Yes... the ejection seats were "usable" on the pad up until about 30-40 seconds into the flight IIRC... (I was just reading Mike Collins' account of his Gemini flight and he made a passing reference to it, but it's been a couple days ago and we've had a lot going on). After that, the solid retrorockets would have been used for escape, or simply "ride it out" until the capsule slowed down enough after the Titan disintegrated to subsequently eject...

The ejection seats were a pretty dicey proposition anyway... a lot of the astronauts described the ejection seat system the same way that John Young described proposals for STS-1, the first flight of the shuttle, to simulate a "Return To Launch Site" type abort in flight rather than flying into orbit... "It was taking a high risk of death to avoid certain death"... Hence the plans to demonstrate RTLS on an actual shuttle flight were shot down fairly quickly. Remember that the first four shuttle missions (IIRC) were equipped with ejection seats as well... but they were pulled out when they added seats for seven crew-- there was no way to eject from the mid-deck, and so it wouldn't be fair for the four folks sitting "upstairs" to have ejection seats while the other three "down below" would just have to ride what was left of the shuttle all the way in if there was an emergency. John Young didn't have much faith in the ejection seats on shuttle either IIRC...

That was the mindset of the astronauts and a big part of the reason why Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford didn't punch out of Gemini 6 when it ignited, the clock started (which was supposed to be triggered by the vehicle physically lifting off the pad, which pulled a plug out of the aft body of the Titan II, triggering the spacecraft clock to start counting... the shutdown of the Titan engines was triggered by this plug popping out too soon-- the safety system determined that the thrust was insufficient because the plug popped out during engine start and thrust buildup, and so the controller shut the engines down before liftoff. The procedure that the astronauts had been trained for was to eject in the event of a failed startup/liftoff, so technically speaking, according to the rulebook, they SHOULD have ejected on the pad... BUT, of course it would have destroyed the spacecraft and any chance of there even being a Gemini 6 (6A as it turned out). Wally was convinced that his odds were better staying in the capsule than ejecting, because absolutely EVERYTHING had to come off right, and you had to have luck on your side, to survive a Gemini ejection... If the doors didn't blow correctly or the timing was off, you'd have your head in your lap. If the ejection seats didn't burn right and fly the correct trajectory, you'd arc straight into the ground backwards and head first at high velocity. Even if the ejection seats followed the correct trajectory and arced upwards and then burned out and released the chute, it was still a very low altitude chute deployment and thus extremely risky... CCWilliams had been killed trying to eject from his crippled T-38 after its controls locked up and it went inverted, and Ted Freeman had been killed ejecting from his T-38 after it was hit by a goose and flamed out on approach to Ellington Field in Houston (the wiki article says he didn't eject, but that's not what Deke Slayton told in his account of the accident, as he was one of the first on the scene-- Ted had ejected, but too low and his parachute didn't have time to inflate and slow down before he hit the ground. Thus the decision that Wally and Tom made to "sit it out" in the Gemini rather than risk death in an ejection... a decision that saved the mission, as it turned out, and perhaps saved their lives had the ejection not gone well...

Interestingly enough, it was lucky that the plug dropped out prematurely, and that the engines shut down... during the inspection of the rocket in preparation for another launch attempt a few days later, it was discovered that a plastic cover had been left in place inside a propellant line feeding one of the first stage engines. Had the rocket lifted off normally, the cover would have compromised the propellant flow into the engine, and the resulting lack of power would have REQUIRED an abort and the destruction of the booster shortly after it lifted off, since it would have insufficient power to continue flying. Thus, the plug popping out, and Wally's cool calculation not to abort, allowed the re-inspection of the booster that found the cover left in the propellant line, and allowed the rocket to be repaired and the countdown reset for Gemini 6A's successful first rendezvous in space with Gemini 7 a few days later...

Kinda funny how those things work out sometimes...

Later! OL JR

__________________
The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!