Abstract On the evening before the first manned Gemini flight, astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford were men with a mission of their own. It involved a favour asked of them by Gemini 3 pilot John Young and a last-minute visit to a deli called Wolfie’s on North Atlantic Avenue in Florida’s Cocoa Beach. “Young mentioned to me a day or so before launch that there was not a meal scheduled on the flight,” Schirra wrote in his autobiography, “since the flight was less than five hours. But add a two- and -a-half-hour countdown, he reasoned, and they were bound to get hungry.” Schirra’s solution: to buy Young and his command pilot, Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom, a corned beef sandwich, “on rye with two dill pickle slices”, which he kept in a refrigerator at the newly-renamed Cape Kennedy and passed word to Young that it was there. On Gemini 3’s launch morning, 23 March 1965, the 34-year-old Young tucked the sandwich into one of his space suit pockets, ready to surprise Grissom when they reached orbit.


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