I did have some trouble with the attitude controls. They seemed sticky and sluggish to me, and the capsule did not always respond as well as I thought it should. This meant that it took longer for me to work the controls than I had planned, and when my time for testing them was up I was slightly behind schedule. I wanted to fire the retros manually and at the same time use the manual controls to stay in the proper attitude. This was not critical on my flight since I was on a ballistic path and we were just exercising the retrorockets for practice. But it did indicate that we still had a few improvements to make with the controls. Actually, even if I had been in orbit, I could have handled the situation. It was not serious. It just wasn’t perfect. This was the main reason I was up there, of course – to find the bugs in the system before we went all the way.
I was looking out of the window when I fired the retros manually, right on schedule. I could see by checking the view that a definite yaw to the right was starting up. I had planned to use the view and the horizon as a reference to hold the capsule in its proper attitude when they fired. But when I saw this yawing motion start up, I quickly switched back to instruments. You have to stay right on top of your controls when the retros fire, because they can give you a good kick in the pants and you cannot predict in which direction they may start shoving you. Here was where some extra training on the ALFA would have come in handy. It would have given me more confidence in the window as a visual reference for the controls, and I would not have felt it so necessary to go right back to the instruments that I knew best.
It was a strange sensation when the retros fired. Just before they went, I had the distinct feeling that I was moving backwards – which I was. But when they went off and slowed me down, I definitely felt that I was going the other way. It was an illusion, of course. I had only changed speed, not direction.
Despite my problems with the controls, I was able to hold the spacecraft steady during the twenty-two seconds that it took for the three retros to finish their job.
The re-entry itself, which I knew could be a tricky period, was uneventful. But it did produce some interesting sensations. Once I saw what looked like smoke or a contrail bouncing off the heatshield as it buffeted its way through the atmosphere. I am sure that what I saw were shock waves. We were really bouncing along at this point. I was pulling quite a few Gs – they built up to 11.2. But they were no sweat. I had taken as many as 16on the centrifuge, and this seemed easy by comparison. I could also hear a curious roar inside the capsule during this period. This was probably the noise of the blunt nose pushing its way through the atmosphere.
Both the drogue chute and the main chute broke out right on schedule. There was a slight bouncing around when the big one dug into the air, but this was no problem. The capsule started to rotate and swing slowly under the chute as it descended. I could feel a slight jar as the landing bag dropped down to take up some of the landing shock.
I hit the water with a good bump at T+15 minutes 37 seconds.
I felt that I was in very good shape. I had opened up the faceplate on my helmet, disconnected the oxygen hose from the helmet, unfastened the helmet from the suit, released the chest strap, the lap belt, the shoulder harness, knee straps and medical sensors. And I rolled up the neck dam of my suit, a sort of turtle-neck diaphragm made out of rubber to keep the air inside our suit and the water out in case we get dunked during the recovery. This was the best thing I did all day.
This procedure left me connected to the capsule at only two points: the oxygen inlet hose which I still needed for cooling, and the communications wires which led into the helmet. Now I turned my attention to the hatch. I released the restraining wires at both ends and tossed them to my feet. Then I removed the cap from the detonator which would blow the hatch, and pulled out the safety pin. The detonator was now armed. But I did not touch it. I would wait to do that until the last minute, when the helicopter pilot told me he was hooked on and ready for me to come out.
I was in radio contact with “Hunt Club”, the code name for the helicopters which were on their way to pick me up. The pilots seemed ready to go to work, but I asked them to stand by for three or four minutes while I made a check of all the switch positions on the instrument panel. I had been asked to do this, for we had discovered on Al’s flight that some of the readings got jiggled loose while the capsule was being carried back to the carrier. I wanted to plot them accurately before we moved the capsule another foot. As soon as I had finished looking things over, I told Hunt Club that I was ready. According to the plan, the pilot was to inform me as soon as he had lifted me up a bit so that the capsule would not ship water when the hatch blew. Then I would remove my helmet, blow the hatch, and get out.
I had unhooked the oxygen inlet hose by now and was lying flat on my back and minding my own business when suddenly the hatch blew off with a dull thud. All I could see was blue sky and sea water rushing in over the sill. I made just two moves, both of them instinctive. I tossed off my helmet, grabbed the right edge of the instrument panel and hoisted myself right through the hatch. I have never moved faster in my life. The next thing I knew I was floating high in my suit with the water up to my armpits.
Things got a little messy for the few minutes that I was in the water. First I got entangled in the line which attaches the dye marker package to the capsule. I was afraid for a second that I would be dragged down by the line if the capsule sank. But I freed myself and figured I was still safe. I looked up then and for the first time I saw the helicopter that was moving in over the capsule. The spacecraft seemed to be sinking fast, and the pilot had all three wheels down in the water near the neck of it while the co-pilot stood in the door trying desperately to hook on. I swam over a few feet to try and help, but before I could do anything he snagged it. The top of the capsule went clear under water then. But the chopper pulled up and away and the capsule started rising gracefully out of the water.
I expected the same helicopter crew to drop a horse collar near me now and scoop me up. That was our plan. Instead, they pulled away and left me there. I found out later that the pilot had a red warning light on his instrument panel, telling him that he was about to burn out an engine trying to bolt on to the capsule. Normally, he could have made it. But the capsule full of sea water was too heavy for him, and he had to cut it loose and let it sink. I tried to signal to him by waving my arms. Then I tried to swim over to him. But by now there were three other choppers all hovering around trying to get close to me, and their rotor blades kicked up so much spray that it was hard to move.
The second helicopter in line was right in front of me, and I could see two guys standing in the door with what looked like chest packs strapped around them. A third guy was taking pictures of me through a window. At this point the waves were leaping over my head, and I noticed for the first time that I was floating lower and lower in the water. I had to swim hard just to keep my head up. It dawned on me that in the rush to get out before I sank I had not closed the air inlet port in the belly of my suit, where the oxygen tube fits inside the capsule. Although this hole was probably not letting much water in, it was letting air seep out, and I needed that air to help me stay afloat. I thought to myself, “Well, you’ve gone through the whole flight, and now you’re going to sink right here in front of all these people.”
I wondered why the men in the chopper did not try coming in for me. I was panting hard, and every time a wave lapped over me I took a big swallow of water. I tried to rouse them by waving my arms. But they just seemed to wave back at me. I wasn’t scared now. I was angry. Then I looked to my right and saw a third helicopter coming my way and dragging a horse collar behind it across the water. In the doorway I spotted Lieutenant George Cox, the Marine pilot who had handled the recovery hook which picked up both Al Shepard and the chimp, Ham. As soon as I saw Cox, I thought, “I’ve got it made.”
The wash from the other helicopters made it tough for Cox to move in close. I was scared again for a moment, but then, somehow
, in all that confusion, Cox came in and I got hold of the sling. I hung on while they winched me up, and finally crawled into the chopper. Cox told me later that they dragged me fifteen feet along the water before I started going up. I was so exhausted I cannot remember that part of it. As soon as I got into the chopper I grabbed a Mae West and started to put it on. I wanted to make certain that if anything happened to this helícopter on the way to the carrier I would not have to go through another dunking!
When I had been aboard the carrier for some time an officer came up and presented me with my helmet. I had left it behind in the sinking capsule, but somehow it had bobbed loose and a destroyer crew had picked it up as it floated in the water.
“For your information,” the officer said, “we found it floating right next to a ten-foot shark.”
This was interesting, but it was small consolation to me. We had worked so hard and had overcome so much to get Liberty Bell launched that it just seemed tragic that another glitch had robbed us of the capsule and its instruments at the very last minute. It was especially hard for me, as a professional pilot. In all my years of flying this was the first time that my aircraft and I had not come back together. Liberty Bell was the first thing I had ever lost.
We tried for weeks afterwards to find out what had happened and how it had happened. I even crawled into capsules and tried to duplicate all of my movements, to see if I could make the same thing happen again. But it was impossible. The plunger that detonates the bolts is so far out of the way that I would have had to reach for it on purpose to hit it, and this I did not do. Even when I thrashed about with my elbows, I could not manage to bump against it accidentally. It remains a mystery how that hatch blew. And I am afraid it always will. It was just one of those things.
Fortunately, the telemetry system worked well during the flight, and we got back enough data while I was in the air to answer the questions that I had gone out to ask. We missed the capsule, of course. It had film and tapes aboard which we would have liked to study. But despite all our headaches along the way, and an unhappy ending, Liberty Bell had performed her mission. She had flown me 302.8 miles downrange, had taken me to an altitude of 118.2 miles at a speed of 5,168 mph, had put me through five minutes of weightless flight, and had brought me home, safe and sound. That was all that really mattered. The system itself was valid. The problems which had plagued us could be fixed, and with our second and final sub-orbital mission under our belts, we were ready now for the big one – three orbits of the world.
Glenn’s orbital flight
More sub-orbital flights were scheduled but on 6 August 1961 the Russian cosmonaut Major Yuri Titov made a 17-orbit flight which lasted 25 hours. NASA was hoping to put a man into orbit before the end of the year and this time it would be Glenn. He decribed the preparations:
Atlas testing moved into its final phase. A September 13 Atlas launch, MA-4, carried a dummy astronaut into orbit and back after circling Earth once, and the capsule landed on target in the Atlantic. At that point the system seemed ready. The Atlas had been strengthened not only by the belly band but with the use of thicker metal near the top. But Bob Gilruth and Hugh Dryden, NASA’s deputy administrator, wanted to send a chimp into orbit before risking a man.
This time the chimp was named Enos, and he went up on November 29. Like Ham, he had been conditioned to pull certain levers in the spacecraft according to signals flashing in front of him. Like Ham’s, his flight was not altogether perfect. The capsule’s attitude control let it roll 45 degrees before the hydrogen peroxide thrusters corrected it. Controllers brought it down in the Pacific after two orbits and about three hours.
When Enos was picked up he had freed an arm from its restraint, gotten inside his chest harness, and pulled off the biosensors that the doctors had attached to record his respiration, heartbeat, pulse, and blood pressure. He also had ripped out the inflated urinary catheter they had implanted, which sent his heart rate soaring during the flight. It made you cringe to think of it.
Nevertheless, Enos’s flight was a success and he appeared unfazed at the postflight news conference with Bob and Walt Williams, Project Mercury’s director of operations. All the attention was on the chimpanzee when one of the reporters asked who would follow him into orbit.
Bob gave the world the news I’d learned just a few weeks earlier, when he had called us all into his office at Langley to tell us who would make the next flight. I had been elated when, at last, I heard that I would be the primary pilot. This time I was on the receiving end of congratulations from a group of disappointed fellow astronauts. Now, as the reporters waited with their pencils poised and cameras running, Bob said, “John Glenn will make the next flight. Scott Carpenter will be his backup.”
The launch date was originally set for 16 January but due to bad weather it was postponed until 23 January. Glenn:
I woke up at about one-thirty on the morning of February 20, 1962. It was the eleventh date that had been scheduled for the flight. I lay there and went through flight procedures, and tried not to think about an eleventh postponement. Bill Douglas came in a little after two and leaned on my bunk and talked. He said the weather was fifty-fifty and that Scott had already been up to check out the capsule and called to say it was ready to go. I showered, shaved, and wore a bathrobe while I ate the now-familiar low-residue breakfast with Bill, Walt Williams, NASA’s preflight operations director, Merritt Preston, and Deke Slayton who was scheduled to make the next flight.
Bill gave me a once-over with a stethoscope and shone a light into my eyes, ears, and throat. “You’re fit to go,” he said and started to attach the biosensors. Joe Schmitt laid out the pressure suit’s various components, the suit itself, the helmet, and the gloves, which contained fingertip flashlights for reading the instruments when I orbited from day into night. I put on the urine collection device that was a version of the one Gus and I had devised the night before his flight, then the heavy mesh underliner with its two layers separated by wire coils that allowed air to circulate. I put the silver suit on – one leg at a time, like everybody else, I reminded myself. In a pocket in addition to the small pins I had designed, I carried five small silk American flags. I planned to present them to the President, the commandant of the Marine Corps, the Smithsonian Institution, and Dave and Lyn.
Joe gave the suit a pressure check, and Bill ran a hose into his fish tank to check the purity of the air supply; dead fish would mean bad air. I was putting on the silver boots and the dust covers that would come off once I was through the dust-free “white room” outside the capsule at the top of the gantry when I said casually, “Bill, did you know a couple of those fish are floating belly-up?”
“What?” He rushed over to the tank and looked inside before he realized I was kidding.
I put my white helmet on, left Hangar S carrying the portable air blower; waved at the technicians, and got into the transfer van. In the van, I looked over weather data and flight plans. About two hundred technicians were gathered around Launch Complex 14 when I got out of the van. Searchlights lit the silvery Atlas much as they had the night we had watched it blow to pieces. I thought instead of the successful tests since then. Clouds rolled overhead in the predawn light. It was six o’clock when I rode the elevator up the gantry. Scott was waiting in the white room to help me into the capsule. In addition to white coveralls and dust covers on your shoes, you had to wear a paper cap in the white room. It made the highly trained capsule insertion crew look like drugstore soda jerks. I bantered with Guenter Wendt, the “pad führer” who ran the white room with precision, before wriggling feet first into the capsule and settling in to await the countdown.
The original launch time passed as a weather hold delayed the countdown. Then a microphone bracket in my helmet broke. Joe Schmitt fixed that, I said goodbye to everybody, and the crew bolted the hatch into place. They sheared a bolt in the process, so they unbolted the hatch, replaced the bolt, and secured it back into place. That took another forty minute
s. I still didn’t believe I would actually go.
I heard a steady stream of conversation on my helmet headset, weather and technical details passed between the blockhouse and the control center in NASA’s technical patois. A voice said the clouds were thinning. Up and down the beaches and on roadsides around the Cape, I knew thousands of people were assembled for the launch. Some of them had been there for a month. The countdown would resume, then stop. I just waited. Then the gantry pulled away, and I could see patches of blue sky through the window. The steady patter of blockhouse communications continued. Scott, in the blockhouse, made a call and let me know he had patched me through to Arlington so I could talk privately with Annie. “How are you doing?” I said.
“We’re fine. How are you doing?”
“Well, I’m all strapped in. The gantry’s back. If we can just get a break on the weather, it looks like I might finally go. How are the kids?”
“They’re right here.” I spoke first to Lyn, then Dave. They told me they were watching all three networks and the preparations looked exciting. Then Annie came back on the line.
“Hey, honey, don’t be scared,” I said. “Remember; I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.”
Her breath caught. “Don’t be long,” she said.
“I’ll talk to you after I land this afternoon.” It was all I could do to add the words, “I love you.” I heard her say, “I love you too.” I was glad nobody could see my eyes.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 10