I called Annie at home in Arlington. She knew I was safe. She had had three televisions set up in the living room, and was watching with Dave and Lyn and the neighbours with the curtains drawn against the clamor of news crews outside on the lawn. Even so, she sobbed with relief. I didn’t know then that Scott had called to prepare her in case the heat shield was loose. He had told her I might not make it back. “I waited for you to come back on the radio,” she said. “I know it was only five minutes. But it seemed like five years.”
Hearing my voice speaking directly to her brought first tears, then audible happiness.
After putting on a jumpsuit and high-top sneakers, I found a quiet spot on deck and started answering into a tape recorder the questions on the two-page shipboard debriefing form. The first question was, what would you like to say first?
The sun was getting low, and I said, “What can you say about a day in which you get to see four sunsets?”
Before much more time had passed, I got on the ship’s loudspeaker and thanked the Noa’s crew. They had named me sailor of the month, and I endorsed the fifteen-dollar check to the ship’s welfare fund. A helicopter hoisted me from the deck of the Noa in a sling and shuttled me to an aircraft carrier, the USS Randolph, where I met a larger reunion committee. Doctors there took an EKG and a chest X ray, and I had a steak dinner. Then from the Randolph I flew copilot on a carrier transport that took me to Grand Turk Island for a more extensive medical exam and two days of debriefings.
At the debriefing sessions, I had the highest praise for the whole operation, the training, the way the team had come back from all the cancellations, and the mission itself – with one exception. They hadn’t told me directly their fears about the heat shield, and I was really unhappy about that. A lot of people, doctors in particular, had the idea that you’d panic in such a situation. The truth was, they had no idea what would happen. None of us were panic-prone on the ground or in an airplane or in any of the things they put us through in training, including underwater egress from the capsule. But they thought we might panic once we were up in space and assumed it was better if we didn’t know the worst possibilities.
I thought the astronaut ought to have all the information the people on the ground had as soon as they had it so he could deal with a problem if communication was lost. I was adamant about it. I said, “Don’t ever leave a guy up there again without giving him all the information you have available. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a manned program?”
It emerged that a battle had gone on in the control center over whether they should tell me. Deke and Chris Kraft had argued that they ought to tell me, and others had argued against it, but I didn’t learn that until many years later. I don’t know who had made the decision, but they changed the policy after that to establish that all information about the condition of the spacecraft was to be shared with the pilot.
I was describing the luminous particles I saw at each sunrise when George Ruff, the psychiatrist, broke up everyone in the debriefing by asking, “What did they say, John?” (The particles proved to be a short-lived phenomenon. The Soviets called them the Glenn effect; NASA learned from later flights that they were droplets of frozen water vapor from the capsule’s heat exchanger system, but their firefly-like glow remains a mystery.)
George also had a catch-all question tagged on at the end of the standard form we filled out at the end of each day’s training. It was, Was there any unusual activity during this period?
“No,” I wrote, “just the normal day in space.”
Grand Turk was an interlude, in which morning medical checks and debriefing sessions were followed by afternoons of play. Scott, as my backup, stuck with me as I had Al and Gus after their flights. We went scuba diving and spearfishing, and Scott rescued a diver who had blacked out eighty feet down, giving him some of his own air as he brought him to the surface. There were no crowds, since the debriefing site was closed.
Annie had tried to give me some idea of the overwhelming public reaction to the flight. Shorty Powers had said there was a mood afoot for public celebration. But I was only faintly aware of the groundswell that was building.
Project Mercury returned to space on May 24, with Scott’s three-orbit flight in Aurora 7. Deke had been scheduled to make the flight, but the doctors had grounded him after detecting a slight heart murmur.
Malfunctions aboard Scott Carpenter’s orbital flight
Scott Carpenter was born in Boulder, Colorado, on 1 May 1925. He joined the US Navy in 1943 but was discharged at the end of the Second World War. He rejoined the US Navy and was commissioned in 1949. He was given flight training at Pensacola, Florida and Corpus Christi, Texas and designated a naval aviator in April 1951. During the Korean War he flew anti-submarine, ship surveillance, and aerial mining missions in the Yellow Sea, South China Sea and the Formosa Straits. In 1954 he attended the Navy Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, and subsequently was assigned to the Electronics Test Division of the Naval Air Test Center, where he flew tests in every type of naval aircraft including multi-and single-engine jet and propeller-driven fighters, attack planes, patrol bombers, transports, and seaplanes.
From 1957 to 1959 Carpenter attended the Navy General Line School and the Navy Air Intelligence School and was then assigned as Air Intelligence Officer to the aircraft carrier, USS Hornet. In April 1959 he was selected as one of the original seven Mercury Astronauts.
Robert B. Voas was a US Navy psychologist posted to NASA, whose first job was to select suitable men for space duty. Warren North was chief of manned space flight. At an early briefing North confirmed that the potential spacemen would be chosen from pilots:
They would monitor and adjust the cabin environment. They would operate the communications system. They would make physiological, astronomical, and meteorological observations that could not be made by instruments. Most important, they would be able to operate the reaction controls in space and be capable of initiating descent from orbit. This was the key part, that the astronaut could take over control of the spacecraft itself.
Carpenter endured 30 hours of tests at the Lovelace & Wright-Patterson Centre in 1959.
The chosen seven had shown emotional maturity, engineering, flight experience and motivation. Eighteen others were unreservedly recommended.
On 27 April 1959 they began work at Langley Air Force Base. NASA was considering 10 flights carrying chimpanzees but this changed on 12 April 1961. The Soviets made the first manned flight. Shepard followed on 5 May 1961. On 25 May President Kennedy presented his vision to Congress.
A couple of weeks later, Gilruth and Webb were aboard one of NASA’s R4Ds when over the radio the president was addressing Congress, pledging NASA to a lunar expedition. Gilruth was “aghast.” He looked at Webb, who knew all about it. In his special message to Congress, delivered on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy set out his vision on a number of “urgent national needs,” one of them the conquest of space. In a resonant call to arms, the president asked the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” No other space project, Kennedy declared, would be “more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”
Glenn’s flight had been launched by the Mercury Atlas 6 (MA-6) which carried 122 tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen, more than four times the fuel load of the Redstone rockets which had powered Shepard and Grissom’s sub-orbital flights. Scott Carpenter had been the back-up to Glenn, who had left the face plate of his helmet open on re-entry. At the formal inquiry he was cleared of the charge of panicking. Deke Slayton was scheduled to make the next orbital flight but during a G force test in August 1959 it had been noticed that his heartbeat was erratic. In January 1962 an Airforce cardiologist recommended that he should be grounded and Carpenter was given the next flight, designated MA-7. Carpenter named his capsule Aurora 7.
Carpenter’s daughter, Kris
Stoever, was six years old at the time and later helped her father write his account. Carpenter’s wife’s name was Rene. Kris Stoever:
Finally, at a little after seven forty-five, the great Atlas engine were fired, sending out billows of steam, flames, dust, smoke, fumes and heat. At this signal, all four Carpenter children abandoned their posts in front of the television, where all three networks were covering the launch live, and dashed out to the beach. Already the pale morning sky was streaked with contrails, and in the distance they could see the Atlas lifting off. Against the low slant of the sun, Rene saw the Atlas streak into the sky and then disappear.
Just before liftoff, Scott had been thinking about his grandfather, Vic Noxon. “At last I’ll know the great secret,” the old man had told Dr Gilbert on a golden Sunday morning on the Front Range. He was dying. He knew he was dying. He wasn’t afraid. Scott was confident that May morning, like his Grandpa Noxon, that everything was going to be all right – that this experience so long anticipated had finally arrived. As the rocket engines began to rumble and vibrate beneath him, he became preternaturally alert to the many sounds and sensations of liftoff.
There was surprisingly little vibration, although the engines made a big racket and he felt the rocket swaying as it rose. The ride was gentler than he expected. He looked out his window, placed directly overhead, to see the escape tower streaking away like a scalded cat. One especially odd thing, for one accustomed to level flight after the required climb, was to see the altimeter reach seventy, eighty, then ninety thousand feet and yet know that he was still going straight up.
No one noticed at the time – there was no dial to measure its functioning – but the capsule’s pitch horizon scanner (PHS) had already started malfunctioning. The Mercury capsule was chockfull of automatic navigational instruments, among them the PHS, which does just what the name implies: it scans the horizon for the purposes of maintaining, automatically, the pitch attitude of the capsule. For MA-7, however, the PHS immediately began feeding erroneous data into the Automatic Stabilization and Control System (ASCS), or autopilot. When this erroneous data was fed into the ASCS, the autopilot responded, as designed, to fire the pitch thruster to correct the perceived error. This in turn caused the spacecraft to spew precious fuel from the automatic tanks. Fuel was a finite commodity.
Forty seconds after tower separation, the pitch horizon scanner was already 18 degrees in error. It was indicating a nose-up attitude, or angle, of plus-17 degrees while the gyro on the Atlas showed pitch to have been minus 0.5. By the time of spacecraft separation, the pitch gyro aboard the capsule had “slaved” to the malfunctioning pitch-scanner output and was in error by about 20 degrees. NASA later found that the error would persist, intermittently, to greater and lesser degrees, throughout the three-orbit flight, with near-calamitous effect as MA-7 readied for reentry less than five hours later.
At the moment, Scott was focused on the gravitational forces, which peaked at a relatively gentle 8 Gs. He marvelled at the intense silence, but then experienced an even greater sensation of weightlessness. At five minutes, nine seconds into the flight, he reported to Gus listening as Capcom at Cape Canaveral: “I am weightless! – and starting the fly-by-wire turnaround.”
The sensation was so exhilarating, his report to the ground was more of a spontaneous and joyful exclamation than the routine report he had expected to make. The fly-by-wire manual controls were exquisitely responsive and quickly placed the Mercury capsule into a backward-flying position for the beginning of Scott’s first circumnavigation of the earth. John had accomplished this maneuver on autopilot, as specified by his flight plan, causing the system to expend more than four pounds of fuel in the process. In the fly-by-wire control mode, it could be done using only 1.6 pounds.
The three-axis control stick (or hand controller) designed for Mercury was a nifty device that allowed the pilot to fly the capsule in either the “manual proportional” or “fly-by-wire” (“wire” here meaning electrical) systems. The manual proportional system required minute adjustments of the control stick – of perhaps 2 or 3 degrees – to activate the one-pound thrusters. Fore and aft movements controlled pitch, which is the up or down angle of the spacecraft, side-to-side movements controlled roll. The pilot could control or change the direction left or right, by twisting the control stick – a hand control that replaced the old rudder pedals used in airplanes The MA-7 flight plan specified only limited use of the ASCS.
Gus Grissom, as Capcom, gave Carpenter the good news: “We have a Go, with a seven-orbit capability.” Carpenter replied: “Roger. Sweet words.”
Carpenter described:
Sweet words indeed. With the completion of the turnaround maneuver, I pitched the capsule nose down, 34 degrees, to retroattitude, and reported what to me was an astounding sight. From earth-orbit altitude I had the moon in the center of my window, a spent booster tumbling slowly away, and looming beneath me the African continent. But the flight plan was lurking, so from underneath the instrument panel I pulled out my crib sheets for the flight plan written out on three 3 x 5 index cards, and Velcroed for easy viewing. I could just slap them up on a nearby surface, in this case the hatch, covered with corresponding swaths of Velcro. Each card provided a crucial minute-by-minute schedule of in-flight activities for each orbit. They gave times over ground stations and continents, when and how long to use what type of control systems, when to begin and end spacecraft maneuvers, what observations and reports to make on which experiments. In short, they told me, and the capcoms, who had copies, what I was supposed to be doing every second of the flight – every detail of which had been worked out, timed, and approved before liftoff. A brief investigation of these cards is enough to suggest constant pilot activity. But to get the best appreciation of just how busy we all were during those early flights, read the voice communication reports between the capcoms and the astronaut.
It was time to open the ditty bag. Stowed on my right, it contained the equipment and the space food for the flight. First out was the camera, for I needed to catch the sunlight on the slowly tumbling booster still following the capsule. The camera had a large patch of Velcro on its side. I could slap it on the capsule wall when it wasn’t in use. Velcro was the great zero-gravity tamer. Without it, the equipment would have been a welter of tether lines – my idea, incidentally, and not a very good one, for John’s flight. He had ended up in a virtual spaghetti bowl full of tether lines and equipment floating through his small cabin.
Also in the ditty bag were the air-glow filter, for measuring the frequency of light emitted by the air-glow layer, star navigation cards, the world orbital and weather charts-adjuncts to the earth path indicator (EPI) globe mounted on the instrument panel. The EPI was mechanically driven at the orbital rate so that it always showed the approximate spacecraft position over the earth. There were also bags of solid food I was to eat (a space first), and the densitometer.
But the most important items at this point in the flight were probably the flight plan cards. I had been tracking the booster since separation, maneuvering the capsule with the very good fly-by-wire system: “I have the booster in the center of the window now,” I reported, “tumbling very slowly.” It was still visible ten minutes later, when I acquired voice contact with Canary capcom.
Carpenter: “I have, west of your station, many whirls and vortices of cloud patterns. [Taking] pictures at this time – 2, 3, 4, 5. Control mode is automatic. I have the booster directly beneath me.”
The brilliance of the horizon to the west made the stars too dim to see in the black sky. But I could see the moon and, below me, beautiful weather patterns. But something was wrong. The spacecraft had a scribe line etched on the window, showing where the horizon should be in retro-attitude. But it was now above the actual horizon I checked my gyros and told Canary capcom my pitch attitude was faulty.
Carpenter reported: “I think my attitude is not in agreement with the instruments.”
Then I added an explanatio
n – it was “probably because of that gyro-free period” – and dismissed it. There were too many other things to do.
John had also had problems with his gyro reference system. Kraft described it in an MA-6 postflight paper, where he wrote that the astronaut “had no trouble in maintaining the proper [pitch] attitude” when he so desired “by using the visual reference.” All pilots do this – revert to what their eyes tell them when their on-board tools fail. But future flights, he said, would be free of such “spurious attitude outputs” because astronauts would be able to “disconnect the horizon scanner slaving system,” called “caging the gyros” in these future flights. Because my flight plan for the follow-on mission called for so many large deviations from normal orbital attitude (minus-34-degree pitch, 0-degree roll, 0-degree yaw), I was often caging the gyros when they weren’t needed for attitude control.
The Canary Capcom picked up on my report, and asked me to “confirm orientation.” Were my autopilot (ASCS) and fly-by-wire operating normally?
Carpenter reported: “Roger, Canary. The manual and automatic control systems are satisfactory, all axes . . .”
The procedure for voice reports on the attitude control system did not call for determining agreement in pitch attitude as shown by (a) the instrument and (b) the pilot’s visual reference out the window. The reporting procedure also assumed a properly functioning pitch horizon scanner, in the case of MA-7 a false assumption. Because of the scanner’s wild variations careening from readings of plus 50 degrees at one place over the horizon and then lurching back to minus-20 over another, without any discernible pattern – I might have gotten a close-to-nominal, or normal, reading at any given moment in the flight.
A thorough ASCS check, early in the flight, could have identified the malfunction. Ground control could have insisted on it, when the first anomalous readings were reported. Such a check would have required anywhere from two to six minutes of intense and continuous attention on the part of the pilot. A simple enough matter but a prodigious block of time in a science flight – and in fact the very reason ASCS checks weren’t included in the flight plan. On the contrary, large spacecraft maneuvers, accomplished off ASCS, were specified, in addition to how many minutes the MA-7 pilot would spend in each of the three control modes-fly-by-wire, manual proportional, and ASCS. Because of this, I would not report another problem with the ASCS until the second orbit. I had photographs to take and the balky camera to load.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 13