Lamborn agreed. "At the time, everybody was behind the space program ... it was national pride," Mattingly said. "He was also a good guy."
But Lamborn set down rules: "We had to clear out of the place after our work. We could only use it during odd hours," Mattingly said. And, Lamborn insisted on the same payments he got from the Red Cross swimming school: $10 an hour.
So Mattingly and Loats moved in, hired local divers, brought in lots of hardware, mock-ups of air locks, hatches, tunnels and spacecraft and reported their results to NASA. They worked at night when they had to, leaving the pool for students during the day.
It all seemed very hush-hush to Quinton D. Thompson, who was head of the middle school at the time.
"It wasn't discussed, and I imagine some of the people there were not completely aware," he recalled. "I knew it was top-secret work." Even so, he confessed, "I may have peeked in the door once or twice, but strictly on the QT. I saw these people in their fancy suits training in the pool."
For a time, some key NASA officials weren't convinced of the need to venture outside a spacecraft, or of the difficulty of working in zero gravity. And they weren't sure of the value of underwater simulations. After all, training on the ground was going fine, and they could always use C-131 airplanes flying outside loops to simulate weightlessness, albeit for just 30 seconds at a time.
But when the actual Gemini spacewalks began in June 1965, Houston quickly realized it had a problem.
"They really didn't know what the hell they were doing," Mattingly recalled. On three missions in a row - Gemini 9, 10 and 11 - spacewalkers Gene Cernan, Mike Collins and Dick Gordon all experienced serious problems with exhaustion, overheating, groping dangerously for hand- and foot-holds. And they simply could not complete assigned tasks.
Suddenly, Charles said, underwater spacewalk training "sort of became imperative." And Loats and Mattingly were ready to make it happen at McDonogh.
Senior NASA officials now began showing up at McDonogh, Mattingly said. They watched underwater simulations of the tasks that Collins had attempted in space. It became clear in the water that some were impossible without three hands.
One NASA official asked Mattingly how the agency could get him to conduct more such evaluations and Mattingly replied, "If Houston could send some money it would make everybody happy."
