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The original crew for Gemini 9, command pilot Elliot See and pilot Charles Bassett, were killed in a crash on February 28, 1966, while flying a T-38 jet trainer to the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St. Louis, Missouri to inspect their spacecraft. Their deaths promoted the backup crew, Thomas P. Stafford and Eugene Cernan, to the prime crew
The Gemini astronauts were sixteen pilots who flew in Project Gemini, NASA's second human spaceflight program, between projects Mercury and Apollo. Carrying two astronauts at a time, a senior command pilot and a junior pilot, the Gemini spacecraft was used for ten crewed missions. Four of the sixteen astronauts flew twice.
In the aftermath of the crash, the backup crew of Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan were moved up to the primary position for the Gemini 9 mission, scheduled for early June. Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin , who had formerly been the backup crew for Gemini 10 , became the mission's backup crew and through the normal rotation were assigned as prime ...
The backup crew of Stafford and Cernan was then moved up to the new prime crew of Gemini 9A. Lovell and Aldrin were moved from being the backup crew of Gemini 10 to be the backup crew of Gemini 9. This cleared the way through the crew rotation for Lovell and Aldrin to become the prime crew of Gemini 12. Along with the deaths of Grissom, White ...
The crew were exposed to the toxic fumes from 24,000 ft (7.3 km) down to landing. About an hour after landing the crew developed chemical-induced pneumonia and their lungs had edema. They experienced shortness of breath and were hospitalized in Hawaii. The crew spent five days in the hospital, followed by a week of observation in semi-isolation.
He made his first spaceflight in December 1965 as the pilot of Gemini 6A, which made the first space rendezvous, with Gemini 7. In June of the following year he commanded Gemini 9A . In 1969, Stafford was the commander of Apollo 10 , the second crewed mission to orbit the Moon and the first to fly a Lunar Module in lunar orbit, descending to an ...
After the deaths of Wally Schirra, Eugene Cernan, and John Young, he was the last surviving crew member of Gemini 6A, Gemini 9A, and Apollo 10. In 1993, the Stafford Air & Space Museum was founded in his hometown of Weatherford, Oklahoma. Originally just two rooms, it has grown to over 63,000 square feet (5,850 m 2) of artifact space.
Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin were promoted to the backup crew as a result of the accident. Stafford and Cernan, the original backup crew, were launched three months later on June 3 as Gemini 9A. [41] The shuffling of the Gemini crews caused by the deaths of See and Bassett affected crew assignments for subsequent Gemini and Project Apollo missions.