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[i]CB: Okay. First of all, plans two months ahead of Gemini 5 called for the possibility of a crewmember poking his head out of the hatch. Was it always going to be Ed’s job, or was consideration given to you doing the stand-up EVA? JM: Well, when we first started we both did it all together. I mean, he’d practice something and I’d practice something, so we just went along in parallel like that. Then by the time we got around to doing it, it was one of those things where I was the commander and that was a full-time job, and so I talked it over with the other powers around NASA and we decided Ed ought to do it. CB: When and how did you find out that Ed was going to conduct a full EVA? JM: Well, you know, I don’t think there were any plans ahead of time for us to stick our heads out the hatch; I don’t think that was the case. I don’t remember that – it was forty years ago – but, the way I remember it; we were going along and we thought we ought to do a – you know, there was no planned EVA whatsoever on that flight. It was a four day flight, and we, nobody had really been talking about doing an EVA at all on any of the missions, as far as I know, and then very secretly somebody decided we ought to try one, so Ed and I practiced at night, and we did all the EVA stuff real late in the evening. We did discover early on that the seat was not quite the right height, so we had to do some modifications to the seats so we could make sure we could get the guys back in the spacecraft. We did it all very secretive; even … nobody in the Astronaut Office knew we were doing it. And then, a week or so before the flight – or maybe it was two weeks or so before the flight – the Russians did one, so we were really planning on doing the first one, but they beat us to the punch. To the best of my knowledge, there weren’t any plans to do an EVA on any Gemini flight up until the time we started on ours. And the equipment that we used was sort of developed for Ed and I on an air table, trying to figure out how we can make that little hand gun work and stuff.[/i]
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