![]() Had the Titan actually left the pad before engine cutoff, the missile would have toppled over, engulfing Schirra and Stafford in flames. A small electrical connector had vibrated loose a split-second before launch, sending a spurious shutdown signal to the Titan's first-stage engines. Stafford didn't know what was going on but I had the experience of a Mercury flight and my butt told me we hadn't left the pad." "I heard from the blockhouse that the clock had started, which means we had lifted off. "A light came on in the spacecraft saying we had liftoff," Schirra says. All indications were that Gemini 6 had lifted off from Pad 19-when the engines inexplicably shut down. [See Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford heard the pre-valves open, the turbopumps whir, and the Titan begin to rumble with the power of 430,000 pounds of thrust. Four seconds later, if all systems remained go, the bolts that anchored the Titan to the launch pad exploded and the Titan was on its way. When combined, the hypergolics emitted only a relatively small white flame and a rosy cloud rather than the burst of orange flame and billowing smoke of Mercury and Apollo launches. The gas from the cartridges started the Titan's turbopumps spinning, which in turn forced both fuel and oxidizer into the engine's combustion chambers. At T-minus-0, an electrical signal set things in motion by igniting two small cartridges in the Titan's two first-stage Aerojet engines. Unlike Project Mercury's Redstones and Atlases, as well as the later Saturn Vs, the Titan used room-temperature propellants called hypergolics, which ignite on contact. An improved version of the Air Force's Titan I, it first flew successfully in March 1962. When you heard that you knew they were serious about sending you somewhere."Īt the time it was chosen for Gemini duty, the Titan II was the most powerful rocket in America's inventory. I'll always remember that oxidizer pre-valve at 30 seconds. ![]() You can even feel it sway a little bit in the wind. "The Saturn V was a great big hulk, you know," he says of the enormous launcher behind the Apollo moon missions, "and the engines are 365 feet away and you don't hear a lot of things happening. So when they opened that thing up, you are sitting on top of this thing-you are not that far away-and you can hear it going glah-glah-glah-glah. The oxidizer was all the way up in the tank, and that line runs all the way down through the fuel tank down to the base. Recalling the launcher that powered all 10 manned Gemini spacecraft into orbit, two-time Gemini astronaut Pete Conrad says: "The thing about the Titan that I remember was somewhere in the count, like at T-minus-30 seconds, they open the oxidizer pre-valves. Once the Gemini's hatches were closed and locked just before launch, the busy throng that readied the spacecraft for orbit diminished dramatically-to two men and a machine that smelled slightly of plastic, sitting on top of a 150-ton intercontinental ballistic missile. Riding the tip of a 100-foot burning cylinder whose useful life is less than your average Marlboro is something you don't forget, even after three and a half decades. ![]()
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