“He’s out! He’s floating free!”

Abstract

Once the station-keeping exercise with the Titan booster had been terminated, the focus turned to the planned spacewalk by Ed White. As McDivitt commented post-flight, they started the preparation work almost immediately. “[After] we reverted from the station-keeping which we were both attempting to do, to EVA preparation which we both had to do, that’s when Ed went after the [hand-held maneuvering] gun and we started our preparation. We weren’t really far behind at this time. All we had to do was get the gun out and the maneuvering unit. The cameras were already out.” White had already unpacked the Zeiss camera along with the Hasselblad from the same storage location, finding little difficulty in unzipping the center container. He also found assembling the components of the maneuvering gun very easy, having practiced it many times during training.

“We were looking to find out:

‘Could man control himself in space?’

And the answer is yes,

Man can control himself in space.

He needs a little more fuel than was provided to me.”

Ed White’s post-flight comment on his EVA