Remembering NASA Astronauts

Remembering NASA Astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett

Fifty years ago, the Gemini program was teaching NASA what it needed to know to be able to send crews to the moon. Astronauts were learning to walk and work in zero gravity. Pilots were practicing rendezvous maneuvers and docking spacecraft. Many of the Gemini crews included astronauts who would reach lunar orbit or walk on the lunar surface: Armstrong, Aldrin, Stafford, Young and Cernan, to name just a few.

Two astronauts who were part of Gemini, and who might well have gone on to the Moon, never got the chance. Elliot See and Charles Bassett II, who were scheduled to fly Gemini IX in 1966, died when their T-38 training jet crashed at St. Louis's Lambert Field. They were the second and third casualties (after Theodore C. Freeman) of NASA's astronaut program. To say they've been forgotten would be an overstatement. But they haven't been as well-remembered as other astronauts, and on the 50th anniversary of their deaths, their stories are worth recalling.

See, a 38-year-old Texan, had been a flight engineer and test pilot for the General Electric Company. He joined NASA in September 1962, part of NASA's second astronaut class (the "Next Nine", following the "Original Seven"). He worked with the teams developing guidance and navigations systems and was named backup pilot for Gemini V, then command pilot for Gemini IX.

Bassett, 34, joined the third astronaut class after being a U.S. Air Force pilot. On the ground, he worked with the teams conducting astronaut training and simulations; Gemini IX would be his first assignment.

On Feb. 28, 1966, See and Bassett left Ellington Field in a T-38 training jet for St. Louis. They were planning to spend several days working in the rendezvous simulator at the McDonnell-Douglas facility where their Gemini capsule had only recently been completed. They were accompanied, in another T-38, by their backup crew, Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan. The weather in St. Louis was poor for flying: overcast and raining with low clouds and limited visibility.

"As the aircraft descended through the overcast, the pilots found themselves too far down the runway to land. See elected to keep the field in sight and he circled to the left underneath the cloud cover. Stafford followed a missed approach procedure and climbed straight ahead into the soup to 600 meters, intending to make another instrument approach. He landed safely on his next attempt. Meanwhile, See had continued his left turn. The aircraft angled toward McDonnell Building 101, where technicians were working on the very spacecraft See and Bassett were scheduled to fly. Apparently recognizing that his sink rate was too high, See cut in his afterburners and attempted a sharp right turn; but it was too late. The aircraft struck the roof of the building and crashed into a courtyard. Both pilots were killed."

An investigative board chaired by astronaut Alan B. Shepherd attributed the crash to weather and pilot error on See's part in choosing to keep his plane so low. See and Bassett are buried near each other in Arlington National Cemetery.

For the first time, NASA replaced a mission's primary crew with a backup crew. Stafford and Cernan completed the Gemini IX mission, which became the first flight on which crews attempted and succeeded on three rendezvous attempts. They would later fly together on Apollo 10, testing the lunar module around the moon in advance of Apollo 11.