by Jay Barbree
He and Barbree had had a thousand things to say about the astronaut, his family, the mission, the Redstone, the oddly shaped cone in which Alan Shepard rode. Mueller could do play-by-play on a live broadcast as though he’d rehearsed it for a week. Barbree could only stand in awe.
But Mueller had never seen a man disappearing in the bright sunlit sky as a single source point of silvery flame.
The master felt his voice fading. He tried desperately to regain control. Finally the dean of broadcast description swallowed hard. He could think of only one thing to say.
“He looks so lonely up there . . . ”
Then Merrill Mueller for a first fell silent.
Redstone increased Shepard’s weight to a thousand pounds as he called out the force of six times gravity to Deke. He found it difficult to talk as the g-forces squeezed his throat and vocal cords. He drew on the techniques of fighting these loads he’d perfected in test flying. They heard him clearly in Mercury Control.
Another moment of truth was at hand.
Cutoff!
As quickly as it had ignited, the Redstone engine shut down. The rocket was inert, an empty tube from which Shepard had to separate.
Above his head the no longer needed escape tower ignited. A single, large, solid propellant rocket blazed to life, spewing back flame from three canted nozzles. These broke connecting links to yank the tall tower away from the Freedom Seven and send it racing along a safe departure angle.
Systems functioned precisely and on a rapid schedule.
Three small separation rockets at the base of the capsule ignited. Freedom Seven pulled away from the Redstone.
A new light flashed on the instrument panel before Shepard.
“This is Seven. Cap sep is green.”
Shepard was on his own, slicing high above earth along a great ballistic arc.
“Roger,” Deke confirmed.
Alan called out the programmed reports. Then he took time to drink in the sensations of being separated from his planet.
Moments before he had weighed a thousand pounds. Now a feather on the surface of the earth had more weight than he. He simply had none.
“Go Navy,” he permitted himself one cheer of celebration.
Being weightless was simply a miracle in comfort.
The tiny capsule seemed to expand magically as pressure points vanished. Were he not strapped to the couch he would have floated about in total relaxation. No up, no down, no lying or sitting or standing.
A missing washer and bits of dust drifted before his eyes. He laughed at the sight.
He had expected silence at this point. Atmosphere was something far below. No rush of wind despite speeding through space so many thousands of miles an hour. No friction. No turbulence. It should have been the silence of ghosts.
But it wasn’t. These ghosts were real. They made their own sounds—the sounds of Freedom Seven. It was as if a brook were running mechanically through his space capsule’s structure. Inverters moaned, gyroscopes whirred, cooling fans had their own sound, cameras hummed, radios crackled and emitted their tones before and after conversational exchanges. The sounds flowed together, some dulled, others sharper—a miniature mechanical orchestral chorus. Shepard smiled. He was hearing the Concert of Freedom Seven, a strange and unexpected company to remain with him as he hurtled through the soundlessness of space.
“Welcome sounds,” he smiled. They meant things were working, doing, pushing, and repeating. They were the new age sounds of life.
Weightlessness was still new, refreshing, exciting, but this was a romance kick-started by a great rocket. Shepard took to zero-g with fierce pleasure, bonding not only naturally but eagerly with this new world without weight.
He felt Freedom Seven initiate its slow turnaround. Still more new sounds! Of course, the attitude control jets firing in vacuum. But within Freedom Seven’s contained atmosphere they exerted pressure, and that pressure came to him as thuds, dimmed bangs carrying wonderful satisfaction. His ship was obeying its autopilot-commanded flight plan, turning on schedule, rotating into a position that would assure the blunt end of the capsule facing in the direction of reentry.
Reality reached in through the capsule’s titanium shell, an invisible hand to tap him on the shoulder. Shepard grinned with the realization that this sense of comfort and freedom, the humming sounds of the spacecraft, had blanked out the fact that he was zinging along high above the planet’s atmosphere.
But there was nothing by which to judge speed. You need relative comparison for that—a tree, a building, passing spacecraft. His view of the outside universe was restricted to what he could see through the capsule’s two small portholes, and through those he saw that almost jet-black sky. Only one reference point was available to him. He had to look at the earth below. Otherwise every sense he had told him he wasn’t moving.
He hesitated. That look at earth would have to wait. The mission checklist came first. “Got to go flying, guy,” he said. Until now Freedom Seven had flown its profile on autopilot. The only aspect of the flight different for Shepard than for the chimp that preceded him was that he could give a verbal report of events.
Now he wrapped the gloved fingers of his right hand about the three-axis control stick. He reached out to switch from autopilot mode to manual control. One axis at a time, he warned himself.
“Switching to manual pitch,” he announced to Deke.
Major Laconic was right there. “Roger.”
He squeezed the stick to one side. Tiny jets of hydrogen peroxide gas spat into space from exterior ports on the spacecraft. Instantly he felt the reaction as Seven’s blunt end raised and lowered in response to his hand commands. He couldn’t believe the incredibly smooth movements of his small spaceship. It was doing precisely what he demanded.
“Pitch is okay,” he said briefly. “Switching to manual yaw.”
“Roger. Manual yaw.”
Alan fed in reaction thrust to the yaw axis, and again Seven danced slickly to his tune, shifting left or right.
“Yaw is okay. Shifting to manual roll.”
“Roger. Roll.”
Again Seven moved on invisible silken threads. Shepard was elated. Finally, he shouted within his mind, we’re doing something first—manual control of a spaceship!
Not for an instant would Shepard even think of degrading the sensational orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin in that heavy Vostok he called Swallow. He’d gone higher and faster and had raced all the way around the planet, but the Russians had played it very safe. Yuri Gagarin had been only a fascinated passenger.
Shepard smiled as he reported, “Roll is okay.”
Deke almost made a speech as he responded. “Roll is okay,” he confirmed from his console. “It looked good here.”
Alan Shepard took a deep breath. Now, let’s take a good look at the earth.
His portholes still looked outward, toward the blackness. So he moved his head to look downward through the periscope. He cursed aloud. While still on the pad, looking through the scope, he’d stared into a bright sun. Immediately he had moved in filters to cut down the glare. He’d forgotten to remove those filters and now, looking through the scope, instead of a brilliant blue round earth he saw his planet only in shades of gray.
He reached for the filter knob and, as he did, the pressure gauge on his left wrist bumped against the abort handle. His suited body had shifted in weightlessness. He quickly stopped that movement. Sure, the escape tower was gone, and hitting the abort handle might not have caused any great bother, but this was still a test flight and he wasn’t about to guess.
He looked again through the periscope. Even through the gray the sight was breathtaking. The sun’s reflection from the world below was strong enough to give him a picture.
“On the periscope,” he radioed. Then, with great excitement, “What a beautiful view!”
“Roger.”
“Cloud cover over Florida, three to four-tenths on the eastern coast, obscured up through H
atteras.”
He drank it all in, amazed to look down on the world from his seat with the gods. He watched the curving edge of the planet fall away below the southeastern United States.
Clouds obscured the Florida coastline south to Fort Lauderdale, then yielded to sunshine and the rich green of Lake Okeechobee’s shores and down to the spindly curve of the Florida Keys. He shifted slightly to see the Florida Panhandle extending west, saw Pensacola clearly. The horizon arced away to offer a tantalizingly bare glimpse of Mobile, beyond which, just out of visual reach, laid New Orleans.
He looked northward across Georgia, at the Carolinas, and saw the coastline of Cape Hatteras and beyond.
He looked down, beneath the tight little craft, studied Andros Island and Bimini and saw other Bahamian islands through broken cloud cover. “What I’d give,” he said, “to have that filter out so I could see the beautiful waters and coral formations.”
He was now at his highest point, 116 miles. Freedom Seven, obeying the intractable laws of celestial mechanics, was swinging into its downward curve, calculated to carry Shepard directly to the Navy recovery teams waiting for him in the waters near Grand Bahama Island, some three hundred miles southeast of the Cape.
He worked the controls to the proper angle to test-fire the three retro-rockets. They weren’t necessary for descent on this suborbital, up-and-down mission, but they had to be proven for orbital flights to follow. For return to earth, they would be critical to decelerate Mercury spaceships from orbital speed.
Deke remained with him every second of the way and began the countdown from Mission Control. “Five, four, three, two, one, retro angle,” Deke confirmed.
Retro sequence was set. “In retro attitude,” Shepard announced. “All green.”
“Roger.”
“Control is smooth,” came the words from space.
“Roger, understand. All going smooth.”
“Retro one,” Alan sang out. The first rocket fired and shoved him back against his couch. “Very smooth,” he added.
“Roger, roger.”
“Retro two.” Another blast shoving him backward.
“Retro three. All three retros have fired.”
“All fired on the button,” Deke said with satisfaction.
The weightless wonderland vanished almost as swiftly as it had appeared.
Gravity was back. His weight increased with every mile Freedom Seven plunged into the atmosphere. Alan switched to manual control to get as much experience flying a spacecraft as he could while the forces of gravity gradually increased. He worked the controls until the small thrusters were no longer effective and he switched to automatic mode. He’d ride the rest of the trip down.
Deke was on the horn. “Do you see the booster?” There was a touch of concern in his voice.
Before launch, some engineers had worried that when Shepard fired the retros, his speed would be slowed enough that the empty Redstone, following its own ballistic arc, might catch up and bump Freedom Seven off its reentry track.
Shepard judged the issue as trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. Even though the Mercury and the Redstone had boosted out of the atmosphere, there was still some drag associated with upward lofting after burnout of fuel. The Redstone was so much larger and its mass was so much greater that even remnants of atmosphere would slow its ballistic arc more than Freedom Seven’s. This should keep it well below his space capsule, and soon it should slam into denser atmosphere on its plunged into the ocean.
Shepard’s calculations proved correct. Well below Freedom Seven, the Redstone was tumbling wildly out of control, increasing its drag and imposing terrible forces on the rocket’s structure. The Redstone was like a helpless, frightened whale attacked by invisible sharks of reentry, pieces being torn from its body, chunks hurled away as the metal structure heated swiftly from friction. Behind, Redstone’s sputum of its destruction fled backward in an ionized trail.
Below, a freighter plowed northward through calm seas on an uneventful journey. Until the first American-manned space flight entered the scene. Both the Mercury and the Redstone were whipping huge sonic waves through the atmosphere. Without warning, shock waves ripped downward through the sky to smash against the vessel. The windows on the bridge rattled and flexed wildly from the sonic boom howling across the water. A shock wave cutting the sky at the speed of sound is a fearsome thing especially when you have no idea the sky is about to scream.
The terrified crew thought their ship had exploded. The captain jerked his head around. “Damn, what the hell was that?” he shouted.
Before anyone could answer, a whirlwind of ear-piercing whistling and howling force tore across the ship. Someone pointed up and screamed, “Omigod! Look!”
A white and black shape, the charred and still burning Redstone, tumbling crazily, crashed out of the sky, sailed high over the ship’s deck, and smashed into the Atlantic several miles east of the freighter, sending multiple water geysers into the air. The Redstone didn’t die easily and seemed determined to end its time with a spectacular water ballet. It skipped across the water’s surface, twice parting the sea, sending up two towering walls of water. Then a final careening plunge into the waves, and it settled forever into the ocean.
The crew stared, stunned. They stood frozen in place until they heard the shouts of their radio operator. “Hey, on deck! Everybody! Listen!”
He placed the microphone by his radio calling in the blind for anyone who could tell them what insanity was going on. NBC radio engineer Joe Sturniola was at his short-wave gear on Grand Bahama Island. He picked up the freighter’s call, heard clearly the operator saying, “It couldn’t have been an airplane. Not from what we saw. We don’t know what it was!”
Sturniola answered immediately. “You people have just been missed by the rocket that carried the first American astronaut into space.”
“Rocket?”
“Affirmative.”
“Astronaut?”
Sturniola grinned. “That’s right. This is Grand Bahama Island, and astronaut Alan Shepard will be arriving here shortly.”
“Okay this is Freedom Seven . . . my g-build-up is three . . . six . . . ” His voice faltered as a great invisible hand squeezed him with brutal force.
“Nine . . . ” he grunted, using the proven system of body tightening and muscle rigidity to force the words through a tortured throat. Words still spoken under control. Grunt talk that worked.
“Rog.”
Deke didn’t want to miss a word from the plunging spacecraft.
“Okay . . . Okay . . . ” Alan’s voice rose as the intensity of the struggle increased. Eleven times the normal force of gravity, getting close to “weighing” a full earth ton. But he had pulled 11g in the centrifuge, and he knew he could keep right on working now.
He did.
Deke stabbed into the silence after his last call. “Coming through loud and clear, Seven.”
“Okay,” came the grunted oath from what was now high atmosphere instead of space. No matter how severe the punishment, so long as he kept repeating at least that one word they knew he was on top of the situation.
“Okay . . . ” They noticed the change in his voice. Less quaver. Lower pitch. They tracked him on radar, knew his changing altitude, but hearing the man’s voice was what really counted. The capsule slowed rapidly, and the g-loads were fading.
“Okay . . . this is Seven. Okay forty-five thousand feet. Uh, now forty thousand feet.”
Shepard was through the gauntlet of punishing g-forces and deceleration and blazing heat of reentry. He felt great. Right behind his back the temperature had soared to 1,230 degrees, a critical test for the spacecraft and no small feat for the man inside. Under the worst-case conditions of the scorching dive, his cabin temperature hit a peak of 102 degrees. Inside his suit the reading topped at 85 degrees. Not at all bad, he grinned. Nice and toasty. An E ticket ride on one of Mr. Disney’s best.
His altimeter showed thirty-one thousand f
eet when Deke’s voice reached him again. “Seven, your impact will be right on the button.”
Great news. Flight computations were as close to perfect as could be, and so were the performances of the Redstone and the spacecraft. The Mercury was heading directly for the center of its Atlantic recovery area bullseye. The Cape lay three hundred miles to the northwest, and with Alan’s loss of altitude it soon would be out of radio contact. No time for long good-byes as he signed off with Deke, telling him he was going to the new frequency.
“Roger, Seven, read you switching to GBI.”
Deke was eager to get the hell out of Mercury Control as fast as he could. Shepard almost laughed aloud. He knew Gus would be right there with Deke, and the two of them would clamber into a NASA jet and burn sky, blazing their way to GBI so they could be on the ground waiting for him when Shepard was delivered by helicopter from the recovery vessel.
“Seven, do you read?” came a new voice, using the GBI line.
“I read,” Alan called back, starting to look for the recovery fleet.
But this game wasn’t quite over. He still had to reach that fleet and in good shape. That meant the parachute system had to work.
Perfectly.
Or all that had gone so beautifully up to this moment would mean nothing.
He stared through the periscope. Above him, panel covers snapped away in the wind as the spacecraft fell.
“The drogue is green at twenty-one,” Shepard reported, “and the periscope is out.”
Down went Freedom Seven and Alan Shepard.