Leading the Chamber of Commerce is Rocket Science

Roy Edwards sells insurance for a living. He is also President of the Fair Oaks Chamber of Commerce, helping to launch local businesses toward success. Thirty years ago, Edwards launched men into space for the Gemini Space Program-the most successful project in the history of American manned space flight.

Edwards spent thirteen years as a field engineer for Martin Marietta, a Denver-based company contracted in the early Sixties to provide the boosters for the Polaris and Titan missiles positioned throughout the country and the world during the height of the cold war. NASA used the Titan II missile as the booster to launch manned Gemini space capsules into orbit. Edwards was recruited from the missile test sites of Nevada to ensure that the Titan boosters made the grade.

"It was a young man's job," Edwards laughs. "I could never do it if I had to do it now. I look back, and the hours we used to keep and the stuff we had to do-you had to be young to keep up with it."

The Gemini Space Program was the transitional stage between the Mercury Project, which put the first man in space, and the Apollo Missions, which put men on the moon.

"We don't get much recognition, anymore," says Edwards. "We didn't send up Alan Shepard, the first man in space, and we didn't put anybody on the moon. But what most folks don't realize is that, if it hadn't been for our program, and the great successes that we had, Neil Armstrong would never have walked on the moon."

The Gemini Space Program was perhaps the most grueling, and was certainly the most successful space program ever put together by NASA. In just twenty months, NASA sent up 20 astronauts in twelve launches, proved that men could could walk in space and work in such a hostile environment, and demonstrated unparalleled flight precision by linking two manned space vehicles, 327 kilometers above the earth.

"That program, for its success, has never been equaled," Edwards says with pride "We had twelve flights, and they were all successful. Every other space program, before or since, had at least some parts that were failures. Even when we had a failure, we turned it into a success, and that was the rendezvous in space with Geminis VI and VII."

The rendezvous between two Gemini space vehicles and four astronauts stands as the pinnacle of Edwards' pioneering career. The initial mission planned for the Gemini VI spacecraft to launch into space and link up with an Atlas rocket. As Edward's recalls, it was a mission that, though successful, wasn't without a few heart-stopping moments.

Scheduled for an eleven-day window, The Atlas Agena was to go into orbit and wait for the Gemini VI, which had to launch on the second orbital pass for a successful rendezvous. When the flight began, all systems were go. But it didn't take long for the project to put the launch crew on a fifteen-day cardiac alert.

"We were all doing a parallel countdown," Edwards recalls, "but we got to a point where we stopped our countdown and went into a hold. It was a planned hold. They [the Atlas team] went ahead and counted down, and they launched. So here we are sitting with our astronauts on top of the bird, and everything's going on hold while we wait our turn to launch. The Atlas launch is a beautiful launch, but it gets up and blows up on separation." Edwards' eyes flicker for a split second with a sudden remembrance of fear. "We're sitting there with a rendevous, but nothing to rendevous with. At that point NASA goes into a panic-what do we do? The whole world is watching on televison."

And the whole world was watching. At a time when President John Kennedy had publically announced that America would put a man on the moon in that decade, NASA could not afford to misstep on the road toward such a monumental, and was at that time a theoretical task, particularly since the Apollo space program was already underway, with probes mapping potential landing sites for future manned flights to the moon.

With the first half of their rendezvous mission lying on the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, the Gemini crew needed an immediate solution.

"We went into a quick huddle," Edwards laughs. "A proposal was made by Gil Verlander, our program director, who had just received word that Gemini VII was in the hangar, ready to go as soon as we lifted off with six. Now we had to redo everything, because the payload for Gemini VI would not allow it to stay in orbit for the length of time that we needed. Gemini VII was configured with a higher payload margin so it could orbit for a longer period of time. We had to get the guys out of VI, get it taken down, get it back to the hangar, and get VII set up on the pad, then get it all checked out and ready to go, and have VI ready to go on the pad right behind it.

"So that was done. VII went off with a beautiful shot, and went into orbit. Then we had to rush and scramble, because we had just an eleven-day turnaround to get VI into space for the rendezvous with Gemini VII. We were racing the clock. Nobody got any sleep."

Edwards and his 147 other members of the Gemini launch crew worked in pairs. NASA and Martin Marietta reserved a block of motels along Coco Beach, and crew members would work to the point where "we walked in our sleep." One crew member would work to exhaustion, would go back to the motel to wake up his counterpart who would go back to work until he could barely walk back to the motel to wake his relief. The Gemini team worked that rotation for eleven days, plus the four days that the space vehicles remained in orbit.

"We got VI into position, got the countdown, a beautiful countdown, right down to the light at ignition. The bird went off for one-point-two seconds and then it shutdown. Oh no, here we go again. There was dead silence in the blockhouse. Nobody knew what had happened. It was in the propulsion unit, so obviously everyone was looking at us with, `So, okay what happened?' Real quick we got out the telemetry data and the instrumentation, and found that the bird shut itself down. We took the first engine off and left the bird where it sat, right on the pad, still vertical. We took the engine back to the hangar and took it apart."

The Gemini propulsion team found a three-quarter inch dust plug that had been left in the propulsion unit, which allowed the oxidizer for ingniton to get far enough to start a burn, but not far enough to ignite the rest of the launch.

"We got that fixed, put the engine back on, started the countdown again, and back-to-back we made two launches in eleven days."

No space program before or after the Gemini space flights achieved such marks of success, reached such milestones or demonstrated such accuracy. "We never missed a launch, never lost a bird and never lost a man," Edwards says, victoriously.

Five launches later, the Gemini project shutdown to make way for the Apollo missions. The program was a complete success, proving everything that it set out to prove, and making discoveries that would later become the foundation for the successes of the Apollo missions and the Shuttle flights.

In the twenty months of the Gemini program, astronauts Ed White, Michael Collins, Richard Gordon and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin made historical walks in space. Gemini VIII effected the first successful docking of two space vehicles, a technique necessary to join the Columbia and Eagle vehicles for the Apollo XII moon landing.

The Gemini Space Program became the proving ground for American ingenuity and know-how, putting the United States on the global map of technology. It was a hard path to forge, but Edwards wouldn't have traded it for the world.

"It was a wonderful job, and the guys I worked with, well... they were all great guys. They were role models, every one of them. I know everyone worked as though their lives depended on it-every launch crew. It was the only job I've ever had where you'd jump out of bed and couldn't wait to get to work because you wanted to know what happened the night before. I've never had a job like that before or since. I use that job as the measure of comparison."

Edwards got a renewed spark of Gemini excitment when he attended the reunion of the Gemini launch crews the last week in July. NASA put together a privately funded project to honor the men and women who worked on the various space programs, and invited them down to break ground for the Gemini monumnet that will stand in the "Space Walk of Fame."

For now, Edwards leads a simpler, less stressful life. But you can bet he doesn't sit around making the moon disappear behind his thumb. Edwards can look up at the sky with pride, knowing that he helped get astronauts to the earth's little sister in the sky.