by Jay Barbree
Glenn had reached a deceleration of 7g on reentry. The capsule kept slowing. Now it was oscillating strongly from side to side, rocking badly enough for John to feed corrections with his thrusters. They weren’t much good anymore. The atmosphere thickened quickly.
At fifty-five thousand feet he decided to override his automatics and deploy the drogue chute early to gain some stabilization.
Glenn’s heartbeat was now at 134 beats a minute.
The drogue chute came out. The auto sequences followed like clockwork, and Friendship Seven dropped into the water near the recovery destroyer Noa.
John Glenn returned to Washington a hero of Charles Lindbergh’s stature. The nation flipped over the first American to race into earth orbit. The White House smiled, issued an invitation, and a quarter million people braved heavy rain to watch the astronaut pass. He was then hustled off to New York City, where four million screaming, cheering people greeted him with a tumultuous ovation and a ticker tape parade.
The distance to the moon was starting to lessen.
At NASA headquarters the word went out. Keep the astronauts flying. Get the next Mercury mission into orbit as quickly as possible.
Deke Slayton stepped forward to take the reins for orbital flight Number Two and went to work, with Wally Schirra as his backup.
He was completely unaware of the black clouds gathering over his head.
Jerome Wiesner cornered James Webb in the NASA chief’s office. “Listen to me, Jim,” Wiesner said. “Sending this fellow Slayton into orbit could be a terrible mistake. Suppose, just suppose, we run into a failure. When it’s all over and we’re wearing black armbands, the word gets out that the astronaut flying the ship had an erratic heart condition. Who do you think they are going to blame? It wouldn’t matter if his heart had nothing to do with the failure. They’re going to take dead aim at you and the administration.”
Webb shifted in his seat. He hated this. But the truth had a nasty habit of stinging. He stared at the president’s science adviser. “I get your point,” Webb said unhappily.
“Take him off the flight, dammit,” Wiesner repeated, “It’s a risk we can’t afford. Get your emotions out of this, Jim.”
Webb recognized that Wiesner was still uptight. He had lost his argument to cancel the whole manned space program and he didn’t want anything to go wrong now that would tarnish the administration.
If Slayton flew and there was a failure, John Kennedy would end up taking the heat. Wiesner ended his pitch with an unassailable argument: “Why take the risk with the unknown when you have astronauts in perfect physical shape ready to go?”
Webb yielded to the point after asking the Air Force surgeon general to convene a panel of flight surgeons to review the case.
Deke had idiopathic paroxysmal atria fibrillation, a disturbance of the rhythm in the muscle fibers in the upper chambers of his heart. The cause was unknown.
The disturbance showed up about once every two weeks. To Deke it was as serious as having one blue and one brown eye. He’d been flying punishing machines without anyone ever knowing the condition existed.
Dr. Bill Douglas and the other flight surgeons that examined Deke earlier had agreed the condition was not life-threatening and retained him on flight status. The new Air Force panel requested by Webb came to the same conclusion, judged Slayton to be “fully qualified as an Air Force officer and a pilot.”
Still, Webb was worried, and he referred the matter to three eminent cardiologists. They examined Deke, and their consensus was that, while they were unable to state conclusively that the condition would jeopardize Slayton’s performance, there were enough unknowns about it that NASA should not take the chance. Deke should be grounded.
“Goddamn it, Bill, those sons-a-bitches can’t do this to me,” Deke shouted at Bill Douglas when he got the word. “I’ve worked too long, too hard, for this.”
To make matters worse, almost as soon as he learned, Deke had to attend a news conference in Washington about his grounding. “This medical guy and I were to explain all of this, and I was supposed to act like I was grateful,” he said. “I could have killed everyone in that room.”
But in an incredible moment of self-control, Deke told the press he was grounded. “I am disappointed, of course, but I will step aside as a flying astronaut and support the program in any way I can.”
There was more bad news. The rules called for the backup pilot to slip into the seat of an astronaut unable to make a mission. Which meant Wally Schirra was next to go. But Bob Gilruth decided that Scott Carpenter, John Glenn’s backup during his long flight delays, had more simulator time than Schirra, and Scott drew the assignment.
Deke despised it. He wanted Wally to go, and he wanted to make waves about it, but he also did not want to anger NASA officials. The agency had put him on standby flight status for the future, and he did not want to jeopardize any chance he had, no matter how slim, to fly a space mission. Deke played the game.
NASA also got Deke the hell out of the way for Carpenter’s mission. When the Aurora Seven lifted off on May 24, 1962, Deke Slayton was at a remote tracking station in Australia.
It was a space flight no one had expected.
Scott Carpenter was the astronauts’ gentleman. He had no role in Deke’s grounding. In fact, he felt for his colleague but he had this job that had been shoved in his lap to do, and he rocketed into space knowing there were no longer any monumental questions about exposure to weightlessness or the dangers of reentry. He had the benefit of the space flight experience of Gagarin, Shepard, Grissom, Titov, and Glenn, and Scott made the most of what he had. On his first two orbits he drank more, ate more, and by wringing out the Mercury spacecraft’s control thrusters in one maneuver after another, he virtually depleted the fuel available for altitude maneuvering. He took a basketful of photographs, ran through his scientific program checklist with skilled aplomb, which included releasing a balloon from the capsule, and spent as much time as he could catching the spectacular sunrises and sunsets. In many ways Scott Carpenter was the first scientist in space and he was having a ball.
After those first two fuel consuming orbits, Mercury Control gave serious consideration to bringing Scott home an orbit early.
But they made a last-moment decision to let Carpenter stay in orbit if he would go into a “drifting mode,” which would conserve his remaining fuel. Scott judged it a good idea, and he floated in weightlessness, enjoying every moment. Entering a sunrise, he banged his hand against the inside wall of the capsule.
It was a fortuitous blow with unexpected payoff. The moment he struck the wall, he was flying through a swarm of John Glenn’s “fireflies.” Again he struck the capsule bulkhead, and more fireflies showered into view. Despite his low thruster fuel, he fired the jets, swung around the capsule, and proved beyond a question the mysterious fireflies originated from vapor vented from the spacecraft. Vapor produced by the human body.
The astronaut’s body generated moisture. As he perspired, and especially when he exhaled, body moisture and gases were removed from the spacecraft, dumped through an external vent in the side of the capsule. The instant this moisture entered the cold and vacuum of space, it froze into frost and ice particles. Some swarmed about the capsule or floated away; others clung to the spacecraft side, to be knocked off when Scott thumped the wall. When the sun angle was just right, at sunrise or sunset, these particles became the famed “celestial fireflies.”
Scratch one mystery.
Carpenter somehow had fallen behind in his checklist and when it came time to fire his retro-rockets, Scott fired them three seconds late resulting in a twenty-five-degree error in Aurora Seven’s yaw position.
“My fuel, I hope it holds out,” Carpenter said as the descent began. It didn’t, and he had to release his drogue and main chutes early to stabilize a badly oscillating spacecraft.
A few seconds delay at orbital speed translates into big mileage errors. Because of the late retro-fire and the m
isalignment, Aurora Seven whooshed 250 miles beyond its intended landing point in the Atlantic. Carpenter was isolated, beyond radio range. For thirty minutes he was lost to a frantic Mercury Control and to a stunned worldwide audience, which had been following the flight on radio and TV.
A recovery aircraft finally picked up his radio beacon and homed in on the missing astronaut.
The aircraft crew found a bemused Carpenter floating in a life raft attached to his bobbing spacecraft.
He was eating a candy bar.
Behind the public scenes, Deke Slayton was waging his own fierce struggle to return to flight status. Deke went as high as he could on medical levels and finally met with Dr. Paul Dudley White, generally considered to be America’s most eminent cardiologist. Dr. White examined Deke with meticulous care and told him: “You’re going to live to a very ripe old age, young man. But I must agree with the people at NASA. They don’t want to take any chance that’s not necessary. It’s difficult to fault them for staying on the safe side.”
Deke returned home frustrated and depressed. The other astronauts discussed the devastating effect on him, and John Glenn laid it on the line. “We’re a team. We’ve got to pull for Deke and help him.”
Shepard nodded. “We have to give Deke back his pride. That’s for sure.”
So they came up with the idea of making Deke their boss.
“I’m all for it,” Gordo Cooper agreed and quickly warned, “but we’ll have to move fast. The scuttlebutt has an Air Force general coming in to run our shop—to be chief of the Astronaut Office.”
“Whoa,” Gus Grissom moved center stage. “We ain’t gonna have some outside weenie coming in, telling us what to do.”
NASA knew the Mercury Seven could not fill all the space flight slots in an accelerating program, and it was recruiting new pilots for the astronaut corps. It needed someone to manage this new enterprise, to select flight crews, make assignments, plan and schedule training time, be a link between the astronauts and management. In short, be a mother hen to this elite corps.
The Mercury astronauts made a persuasive case to NASA managers, and Deke became Coordinator of Astronaut Activities. Outsiders may have judged the appointment as a sop for a crestfallen astronaut, but that attitude didn’t linger. Deke took absolute charge. Many stunned NASA staffers came to regard him as the Ironman. That pleased him. In short order Deke’s office was a real power to be reckoned with. The new levels of respect carried over to the entire astronaut team. Everybody stepped back when it came to selection of astronauts for flights. Deke carried the ball, ran with it, and on October 3, 1962 Wally Schirra and his Sigma Seven spacecraft rode an Atlas into orbit. He proved his skills, as Deke knew he would. He stayed up for six orbits—nine hours. He had been launched with the same fuel quantity as Glenn and Carpenter, but he conserved fuel in a way that amazed Mission Control. In the process he went through his scientific and engineering checklist with an efficiency that would have turned a robot green with envy.
It was just what NASA and the nation had been waiting for—a textbook orbital flight.
Schirra’s flight held the rapt attention of nine test pilots who’d just been given the title of astronaut. They would help the Mercury Seven fly the new Gemini two-man spacecraft. Some would become legends. Others would give their lives. Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles “Pete” Conrad, James Lovell, James McDivitt, Elliott See, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young came aboard
Slayton now had fifteen astronauts under his wing. He set the newcomers up for indoctrination and training, and figured the more they saw of the remaining days of Project Mercury, the better prepared they’d be for flying the heavier, larger, advanced Gemini. With the new spacecraft, Slayton would be starting the test maneuvers and procedures that would lead to Apollo and the moon.
Deke helped draw up a flight plan that would put the Mercury in a category with Russia’s heavy spacecraft, in time spent in space. No three-or-six-orbits for the fourth and final Mercury orbital mission. This would be a shot for twenty-two orbits—a full day and a half circling Earth would indeed try the patience and endurance of man and the machine.
Walt Williams met privately with Deke. “Look, I know that besides yourself, Gordo Cooper is the only Mercury member who hasn’t flown. But maybe it would be a good idea to consider moving Al Shepard into this last Mercury flight.” Then Williams got out from under. “Of course, it’s your call, Deke.”
Williams didn’t fool Slayton for a second. The issue at hand was that Gordon Cooper was too much of a maverick for some in the space agency hierarchy.
But Deke judged Gordo as nothing less than a terrific pilot who had come up through the ranks flying everything from J-3 cubs to F-106s, and he belonged in that spacecraft. Dammit he’d earned it and if anyone knew how it felt to have an earned flight yanked from under his feet, sure as hell Deke Slayton was that man, and he was not about to have Gordo get the shaft.
There was another issue, well beneath the surface. Gordo’s deep Oklahoma “twang” irritated some of NASA’s public affairs officers. To them, pilot qualifications had nothing to do with who should fly the mission. Their reasoning was simple. They wanted polished “Madison Avenue,” not a redneck in orbit.
Deke made his decision. The flight was Gordo’s.
A few days before Cooper’s launch, innkeeper Henri Landwirth had been approached by the Gemini Nine to host a “Formal” dinner to honor the Mercury Seven.
Under the direction of the Gemini astronauts, Henri had his chef prepare a magnificent meal of breaded veal with au gratin potatoes, salads, and imported wines.
The Mercury guys murmured their surprise and they thanked Henri. They all sat down to the great banquet and fell immediately to required toasting and bestowing of good wishes and fortune on one another. It was comradeship at its finest, a measure of friendship to warm hearts and minds. With the general high praise from each group quaffed by the wine, sixteen astronauts sat down to enjoy the gastronomical repast.
Waiters served it on silver trays as silence descended with a crash. Henri had prepared a sumptuous feast of breaded fried cardboard, uncooked potatoes, and a salad rotting from hours in the humid Florida sun.
Gordon Cooper had been here before. He had his own reputation at air bases throughout the world built on such moments within the art of “Gotcha.”
The others failed to grasp that Gordon Cooper was not only a notorious jokester himself, but a son of the 1930s Depression. He’d eaten almost worse trying to stay alive in the Oklahoma dust bowl and to the utter astonishment of the assembled astronauts, he refused to acknowledge the joke and chowed down.
Many had tried to rattle the cage of this man and just as many had failed. Prejudice and regional bias had kept Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr. grounded until the last Mercury launch. On May 15, 1963 Cooper flew higher, farther, and longer than any Mercury pilot before—a day-and-a-half of orbiting earth. As Deke Slayton and Cooper’s fellow Mercury astronauts knew he would, Cooper flew a technically perfect flight right on through his nineteenth orbit, thirty hours in space, setting a new American endurance record with every sweep around earth.
Suddenly, there was a problem. Every flight controller in Mercury Control was focused on a green light flashing on the wall-wide tracking map. “Holy crap,” controller Bob Harrington shouted. “He’s leaving orbit—he’s on reentry!”
The ground made an immediate call to Faith Seven. “Hey, Gordo, this .05g signal light down here says you’re on reentry!”
“Like hell I am,” he answered.
Cooper settled back. He’d been waiting for something like this. The flight had been picture-perfect but he was aware the Mercury capsule had been built to last only three to six orbits. Twenty-two was asking an awful lot. The plan had been to see what the Mercury could do. Gordo knew after thirty hours in space the reentry light glitch was only the first that would be telling him his Mercury was coming apart. Faith Seven had been a good ship, but it had been
stretched to its limits. Within minutes, electrical surges knocked out his instruments. Then, the automatic control system rolled over and died. Cooper would have to fire his retro-rockets manually.
“Well,” he told the ground in his unmistakable twang,” it looks like we’ve got a few little washouts here. I’ve lost all electrical power. Carbon dioxide levels are above maximum limits, and cabin and suit temperatures are climbing. Looks like we’ll have to fly this thing ourselves. Other than that, things are fine.”
“Things are fine hell,” Deke laughed out loud. “If the carbon dioxide levels keep climbing they’ll kill ’im, and the only reason he can still talk to us is his radio is on independent battery. Let’s get him down on time, guys,” he yelled across Mercury Control. “Not a second later.”
Deke had confidence in Gordo. He felt everything was going to be all right. He was happy as hell he had the right pilot on the job—proving the endurance of both man and machine.
With just an hour to go, Mercury Control worked out procedures and maneuvers on a precise timetable, and John Glenn, stationed on a tracking ship south of Japan, radioed them up to Cooper.
“It’s been a real fine flight, Gordon,” Glenn told him. “Beautiful all the way.”
After twenty-two trips around earth, L. Gordon Cooper fired his three retro-rockets right on the money.
Gordo Cooper was threading the needle for his return from space. All he had learned from his pilot father, in flight cadet school, test pilot school, and flying his thousands of hours in high-speed jets had honed his abilities for the moment.
John Chancellor and Jay Barbree were broadcasting Gordon Cooper’s return from orbit on NBC. Over and over they said they were witnessing an almost impossible flying job as Faith Seven came out of the sky, rolling steadily, the Oklahoma farm boy flying with a precision that controllers mumbled was tighter than Mercury autopilots or computers had ever delivered.
Faith Seven’s parachutes dropped Gordo Cooper on the sea a stone’s throw from his recovery ship.