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On February 28, 1966, See and Bassett were flying from Texas to inspect the Gemini 9 spacecraft at the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St. Louis, Missouri.The conditions at Lambert Field were poor and, as a consequence, in attempting a visual approach and landing, See hit one of the assembly buildings of the factory and caused the aircraft to crash, killing himself and Bassett instantly.
Cernan was originally selected with Thomas Stafford as backup pilot for Gemini 9. When the prime crew of Elliot See and Charles Bassett was killed in the crash of NASA T-38A "901" (USAF serial 63–8181) at Lambert Field , Missouri , on February 28, 1966, the backup crew became the prime crew—the first time in NASA history this happened. [ 9 ]
See and Bassett were the prime crew assigned to the Gemini 9 mission. They and the backup crew for the mission, Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan, were flying to St. Louis from their normal training base in Houston for two weeks of simulator training for rendezvous and docking procedures at McDonnell Aircraft, the prime contractor for the Gemini spacecraft.
Before Gemini 6A, Stafford was assigned as the backup commander for Gemini 9 with Eugene Cernan as the backup pilot. Charlie Bassett and Elliot See were the primary crew. On February 28, 1966, both crews flew in T-38 Talons to Lambert Field to visit the McDonnell Douglas Gemini assembly facility. Bassett and See crashed on landing, and were killed.
And American astronaut Gene Cernan almost lost his life during his Gemini 9 spacewalk the next year, ... Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, performed two during the 1966 flight of Gemini 12 ...
NASA improvised and in December, Gemini 6 rendezvoused with but didn’t dock with two astronauts aboard Gemini 7. Stafford’s next flight in 1966 was with Cernan on Gemini 9.
Gemini was the second phase in the United States space program's larger goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before the end of the 1960s, as proposed by president John F. Kennedy. As an intermediary step, Gemini afforded its astronauts the opportunity to gain critical spaceflight experience, performing tasks ...
A second GATV launch failure occurred on May 17, 1966, as Gemini 9 astronauts Tom Stafford and Eugene Cernan sat on their pad awaiting launch. The Atlas–Agena lifted smoothly into a cloudy sky, vanishing from view around T+50 seconds.