Launch from Cape Canaveral; landing 1010 km
southwest of the Bermuda-Islands.
Launch was successful after the third
attempt. This mission was originally intended to be the first mission to dock
with an Agena Target Vehicle, but the Agena exploded 6 minutes after its launch
on October 25, 1965 and the mission was cancelled. Plans were changed then. Now
the main goal was a rendezvous of two Gemini spacecrafts in space. The flight
plan was changed two, now the next mission was
Gemini 7 and Gemini 6 was now named
Gemini 6A.
But the second launch attempt on December 12, 1965 also
failed. The Titan-rocket shut down on the pad. The problem was, that the
instruments had shown already a launch, when the engines shut down, so the crew
had to eject. But
Schirra didn't with the simple reason, that he didn't felt
any motions of the capsule (from which it could have fallen down and
exploding). He trusted his senses and that was correct. When the engineers
examined the thrust versus time graph, they found that the thrust rose
nominally but started to get lower before the plug had fallen out. Through the
night, engineers examined the rocket engine piece by piece until they found
that a plastic cover had been left in the gas generator port. With this problem
solved the rocket and spacecraft were recycled for a launch 72 hours after the
first attempt.
The third attempt then was successful,
rendezvous-maneuver with earlier launched spacecraft
Gemini 7 too. During 270 minutes the
crews moved as close as 30 centimetres to 90 meters, talking over the radio,
while
Gemini 7 almost drifted and
Gemini 6 made the burns, because they had more fuel. It was the first radar
contact between the two spacecraft.
The Rendezvous-maneuver was the
only work to do. The flight ended with a nominal reentry and landing in the
West Atlantic, just 10 km from the planned landing point. The recovery ship was
the
USS Wasp. It was
the first successfully controlled reentry and they did in full view of live
television beamed from the Wasp via satellite transmission.
