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In 1957, while stationed in Germany, White read about the U.S.'s embryonic astronaut program, decided that he would one day get into it and, in the process of preparing himself, took a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan—at the same time Jim McDivitt was there. After Michigan, White went to test-pilot school, later was assigned to a necessary but frustratingly tangential job having to do with the space program. At the controls of a jet cargo plane, he would go into a screaming, precisely plotted dive that would create the zero-gravity weightlessness of space ride. In this capacity, he helped in the training not only of John Glenn but of Ham and Enos, the chimpanzees who broke into space before men did. White figures that he "went weightless" 1,200 times—for a total of about five hours—before he was ever selected as a Gemini pilot.
In Gemini, White became smitten with a single overriding ambition: to be the first man on the moon. "His goal, says his father, "is to make that first flight."
Dress Rehearsals. Gemini officers picked McDivitt and White as the spacemen for last week's flight nearly a year ago. After that, each man spent scores of hours in a simulated capsule at Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center They practiced the chilling procedures for aborting a flight in case of a mishap in a centrifuge at Johnsville, Pa. Together, they bobbed inside a Gemini capsule shell on the Gulf of Mexico off Galveston, rehearsing the act of opening the hatch, jumping out and inflating a life raft to await rescuers.
In preparation for his step-out into space, White spent 60 hours in vacuume chambers that simulated altitudes of up to 180,000 ft. Patiently, he practiced moving about in the suit he would wear outside the capsule. Weighing 31 lbs and costing over $30,000, the garment is a marvel of cautious construction With 22 layers, it acts as a coat ot armor, as a heat repellant, as protection from deep-freeze temperatures, and as a pressure force to keep White s body from exploding in the near-vacuum of space. Yet it also allows a certain freedom of movement. Although NASA experts figured that the odds against White being punctured by high-velocity micrometeor in space were about 10,000 to 1, they nevertheless blasted White's suit over and over again with splinters of plastic fired at 25,000 ft. per sec. In those tests, the suit held up.
No Mickey Mouse. White also spent some twelve hours rehearsing with Y "handheld self-maneuvering unit"—the gadget that was to help him walk around in space. The device weighs 7½ lbs., has two small cylinders of compressed oxygen belted to a handle that also acts as a trigger to send jets of air through two hollow tubes, each 2 ft. long. Holding the contraption just below his midriff White could, in his weightless state, manipulate it so as to send him, like a bit of fluff in the wind, in any direction he desired.