🚨Next Step — Rendezvous in Space

Mar. 23, 1965 - Astronauts Virgil Grissom and John Young, America’s first team in space, splashed down safely into the South Atlantic at 2:18 p.m. today after proving that man could move a vehicle around in space at will. They were the first to change orbits deliberately — they did it twice — during their three trips around the Earth.

Control of the spacecraft, as demonstrated today by Grissom and Young, is essential for future flights, especially planned rendezvous missions and manned flight to the moon.

“It was a great flight,” said Grissom after a rescue helicopter plucked him and Young from their spacecraft — lovingly nicknamed the Unsinkable Molly Brown — and delivered them to a red-carpet welcome on the flight deck of the carrier Intrepid.

It was four hours and 54 minutes after the space partners had lifted off from Cape Kennedy and had hurtled at 17,500 m.p.h. three times around the world for a distance of more than 81,000 miles.

Aboard the Intrepid, the pair were called via radio-telephone by President Johnson.

“It was a thrilling and wonderful flight,” Grissom told Johnson.

Young said, “I feel in tiptop shape,” then added, “it didn’t last long enough.”

“We’ll try to work that out in the days ahead,” Johnson replied. “I have been following you every moment since lift-off this morning. I only wish I could have been there to greet you, as I was when John Glenn came in. I know I speak for the country when I tell you we are very proud and very grateful for your safe return.”

For Grissom, 38, an Air Force major, the flight was a sharp contrast to his first landing from a spaceflight almost four years ago. During his suborbital flight then, Grissom almost drowned when the hatch cover of his Mercury capsule blew off prematurely and the spacecraft filled with water and sank in the Atlantic.

Because of the accident, the radio call name chosen for today’s flight was the Unsinkable Molly Brown. The capsule’s official name is Gemini 3.

Grissom has now become the first astronaut to have gone into space twice. 

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