Gemini 4 - Ed White's spacewalk

Ed White became the first American astronaut to undertake a spacewalk on the third of June 1965 as pilot of Gemini 4 along with Command pilot James McDivitt. The American space program was behind the Soviet program after cosmonaut Alexey Leonov became the first human to conduct an extra-vehicular activity on the Voskhod 2 mission on the eighteenth of March 1965.

Interestingly, Ed White wore an Omega Speedmaster timepiece strapped to his spacesuit for the spacewalk. According to Omega, they only became aware that NASA astronauts were wearing their watches after noticing the Speedmaster mounted on the spacesuit of White during his space walk.

Astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young were the first astronauts to wear flight qualified Speedmaster timepieces on the Gemini 3 mission after Wally Schirra, initially from the Mercury program apparently procured a number from a Houston dealer.

After the Gemini program ended, the astronauts moved over to the Apollo program. The Gemini program with two man crew was to develop techniques supporting the Apollo program including docking maneuvers, space rendezvous and extra-vehicular activities.

I was fortunate enough to visit the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in 2014 and look around their fascinating museum viewing both Mercury and Gemini capsules.

The Gemini mission duration were to designed to prepare for length of the Apollo trips to the moon. The six Mercury missions generally lasted a matter of hours although as the program progressed, flights of around 15 minutes for the early flights were gradually extended to a day and a half for astronaut Gordon Cooper on Faith 7.

Sadly Ed White along with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee lost their lives to the fire on board Apollo 1 during a launch simulation. An electrical spark in the Command Module caused wiring to burst into flames, the pure oxygen environment in the Command Module rapidly increased combustion.

The crew were unable to open the hatch due to design constraints with rescuers unable to open the hatch due to the pressure differential as the cabin was pressurised to 2 psi higher than atmospheric pressure.