Swimming Lessons
Astronauts had to swim before they could walk.
- By Rebecca Maksel
- AirSpaceMag.com, August 11, 2009
NASA
“Watching the Gemini 9 EVA from Mission Control convinced me that I’d better be well prepared for the space walks I was to perform on the Gemini 12,” Buzz Aldrin wrote in his 1989 memoir, Men From Earth. “I had a lot of respect for Gene [Cernan] and thought he could have done better had he had different training. In fact, after Gemini 9, Gene joined me in a series of underwater training sessions in a pool near Baltimore to prepare for the Gemini 12 mission. (He was on our backup crew.) I was an experienced scuba diver before beginning this ‘neutral buoyancy’ training. It seemed to me that practicing underwater was better preparation for an astronaut’s weightless EVA than with the wire-and-pulley training gadgets that came and went in Houston, but never really worked.
“Soon my underwater training became quite elaborate. I wore a carefully ballasted EVA suit to completely neutralize my buoyancy and closely approximate zero G. Eventually I mastered the intricate ballet of weightlessness.”
Here, astronaut Buzz Aldrin carries out underwater training in October 1966 at the McDonough School For Boys in Baltimore. The pool contained a full-size mockup of Gemini’s equipment section.
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Comments (1)
This is a great photo, in part because it documents a little appreciated facet of the Skylab program. Before it was Skylab, it was AAP--the Apollo Applications Program. To gain support, NASA offered to fly some military technology experiments on the Orbital Workshop. One is shown in this photo: the inflatable airlock developed by the US Air Force (that roundish white object to the right of the Apollo Telescope Mount). The USAF wanted to evaluate an inflatable, collapsible airlock for use in its future space vehicles. What I didn't realize was that the Air Force inflatable airlock was still (apparently) in evaluation as late as November 1970, when this photo was taken.
Recall also that Alexei Leonov made humanity's first space walk through an inflatable airlock, but (as far as I know) none have ever been used since then.
Posted by John Charles on August 28,2009 | 01:36 PM