by Jay Barbree
In that blackness, only the motors and instruments of his spaceship offered any sounds and light. The remainder of the universe had gone mute, and suddenly he was staring at the brightest, most clearly defined stars and planets he had ever seen.
He was surprised by the speed and completion of his first night as he saw the thinnest crease in the darkness behind him, just a sliver of light, and then the sliver grew swiftly, growing into a shout of color and the brightest of suns as the horizon quickly transformed itself from night to day.
Half of his Mercury capsule was now lit; the other half lay in shadow and the dim reflected light from a planet below that was still in darkness. Sunrise on Earth itself was still minutes away.
Suddenly, he saw something strange out of the corner of his eye. Lightning bugs, good old-fashioned Ohio summer lightning bugs were swarming around Friendship Seven. Swarms of the tiny creatures. Some came right to his window, and then he realized they were frost, possibly ice dancing and swirling along with him as he moved through orbit.
Glenn had no idea what caused this stunning phenomenon, and he radioed Mercury Control. “I’ll try to describe what I’m [seeing] in here.” Every person hearing his voice snapped to, eyes wide.
“I’m in a big mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent,” Glenn explained. “They are bright yellowish-green. About the size and intensity of a firefly on a real dark night. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Roger, Friendship Seven, this is Canton CapCom, can you hear any impact with the capsule? Over.”
“Negative, negative. They’re very slow. They’re not going away from me at more than maybe three or four miles an hour.”
As Friendship Seven moved into brighter sun, the fireflies disappeared, and flight managers shifted their attention to an immediate urgency that could be threatening John Glenn’s life. Shining like a pit of deadly snakes on the Mercury Control’s wall-wide tracking map was Segment 51—a warning that told flight controllers Friendship Seven’s heat shield could be loose.
Everyone stopped. If the warning was correct, John Glenn could be cremated during reentry. Temperatures during the atmospheric plunge would reach 4,000 degrees.
Every member of Glenn’s team concentrated on the problem. They studied every idea floated, but there seemed to be only one in-flight fix: They could leave the retro-rocket pack strapped to the outside of the heat shield. This package contained six small rockets. Three had been used after Atlas shutdown to push Friendship Seven away from the Atlas booster; three larger rockets remained. They would be used to slow the spacecraft for reentry.
The theory was simple. If they left the retro-pack in place after the three de-orbit rockets fired, the straps should be strong enough to hold the heat shield in place until Glenn’s dive took him deep into the atmosphere. There, the growing air pressure would keep the heat shield pressed against the Mercury capsule’s blunt end.
The other possibility was equally simple. If the retro-pack straps did not hold, the first American to orbit Earth would return as ashes.
The managers in Mercury Control decided not to alarm Glenn by alerting him to the problem. This pissed off Alan Shepard, and Glenn heard it in Shepard’s voice. Then, over Canton Island, the tracking station told him to leave the retro-pack in place.
“Why?” he asked.
“You’ll get the word over Texas,” Canton said.
Now, Glenn was pissed. His heart picked up a beat. For the first time in his mission he was concerned. It was not an unfamiliar role for the ace test pilot and combat veteran. He took a deep breath and relaxed his body. He would deal with it.
The Texas station confirmed he was to leave the retro-pack on through reentry. Exactly at four hours, forty-three minutes, fifty-three seconds into the flight, he had to manually override the separation switch and retract the periscope and seal its outer doors. He passed out of radio range before he could ask questions.
Four minutes later, Friendship Seven was over Mercury Control at the Cape. Capcom Alan Shepard told flight director Chris Kraft and operations director Walt Williams in so many words to go to hell. He knew if he were in Glenn’s place, he would want to know. He keyed his mike and gave the whole explanation to John for retaining the retro-pack. The marine was angry he had not been informed earlier. But he understood the decision and told Shepard to pass on his thanks.
“Roger, John,” Shepard told him. “Hang tight, Marine. Navy has your back,” and right on schedule off the coast of California, the three retro-rockets fired at five-second intervals. Glenn felt three sharp thuds at the base of the craft. “I feel like I’m going back to Hawaii,” he reported.
Friendship Seven dropped slowly, skipping over the surface of the atmosphere a bit before sinking into Earth’s protective blanket. Instantly, Glenn could sense the heat build up. The capsule swayed. There was a sudden bang behind him: part of the retro-pack breaking away. He called the Texas station. He couldn’t get through. He had already plowed into the envelope of ionized air, and the ions kept any radio communications from leaving or entering his Mercury capsule.
John Glenn held tight.
Friendship Seven plunged deeper into the heat.
He could not have been more alone.
Alan Shepard tried to reach him. He was calling Glenn with an urgent message. He was trying to tell him to get rid of the retro-pack the moment he weighed 1g, his Earth weight, or greater. This could save Glenn’s life. It could keep the retro-pack from ripping his heat shield apart. The message banged against the ionization layer. It could not penetrate the ions and fell uselessly away, lost unheard in Friendship Seven’s wake.
John Glenn was cocooned inside a growing fireball, and through Friendship Seven’s porthole he saw this fireball devouring itself. A strap from the retro-pack had broken or burned free and was hammering against the glass. It burst into fire and flashed away with bits of flaming chunks of metal whirling and pounding past his view.
“It was a bad moment,” Glenn would tell me later. “I just hoped that everything would not come unglued. If they didn’t,” he smiled, “I would be okay. If they did, well…”
He watched the brilliant orange blaze and burning chunks flying by his window as he had watched the flaming remains of Mig fighters he’d shot down over the Yalu.
Then, he felt the gravity forces building. He could have hugged them. It meant it was all holding together, and he called Alan Shepard in Mercury Control. He was feeling pretty damn good, but there was no way to get through the ions. Not yet.
The heat shield on his back was hanging in there. It was 4,000 degrees outside, while he enjoyed a toasty and comfortable atmosphere inside Friendship Seven.
In Mercury Control they chewed their nails.
Notre Dame engineer Bob Harrington stood behind Alan Shepard. He was in charge of making Mercury Control tick. “Keep talking, Alan,” he begged. Shepard clenched his teeth and called again.
“Friendship Seven, this is Mercury Control. How do you read? Over.”
As instantly as they had come, the ions were gone, and the words penetrated Friendship Seven like the voice of an angel.
Glenn’s reply was a simple mike check. “Loud and clear. How me?”
“Roger,” a grinning Shepard acknowledged. “Reading you loud and clear. How’re you doing?”
“Oh, pretty good,” Glenn said, “but that was a real fireball, boy!”
Mercury Control broke out in cheers and handshakes, and Harrington broke out with the Notre Dame fight song.
There was dancing in the aisles, but flight director Kraft yelled through the pandemonium: “Knock it off. We’ve got a pilot to land.”
Instantly, the celebration ended, and John Glenn’s team was back on the job.
He and Friendship Seven kept losing speed. The Mercury capsule was now oscillating strongly from side to side, rocking badly enough for Glenn to feed corrections with his thrusters. They weren’t much good
anymore in the thickening atmosphere.
In the rain, John Glenn and family rode with Vice President Lyndon Johnson in his Washington parade. Only hours later, Glenn and the vice president had moved on to New York City. They are seen here moving down the canyons of Broadway in an overwhelming ticker-tape parade. (NASA).
“What’s this?” he muttered to himself, reaching for the switch to override his automatics and deploy the drogue chute early. He was at 55,000 feet and stabilization was important.
From that point on, Friendship Seven had a perfect splashdown. The first American to orbit Earth dropped into the water near his recovery ship, Noa.
John Glenn arrived in the nation’s capital a hero of Charles Lindbergh’s stature. He had lassoed the Russian lead, and the White House gave him a parade. A quarter of a million people braved heavy rain to watch the astronaut pass. He was then jetted off to New York City, where four million screaming, cheering people greeted him with a tumultuous ovation and a ticker-tape parade.
When John Glenn had satisfied all his national appearances, he came home for a parade through Cocoa Beach and a first-hand inspection by President John F. Kennedy of his Mercury spacecraft, Friendship Seven. (Rusty Fischer & Hartwell Conklin Collections).
I joined veteran broadcaster Robert McCormick in NBC’s Radio Central at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. We broadcast the parade from start to finish, and for this farm boy’s first trip to the big city, about the only thing I felt akin to was Chet Huntley’s roll-top desk.
The next morning NBC got me out of bed to cover an award for Glenn at the famed Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
I stopped by the coffee shop for breakfast and was introduced to food in the big city. The menu said two eggs anyway you liked them. That’s what I ordered and that’s what I got—two eggs. No toast, no coffee, no jam—no anything except two eggs.
In Cocoa Beach in 1962 you received two eggs, sausage or bacon, potatoes or grits, toast, coffee, and orange juice for $1.75. You can image how pleased I was when they brought me a check for $5.75 for my two eggs and a glass of warm water.
I paid the bill and took the elevator to witness John Glenn’s award. He was happy to see a face from home.
“Any beach sand in there?” he smiled, shaking my trousers’ cuffs.
“Some,” I laughed. “How’re you doing?”
“Tired,” he said, his expression suddenly weary. “I’m ready for a rest.”
“For a guy that shortened the distance to the moon, you’re entitled.”
Standing there, it came to me God didn’t turn out too many like John Glenn. When he passes, his epitaph should read:
HERE LIES A CIVILIZED MAN
SIX
On Orbit
The public had fallen in love with John Glenn, and NASA could not have been more pleased. The word went out: It’s a long way to the moon. Keep the astronauts in orbit, keep the public’s attention.
Deke Slayton did just that. He took the reins from Glenn and went to work. Wally Schirra was his backup. But soon we began to hear rumblings that Deke was in trouble. The rumor was that it was his heart.
In Washington, presidential science advisor Jerome Wiesner spoke with NASA administrator James Webb. He told the NASA chief the White House had heard about Slayton’s heart irregularity, and added, “Sending Slayton into orbit could be a terrible mistake. Suppose something goes wrong, anything, and 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’d be after the President’s ass.”
Webb shifted in his seat. “I get your point.”
Wiesner looked at him soberly. “It’s simple, Jim,” he said. “Take him off the flight.”
Webb nodded a half-hearted agreement. He realized the presidential science adviser was still smarting over losing his argument that JFK should cancel the whole damn manned space program.
Deke had idiopathic paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, a disturbance of the rhythm in the muscle fibers in the upper chambers of his heart, and the NASA administrator called for a medical panel to review the facts. The panel agreed with Wiesner. The job of telling Deke fell to the Mercury Seven’s own flight surgeon, Bill Douglas.
“Goddamn it, Bill, those sons-a-bitches can’t do this to me,” Deke shouted. “No one was concerned about this during selection. After all the years I’ve been flying the hottest jets, flying test flights, they said it was no big thing. Now they want me to step down? I can’t believe it,” he pleaded, shaking his head. “There ain’t a damn thing wrong with me.”
There was more bad news.
“I know the rules call for the backup pilot to slip into the seat of an astronaut unable to make a mission,” Dr. Douglas told Deke, “but Wally won’t be going.”
“God!” Deke screamed, “What the hell else?”
Douglas explained that Bob Gilruth decided Scott Carpenter, John Glenn’s backup, had more time in the Mercury simulator than Schirra, and Carpenter would be going in his place.
NASA gave Deke a few minutes with the press and then got him out of Dodge, got him the hell out of the way of Carpenter’s mission. When Aurora Seven lifted off on May 24, 1962, Deke Slayton was at a remote tracking station in Australia.
Scott Carpenter made a perfect ride into orbit. He was a gatherer of facts and a builder of knowledge, and in a sense he was the first science-astronaut. He made the most of what he had on board. On his first two orbits he drank more and ate more. He wanted to know how the digestive tract would handle weightlessness, and he wanted to know the limits of Mercury’s attitude-control jets. By wringing them out, from one position and then to another, he virtually depleted the fuel available for attitude maneuvering. He took all the pictures he could until his cameras ran hot, and then he ran through his scheduled program checklist, which included releasing a balloon in space.
He was having a ball.
After his first two orbits, Mercury Control began to worry. Scott had consumed so much fuel, flight director Chris Kraft was giving serious thought to ending his mission an orbit early. But he made a last-minute decision to let Scott stay up for his third and final planned trip around Earth if he would go into a “drifting mode.” That would conserve fuel. Scott liked the idea. He lay back in the comfort of weightlessness.
But as he entered his final sunrise, he couldn’t control himself. Scott had an idea. He banged his hand against the inside wall of Aurora Seven. He was right. The moment he struck the wall he was flying through a swarm of John Glenn’s “fireflies.” Again he banged the capsule’s bulkhead, and more fireflies slowly moved into view. “Damn,” he cursed. “I must know.” He fired the jets, swung the capsule around, and proved the mysterious fireflies originated from water vapor vented from the Mercury capsule. Vapor produced primarily by the human on board.
The astronaut’s body perspired, urinated, and exhaled, and the moisture was removed from the spacecraft through an external vent on the side of the capsule. The instant this moisture entered the low temperatures of the space night, it froze into ice particles. Some particles swarmed about the capsule or floated away; others clung to the ship’s 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,” only to be melted away by the heat of the space day.
The thinking astronaut had solved another mystery. But his eagerness to learn had cost Carpenter precious fuel and time needed to prepare for reentry. He landed 250 miles beyond his intended landing target. Scott was isolated on the surface of the Atlantic, beyond radio range. For nearly an hour he was lost to a frantic Mercury Control and to a worried worldwide radio and television audience.
We stayed on the air during the search, and I talked about every space fact I had ever collected. I was down to telling our listeners what the food was like in the Cape’s cafeteria when a recovery aircraft picked up Carpenter’s radio beac
on.
The aircraft crew found Carpenter floating in the life raft attached to his bobbing Mercury capsule. Scott had had the good sense to make sure his radio beacon had activated and to bail out of Aurora Seven and climb into his raft. He was just sitting there, eating a Baby Ruth, cataloging what he’d seen and learned.
Behind the scenes, a devastated Deke Slayton was waging a fierce struggle to return to flight status, and his fellow astronauts were worried. To the man, they were concerned about the effect the grounding was having on him.
As you would expect, John Glenn stepped forward. “We’re a team,” he said. “We’ve got to pull for our friend.”
“We’re going to give Deke back his pride,” Alan Shepard said.
“Yew man,” Gus Grissom agreed. Two words from Gus was a full speech.
So they decided to make Deke their boss.
“Give him the power,” Wally Schirra said. “His own title, office, whatever he needs.”
“Hell, he’ll be chief astronaut,” Gordo Cooper said, “but we’ll have to work fast.”
“Why?”
“Washington’s at it again,” Cooper told them. “Our friends at Edwards tell me they’re bringing in an air force general to take charge of the astronauts.”
“Like hell they are,” snapped Shepard. “Maybe an admiral, but no general,” the future admiral laughed.
“Well,” pondered Glenn, “we’ll just stand firm.”
“Damn right,” Cooper agreed. “It’s gotta be one of us.”
“Damn right,” Scott Carpenter said, slamming a fist on the table. “It’s gotta be Deke.”
They stood solid. Stonewall Jackson would have been proud.