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When, on May 25, only nine days before the launch date, NASA announced that White would try to take his walk in space, skeptics suggested that it was only a publicity gag. This irked the NASA men. "We're not playing Mickey Mouse with this thing, snapped Christopher Kraft, Gemini 4's mission director. "We're trying to carry out flight operations. I don't think its very fair to suggest we're carrying out a propaganda stunt."
The Real Thing. Now the rehearsals were over, and it was time for the real thing. McDivitt and White were ready.
"The condition of the astronauts is the best I've ever seen," said Dr. Charles Berry, Gemini's presiding physician. The countdown started 420 minutes before scheduled blast-off time, and as Mission Director Chris Kraft said, "Everything looks to be about as good as you could ever hope it to be."
Before dawn, McDivitt and White had a low-calorie breakfast of sirloin steak and eggs, gulped in breaths of pure oxygen to prevent the formation of nitrogen bubbles in their blood at high altitudes, went through the laborious process of putting on their space suits, and at 8:12 a.m. E.D.T. lay down on their twin bedlike couches in the capsule on Cape Kennedy's Launch Pad 19. The only hitch came 1 hr. 13 min. later, and 35 minutes before the scheduled launching time, when there was an electrical breakdown in the motor that was to lower the huge erector cradle, which had been used to set the Titan II booster rocket in its place. The delay lasted 1 hr. 16 min.
At 11:16 a.m. E.D.T., a billowing plume of hot orange smoke leaped from the base of the missile. Three seconds later, the rocket lifted ponderously from its pad, built speed rapidly as 430,000 Ibs. of thrust propelled it skyward. As it rose, McDivitt and White lay in their seats, each clutching a D-shaped ring; by pulling on the rings, they could eject themselves instantly if they had to abort the mission.
As the first stage of the missile dropped away, the first words came from the capsule. Exclaimed McDivitt: "Beautiful!" Exclaimed White almost simul taneously: "Beautiful!" Every word, every breath and every heartbeat of McDivitt and White as well as every calibration on every instrument in the cabin were under constant surveillance in Houston's new $170 million Manned Spacecraft Center.
There the nerve center for the Gemini flight was a softly lighted, air-conditioned Mission Operations Control building, where some 300 scientists, en gineers, doctors and technicians hunched over blinking panels or watched the orbital progress on 10-ft. by 60-ft. screens. Chris Kraft and his men were linked through 10,000 miles of wire, 140 instrument consoles and 384 television receivers with the entire Gemini 4 communications operation—including 11,000 men in a recovery fleet of ships and planes spanning two oceans. Basic to control of the Gemini 4 flight were five IBM 7094-11 computers, each of which could digest 50,000 "bits" of telemetry information per second from the orbiting craft. Gemini is able to flash back 275 different kinds of information, three times more than Mercury; the computer gobbles it up, puts it on paper or, upon specific demand, transmits it by television to the mission control officials.