloons to jets.