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Half an hour later, a four-engine C-54 spotted Gemini descending under its giant orange and white parachute. It had scored a bull's-eye. For all its trouble, it had hit its predicted impact point as precisely as any previous U.S. spacecraft. Within minutes, the C-54 swooped low and dropped pararescue swimmers and an emergency raft beside the bobbing Gemini capsule. While other rescue planes circled overhead, the swimmers attached a flotation collar to the capsule, then waited with the astronauts to be picked up by the nearest rescue ship, the destroyer Leonard F. Mason.
Word of the remote rescue came to the U.S. through one of the most intricate communications networks ever used. After the swimmers confirmed that the astronauts were alive and well, they flashed a "thumbs up" signal to the low-flying C-54, which radioed the good news to another rescue plane at a higher altitude. From the second plane, the message was radioed to the destroyer Mason, 58 miles away. The Mason, in turn, sent the message to Hawaii, where it was transmitted by cable to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., which relayed it to the Mission Control Center in Houston-where Paul Haney announced the successful recovery to a waiting world.
Remarkable Calm. With Astronauts Armstrong and Scott safely on their way to a debriefing session at Naha, Okinawa, the press zeroed in on every available NASA official, anxious to check out every possible theory about what went wrong. And when NASA refused to release the tapes of Gemini's conversations with the ground until NASA scientists had a chance to study them, reporters leaped to the conclusion that some bitter truth was being hidden.
The truth, when NASA had time to confirm it, was bitter only because it pointed to one of those senseless snafus that sometimes seem to dog even the best planned and executed space efforts. The trouble, said NASA, was caused by a short circuit in the electrical system that controlled Gemini 8's maneuvering thrusters. The short started a 25-lb. thruster firing, sending the craft into its rapid spin. The astronauts did not at first realize that the trouble was in their own craft because Gemini's maneuvering system had been turned off, decided to unlock because they thought that the difficulty might be in the Agena. When they realized that their own thrusters must be at fault, they deactivated the entire maneuvering system and calmly resorted to their Reentry Control System to stop the roll.
In May, Gemini 9 is scheduled to fly a docking and spacewalk mission even more complicated than Gemini 8's. And NASA officials are confident that they will live up to the promise made by President Johnson last week, when he said that the U.S. would "land the first man on the surface of the moon, and we intend to do this in the decade of the 1960s."