Despite NASA’s embarrassment at losing the capsule after splashdown, the flight itself had gone well—it had been a nominal flight, to use the aerospace term for “as expected; according to plan.” And newspapers grasped at every positive they could. The program “could now boast two successful space travelers to one for the Soviet Union,” reported the New York Times, which went on to point out that “both American astronauts maneuvered their craft. The Soviet major [Gagarin] had left the controls to automatic devices.”
The next mission would be an orbital one, the capsule launched atop the more powerful Atlas booster, fatter than the slender Redstone. But on August 6, 1961, just seventeen days after the Liberty Bell 7 mission, a twenty-six-year-old rookie cosmonaut, air force major Gherman Titov, was launched into space in a Vostok capsule. His flight lasted seventeen orbits and took twenty-three hours and eighteen minutes. He became the first human to eat (from tubes), sleep (for five orbits), and take photos of Earth (with a handheld camera) from space. He was also the first to experience space-sickness, which was like seasickness and included nausea, vomiting, and intense discomfort. His Soviet superiors were so concerned that they decided to organize a crash program of physiological and psychological research before launching another manned mission, though no one outside the Soviet Union knew that; even a year later, Titov would admit publicly only to some “unpleasant sensations” that soon “disappeared almost entirely.”
The Space Task Group originally planned to have each of the seven astronauts make a suborbital flight before tackling any orbital missions. But after Titov’s long flight and the lack of physiological problems during the first two U.S. flights, NASA officials concluded that more suborbitals were a waste of time. Since the oft-delayed Atlas was finally ready, the decision was made to go straight to orbital. That meant Glenn, next in line, had lucked into the first attempt at an Earth orbit—if and when the rocket was man-rated.
The Atlas—a very light rocket whose dime-thin, stainless-steel skin was supported only by internal pressure of the fuel—had proven a tough horse to break. Thirteen Atlas launches had resulted in blowups, some on the launchpad, some soon after the booster had climbed into the sky. To make matters worse, von Braun had been angry when NASA chose the booster without consulting him, and relations between the Space Task Group and Marshall cooled even more. Von Braun and his team were developing a superbooster called the Saturn, but they could proceed only so far without a contract from a government agency—and, increasingly, NASA looked to be the only customer with any need for such monsters. The agency still hadn’t decided how it would get to the moon, though it was clear a massive booster would be required. Marshall’s future depended on it, despite the March 1960 success of Pioneer 4, a small, gold-plated probe that achieved lunar flyby after four failures and became the first American spacecraft to go into orbit around the sun.
On September 13, 1961, a Mercury capsule carrying a dummy was launched into space atop the ninety-five-foot Atlas and made one orbit—another nominal flight. Many weeks later, on November 29, one of the space chimps, thirty-nine-pound Enos—nicknamed “the Penis” for his habit of fondling himself—rode an Atlas into space and around the Earth twice. The mission and the performance of Enos in his lever-pulling duties went well enough. The next Mercury-Atlas flight would carry a man, and Bob Gilruth announced publicly that that man would be Glenn, with his fellow astronaut and good friend Scott Carpenter as his backup.
Glenn’s orbital flight would utilize a worldwide tracking network, something new in this pre-communications-satellite era—an attempt to follow, as close as possible to real time, an object speeding above the Earth. It consisted of a global system of thirteen manned stations and ships around the world on the Mercury orbit path, each with a sixty-four-foot dish to receive signals. Each one would be in contact for up to eight minutes with the capsule every time it passed overhead, from horizon to horizon, in the vicinity; the craft would be entirely out of touch for only a few minutes between stations. The stations would receive telemetry and voice, track it by radar, and communicate by radio and landline phone. They were also in contact with Mercury Control and would relay messages from one to the other via teletype machines. These were kept in a small room just off the control center, and their sewing-machine-like clatter could be heard by the flight controllers when the door was opened by a runner rushing a message in.
The mission was scheduled for January 27, 1962, but near-constant weather problems scratched that flight, and the next, and the next. NASA psychologists worried about what all the delays were doing to Glenn’s psyche. Even Yuri Gagarin sent him best wishes for a launch soon. Whatever his private feelings, Glenn never expressed impatience and continued training. He spent up to nine hours a day lying on his back in the Mercury Procedures Trainer, a replica of the actual capsule, simulating every conceivable mission failure, and he repeatedly practiced maneuvering the capsule’s attitude with the manual controls.
After weeks of Atlantic storms and ten delayed launches, the flight was once again set, this time for February 20, 1962. On that morning, more than eleven hundred TV, radio, and newspaper correspondents from around the world convened at Cape Canaveral. A little after six a.m. at pad 14, as the moon floated among clouds in the west, the silver-suited astronaut was helped into the tight quarters of the spacecraft he had named Friendship 7 at the suggestion of his two children. Glenn, who would soon turn forty-one (an age that would prompt some to say that he was too old for spaceflight), was in good spirits, buoyed by Carpenter and frequent helpings of his favorite music, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.
This time the weather cooperated, though it remained slightly overcast. In Mercury Control, Al Shepard had the job of CapCom. Seven hundred and fifty feet from the pad, in the domed launch-center blockhouse fortified by ten-foot-thick walls and forty more feet of sand, engineers prepared to view the launch through periscopes. Carpenter apprised Glenn of the countdown progress, then patched through a call to Glenn’s wife and family in Arlington. Over the course of two wars, Glenn and his wife, Annie, had developed a ritual they performed whenever he left home to go into combat, and they continued it now:
“I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum,” he said.
“Don’t be long,” she said, fighting back tears.
After dawn came two holds, one due to a fueling problem with the liquid-oxygen propellant, the other to fix a broken bolt on the capsule’s hatch. The Atlas’s thin skin popped and crackled like a bowl of Rice Krispies as it expanded and contracted, and vapor whistled through the liquid-oxygen release valve. The countdown was resumed. Over in the blockhouse, Carpenter said, “Godspeed, John Glenn,” seconds before liftoff, and at 9:47 a.m., the sixty million Americans following the launch on TV or radio held their breath as the white Atlas with the small black capsule and escape tower atop it slowly rose off the ground amid massive clouds of exhaust. This was only the sixth launch of the Atlas, and two of the previous five had exploded soon after liftoff. In the main concourse of New York City’s Grand Central Station, thousands of commuters stopped to silently watch the flight’s progress on a giant TV screen above the ticket windows, and throughout the city’s subway system, train conductors asked their passengers to say a prayer for Glenn—the first time the transit authority had used its communications system for anything besides subway operations. The call to prayer would be repeated every ten minutes for almost five hours.
Five minutes after liftoff, when Friendship 7 achieved an orbital speed of 17,545 miles per hour in the thinning upper reaches of the atmosphere, a huge roar erupted in Grand Central Station. As the spacecraft began to follow the curve of the Earth, Glenn’s vital signs were taken—blood pressure, pulse, respiration, temperature—and he read eye charts to make sure his eyeballs hadn’t changed shape and impaired his vision (one of the doctors’ worries). Then he relaxed between more experiments and measurements and tried to appreciate the wonder of his situation and the pleasures of
weightlessness. Sunsets, sunrises, the Earth below him with its continents and oceans and swirling clouds, all in the most brilliant colors.
Over Mexico on his second orbit, Glenn began to experience problems with his automatic attitude thrusters and then his gyroscopes. He used the one-stick controller that determined his craft’s attitude semiautomatically—a system known as fly-by-wire—then switched to full manual control, which used more fuel; he could hear the pop of the rocket thrusters emitting their bursts of hydrogen peroxide. Glenn prepared for reentry. He would hit the atmosphere at Mach 24.
But another issue had arisen. In Mercury Control, a yellow warning light began to flash, and a technician told Chris Kraft of the problem: telemetry received from Friendship 7 indicated that the ablative heat shield and landing bag were no longer locked onto the craft, and the heat shield was now held in place only by the titanium straps of the retro-rockets on top of it.
Kraft was busy, but Al Shepard heard the technician. This was serious news if accurate—as bad as it could get. If the heat shield jettisoned when the retro-rocket package (retropack) that sat on it did, Glenn and his craft would vaporize upon reentry into the atmosphere.
The tension in Mercury Control increased as word spread from console to console—though not to the congressmen and other VIP visitors in the glassed-in viewing gallery in back or to the TV and radio audiences. Shepard and Kraft discussed the problem. Soon there were more than a hundred people in back rooms at Cape Canaveral, Houston, and St. Louis trying to decide what to do. Three miles away at Hangar S, twenty McDonnell engineers pored over blueprints of the Mercury engineering systems and wiring diagrams looking for a solution. And they couldn’t leave Glenn up in orbit until they found one—he didn’t have the fuel or oxygen to remain in space for much more than the planned three orbits.
The problem appeared insoluble. Time was running out, and Kraft couldn’t get an answer out of his consultants and experts. “Either you guys are going to give a decision in five minutes, or I’m going to make one myself,” he thundered. They finally gave him an answer, and Kraft rendered his own decision. The retropack of small rocket thrusters designed to slow the craft during reentry was still clamped onto the capsule, and hopefully its three titanium straps would keep the heat shield from being torn off. Sooner or later, the retropack, about the size of a bushel basket, would burn up and melt away, since it wasn’t designed to remain on the craft and hit the Earth’s atmosphere at 17,000 miles per hour, but if it could stay on long enough and if the heat shield wasn’t ripped off or damaged by the burning thrusters…When they got hold of Max Faget, he told them that the shield could survive reentry with the retropack still fastened—theoretically.
Glenn was told not to jettison the retropack, though he wasn’t told why—Kraft thought it would be better not to worry Glenn with another problem, since he was busy with the faulty automatic control system and with trying to control the capsule. But from questions and commands he received, Glenn knew that his craft was probably not shipshape.
“We are recommending that you leave the retro-package on,” a tracking-station technician told him, “through the entire reentry.”
Glenn said, “What is the reason for this? Do you have any reason?”
“It’s the judgment of the Cape. Cape Flight will give you the reason for this action.”
As he approached the outer limits of the atmosphere, Glenn assumed full manual control of Friendship 7’s attitude, then used the semiautomatic fly-by-wire system to assume the proper reentry angle. If the approach was too sharp, the capsule would burn up; too shallow, and the orbit might not decay fast enough before the capsule’s oxygen ran out in a few hours. Either mistake would, in all probability, result in Glenn’s death. Few in NASA believed they’d get through the program without a death. Glenn might be the first.
Shepard coached him down. Moments before reentry, he said, “We are not sure whether or not your landing bag has deployed. We feel that it is far safer to reenter with the retro-package on. We see no difficulty at this time in that type of reentry. Over.”
“Roger,” Glenn said. “Understand.” There was no fear in his voice, but one NASA official thought he sensed a note of resignation, as if Glenn believed death was only moments away.
Friendship 7 entered the atmosphere and a layer of ionized air surrounded it, preventing communication. The blackout would last about four and a half minutes. It felt like an eternity to those in the Mercury Control room, its air a blue haze from the many cigarettes and pipes. One doctor bowed his head and prayed. Somewhere out there about a hundred miles above the Earth, Glenn was “falling through space like a shooting star,” one NASA official would remember thinking.
His reentry occurred at the proper angle. As he tore through the atmosphere, the capsule rocked from side to side, and Glenn tried to steady it. He felt and heard a bang and then watched through the porthole as large pieces of the retropack ripped off in flaming chunks and fell away; one of the metal straps smacked against the window before it disappeared. Then burning remnants of the heat shield did the same, and Glenn didn’t know if it was secured or if he was about to burst into flame, and he could almost feel the incinerating heat at his back. With the hand controller, he continued to help steady the bucking capsule as he strained against eight g’s of deceleration. Through the window, he could see a bright orange glow sheathing the craft. The ionized air around it was about ninety-five hundred degrees, only slightly less hot than the sun.
Glenn radioed, “Friendship 7. I think the pack just let go. Friendship 7. A real fireball outside. Hello, Cape. Friendship 7, over…Hello, Cape, do you receive? Do you receive? Over.”
No one could hear him in Mercury Control. Its radar was tracking the capsule, but no one knew if Glenn was alive. A group of men got up from their chairs and walked over to gather behind Shepard’s console. One of them urged him to keep talking.
“Friendship 7,” said Shepard, “this is Mercury Control. How do you read? Over.”
There was silence. Shepard said, “Friendship 7, this is Cape. How do you read? Over.”
More silence. Then they heard Glenn’s voice: “Loud and clear. How me?”
As cheers sounded in Mercury Control, Glenn’s deceleration force eased, the rocking abated, and the orange glow faded. His small drogue parachute opened a bit early, at 23,000 feet, the orange-and-white main chute opened at 10,800 feet, and Friendship 7 smacked into the Atlantic Ocean within six miles of the USS Noa, the destroyer assigned to recover him. After four hours and fifty-six minutes, Glenn had returned to Earth safely. An entire nation following Glenn’s mission on TV and radio could finally relax. Aside from losing five pounds from dehydration due to the heat, Glenn was fine. The Noa reached him seventeen minutes after he splashed down and hoisted the capsule aboard. Moments later, he hit the hatch release plunger and got two skinned knuckles when it snapped back into place (as Grissom would have if he’d opened his hatch deliberately). Glenn stepped out onto the destroyer’s deck bathed in sweat. The now-traditional phone call from the president awaited.
Glenn was not happy that he hadn’t been told about the heat-shield problem (although it turned out that the issue was a defective indicator light; the heat shield had been secured the whole time). He made his feelings clear to his superiors, particularly Kraft—the pilot was entitled to any and all information concerning his ship.
Upon reuniting with his wife and children, he burst into tears.
For his day’s work, he received $245 (before taxes) in bonus flight pay.
Public reaction to Glenn’s flight and his stoic, calm bearing in the face of his potential death by fire was overwhelmingly positive. And his successful mission—he had made three orbits—pulled the Americans closer to the Soviets. It also whetted America’s appetite for more space adventures and made the president’s lofty goal seem more possible. Why not go to the moon?
Glenn was hailed as the greatest American hero since Lindbergh and he received eve
n more adulation and attention than Shepard had. Later that year, toy Friendship 7 space capsules were popular Christmas gifts; unlike the original, they were made in Japan. The flight of Freedom 7 hadn’t inspired any toys. And NASA rushed out a thirty-minute film entitled The John Glenn Story with an introduction by President Kennedy.
Parades and appearances, a White House reception, and an address to a joint session of Congress followed. On a cold March morning in New York, four million people turned out on what was officially declared John Glenn Day for a parade for all the astronauts—though it was Glenn they were really there for. The ticker tape and shredded paper fell thick as snow, and the New York sanitation department later measured the paper garbage at thirty-five hundred tons—more than Charles Lindbergh had received after his 1927 flight from New York to Paris. Glenn was the third American in space, but his fame had quickly eclipsed that of his predecessors.
There would be longer Mercury flights and more complicated and more challenging ones. But Glenn would be the gold standard for astronauts. Americans and countless others around the globe responded to something in him—an earnestness, a likability, a goodness. If these seven men were knights, he was Sir Galahad the pure, undergoing a trial by fire and emerging triumphant. That aura would follow him for the rest of his days.
Chapter Six
Under Pressure
We knew that human beings are never perfect.
Robert Voas, astronaut training officer
The original idea of the Mercury Seven was that any one of them could fly any mission—they were all equally capable. But as it turned out, that wasn’t true. Some astronauts were better at certain tasks than others. The program’s remaining flights made that clear, as each man’s strengths and weaknesses were revealed under the harsh public spotlight.
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