Splashdown! Yorkville Navy vet recalls recovery of Gemini 8 capsule 50 years later

Imagine you’re a 20-year-old radio operator for the Navy during the 1960s, stationed on a small base in the Pacific Ocean, and a call comes over the wire that an object will be tumbling down from space near the base you are stationed at and you need to tell your commanding officers about it immediately.

That’s exactly what happened to Jon Thom of Yorkville 50 years ago this spring when on March 17, 1966, the Gemini 8 space capsule was recovered with the help of his unit after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott were quickly plucked from the small spacecraft and Thom, a radio operator at the time, was one of the first to know about it.

While he never met Armstrong or Scott, he did hurry to the port where they were taken after falling to earth and got a first-hand look at the Gemini capsule.

Even five decades later, Thom speaks about the mid-morning day in March as if he is still that 20-year-old Navy radioman third class.

“March 17, St. Patrick’s Day – that’s when it came out of the sky and tumbled down and they were all worried that they were going to lose the astronauts, but they pulled it off and it was just a wonderful thing,” Thom recalls. “A message came and they said ‘Oh my gosh, you better get ready for some excitement because Gemini 8 is aborting and it’s on its way down now.’”

NASA’s website describes the Gemini 8 mission as the sixth crewed Earth-orbiting spacecraft of the Gemini series, carrying astronauts Armstrong and Scott.

According to NASA, the Gemini 8’s mission objectives were “to perform rendezvous and four docking tests with the Agena target vehicle and to execute an ExtraVehicular Activity (EVA) experiment.” It was the first mission to dock with a target in space, though the full mission had to be aborted when the astronauts encountered technical difficulties that caused the craft to spin out of control.

The Gemini 8 capsule splashed down about 500 miles east of Okinawa at 9:45 a.m. About two hours later the two astronauts were recovered by Air Force pararescue men.

“It came through us, through the radio-shack and we thought we can’t let this message sit for one second, we got to get it to the commander here – to the captain – and we did,” Thom said. “The guys that went out and got them off the tin can in the destroyer went in the water and got them, and it was really a marvelous recovery.”

Thom still has a reprint souvenir copy of the March 1966 edition of the magazine “This Week on Okinawa” which meticulously detailed the recovery efforts by the U.S. Air Force and Navy.

“It’s only fair to say that the Gemini spacecraft is a fine spacecraft but a lousy or poor boat. And the two crewman after they landed... as well as the three frogmen that were with them all suffered sea sickness,” Capt. Wally Schirra, a spokesman for NASA, is quoted as saying in the magazine.

After splashdown and recovery, Armstrong and Scott and their capsule were taken back to base by the USS Mason at Naha port on the morning of March 18.

“The Navy took care of it and we were a little Naval Air Facility, a couple of hundred sailors, and that was it,” Thom said. “We were on a large Air Force base where there were thousands of Air Force personnel. It was our job to go get them. It went without the hitch.”

Thom didn’t get to meet the astronauts but he did get to inspect the capsule when it was hauled back to the Naval Air Facility at Naha, Okinawa. He recalls that its exterior was burned from re-entry into the atmosphere but otherwise it was in fine shape.

Armstrong went on to become the first man to walk on the Moon in July 1969 as commander of Apollo 11. Scott served as commander of Apollo 15 in 1971.

“Boy, that would have been cool,” Thom says of the possibility of meeting Armstrong and Scott, “All I got was a picture them flying off the ship over the harbor in a helicopter.”