Things were not going well for Eugene Cernan, who was outside his ship on a spacewalk — just the second time an American astronaut had ever made such a trip. The vagaries of microgravity and Newton’s laws of motion meant that Cernan, on this scary day in 1966, was having a hard time controlling his movements, tugging on the cord connecting him to the Gemini space capsule.
“You’re kind of rocking the boat,” his companion and commander, Tom Stafford, radioed from inside the spaceship. Stafford had strict instructions: If Cernan put the spacecraft in danger, or was in too much danger himself, there was only one thing to be done: “Cut him loose,” the flight manager had instructed. It’s a black-and-white dictum, given for a gray situation, that Jeffrey Kluger includes to dramatic effect in his new book “ Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story.”
Cernan didn’t know Stafford’s just-in-case instructions. But his heart was hammering, Kluger continues; sweat fogged his visor, which iced over as the spacecraft orbited from the daylight to nighttime side of the Earth. Cernan, Kluger writes, “rubbed his nose against the inside of the visor, and opened a tiny hole in the ice.....”
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