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TODAY, on August 29, in 1965, a conversation took place between a human positioned more than 200 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean and people floating at 99 miles above the earth. On the last day aboard Gemini 5, the astronauts of NASA Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad discussed with their friend Scott Carpenter, an Aquanaut who was at the bottom of the Pacific, aboard the experimental navy of the American navy. They spoke via radio, which sends radio waves between speakers. This marked the very first call between astronauts and an aquanat.
Among other space tasks, Cooper and Conrad tested the impacts of a long journey among the stars on human health – when eight days were considered long, beating the Soviet record of three days. Conrad compared the mission, to its tight districts, “eight days in a trash can”.
Meanwhile, in the Pacific, Carpenter has participated in a similar experience: assess how long people can bear the depths of the ocean. He stayed on Sealab II for a 30 -day record, supervising the dives on the high seas. The Carpenter team even worked with a qualified marine mammal named Tuffy, who wore a harness to deliver various tools and messages.
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Cooper and Carpenter returned back, and everyone had made serious exploits in the Cosmos: both participated in Project Mercury, the country’s first crew space flight program. Conrad was transmitted for the occasion, but still had a successful career for NASA, later commanding the Apollo 12 mission in 1969.
Using the same radiootphone technology he had used to contact his astronaut friends, Carpenter then sounded the American president Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House, although with an extremely acute voice because of the environment rich in helium. Thirty years later, Carpenter made another historic long distance call: he spoke to astronauts from the Endeavour space shuttle in a submarine laboratory off the coast of Florida.
“Look at this window well,” Carpenter Carpenter to the Nasa astronaut Michael Gernhardt during this sea in Espace. “What you can see from above is something that will last in your mind forever.”
Image of lead: Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad left Gemini 5 after splashing on Earth in 1965. Credit: Nasa Johnson Space Center
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