Tests Versus Time in the Race for Space

(January - April 1961)

On January 3, 1961, two years and three months after it was formed, the Space Task Group officially became a separate, autonomous NASA field element charged with the conduct of Project Mercury and any other manned space flight programs that might follow it. The Task Group, now composed of 667 people, was still located physically on the Hampton Roads side of the Langley Air Force Base and was supported by the Langley Research Center, but now the administrative marriage of STG with the Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland, was annulled.¹ The Mercury team had not yet managed to launch a manned rocket, but neither apparently had their Russian counterparts. The United States still had a good chance to place the first man in space, at least for five minutes. The Soviet lead in orbital flight tests argued heavily against the first manned satellite being American, but to score first would still be some consolation.

In only three years and three months since Sputnik I, the Soviet Union and the United States had launched into space a total of 42 vehicles, 38 of which were Earth satellites, three were solar satellites, and one was a lunar probe. The box score in the "space race" between the United States and the Soviet Union was 33 to 9 in favor of the home team, as far as publicly successful space launchings were concerned. But with only nine acknowledged launchings the U.S.S.R. had hoisted some 87,000 pounds (as opposed to the U.S. total of 34,240 pounds), the Soviets had hit the Moon and photographed its backside, and they had recovered two dogs from one Earth orbital flight. Of the 33 American space launches, only three had been done by NASA launch vehicles and crews. Of the remainder, 24 had been launched by Air Force rockets, five by Army boosters, one by the Navy. In contrast to the responsibility for launching these 31 Earth satellites and two solar satellites, the credit for building the instrumented payloads was spread more widely; the Air Force counted 15 successes, the Army and Navy four each, and NASA 10 spacecraft. Already the complexity of accounting properly for mankind's successful satellite and space probe projects was reaching formidable proportions.²

On January 11, 1961, three Soviet tracking ships were reported moving into the central Pacific once again. The next day, in his final State of the Union address, President Eisenhower commended the young space administration for its "startling strides" and "real progress toward the goal of manned space flights." After listing all the successes of American instrumented payloads in space, Eisenhower said:

These achievements make us unquestionably preeminent today in space exploration for the betterment of mankind. I believe the present organizational arrangements in this area, with the revisions proposed last year, are completely adequate for the tasks ahead.³

At this same time, President-elect John F. Kennedy announced that Jerome B. Wiesner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had chaired the Democratic science advisory committee for the campaign, would become the new Presidential special assistant for science and technology. And with this announcement Kennedy released most of a special report made to him by Wiesner's committee of nine campaign advisers on the state of the Nation's security and prestige. A political document, the "Wiesner Report" called for a sweeping reorganization of the national space program. It was critical of past leadership and direction, and it called for more effective use of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, better coordination with the Department of Defense, stronger technical management, and a closer partnership with industry. On top of all this came the uncorroborated news that an Army officer had told a seminar of almost 500 civilian and military participants that the United States had good evidence that at least one and probably two Soviet cosmonauts had been killed in unsuccessful attempts to orbit a man during Premier Khrushchev's visit to the United States in September 1960.⁴

Interregnum

On January 16, 1961, President Eisenhower delivered his annual budget message to Congress, asking for amendments to the Space Act of 1958 and referring to Project Mercury with far less confidence than he had shown five days earlier:

In the program for manned space flight, the reliability of complex booster, capsule, escape, and life-support components of the Mercury system is now being tested to assure a safe manned ballistic flight into space, and hopefully a manned orbital flight, in calendar year 1961. Further testing and experimentation will be necessary to establish whether there are any valid scientific reasons for extending manned spaceflight beyond the Mercury program.⁵

Members of the Space Task Group and of the Mercury team at large could take little comfort from the fact that this speaker was an outgoing President, for they also knew that the incoming President's scientific policy adviser had been quite critical of the "marginal" Mercury-Atlas program. Regarding "man-in-space," the Wiesner Committee had said:

We are rapidly approaching the time when the state of technology will make it possible for man to go out into space. It is sure that as soon as this possibility exists, man will be compelled to make use of it, by the same motives that have compelled him to travel to the poles and to climb the highest mountains of the earth. There are also dimly perceived military and scientific missions in space which may prove to be very important.

By having placed highest national priority on the Mercury program, we have strengthened the popular belief that man in space is the most important aim of our non-military space effort. The manner in which this program has been publicized in our press has further crystallized such belief. It exaggerates the value of that aspect of space activity where we are less likely to achieve success, and discounts those aspects in which we have already achieved great success and will probably reap further successes in the future.⁶

When the managers of NASA and of STG, a few days later, became aware of the earlier, longer, confidential version of the Wiesner report, they were reminded of Mercury's tenuous standing as an urgent, but not an indispensable, "crash" program. If they should fail on their first attempt to place a man in space, or to put him in orbit, or to recover him from orbit, they not only would sacrifice a human life but create a national humiliation. Mercury managers had always been acutely aware of these portents, but the low status of Mercury in real and rumored policy papers made these days darker than ever. Wiesner's Committee recommended that Kennedy not allow "the present Mercury program to continue unchanged for more than a very few months," and that he not "effectively endorse this program and take the blame for its possible failures." Above all else the Wiesner Committee recommended that:

We should stop advertising Mercury as our major objective in space activities. Indeed, we should make an effort to diminish the significance of this program to its proper proportion before the public, both at home and abroad. We should find effective means to make people appreciate the cultural, public service, and military importance of space activities other than space travel.⁷

Next to Mercury, the Wiesner group was most critical of the Nation's booster program, particularly of the inability of United States rockets to lift heavy payloads into space. Measured by rocket thrust, Russian superiority continued unchallenged. Profound criticism was levelled at the Atlas, which was now truly operational as a weapon system, but which had failed signally in its five most recent tests as a launch vehicle for NASA payloads. Wiesner's committee recommended vigorous study of the Titan missile as an alternative Mercury launcher, but STG had already studied and rejected the Titan as a launch vehicle.⁸

Whereas there seemed to be threats of cancellation or modification of Project Mercury from all sides, the Mercury teammates knew from their MR-1A experience of December 19, 1960, that nothing succeeds like success. While some of them carefully but hurriedly made ready for MR-2, others just as desperately sought to ensure the success of MA-2.

In moments of respite from its hectic pace, STG could see three essential tasks that had to be performed within a matter of weeks if the Task Group was to be kept together and functioning. First was the necessity to send a chimpanzee on a successful Redstone flight. Second was the need to qualify the McDonnell capsule and all its systems by a Little Joe flight under max q conditions similar to the worst possible Atlas abort. Third, but perhaps most important, was the imperative need to test and prove as soon as possible the Mercury-Atlas combination, even if only on an elementary ballistic flight.⁹

The admittedly "hasty" Wiesner report was received by the press with mixed reactions. According to the Washington Post, the study was tacitly adopted by the President-elect when he named Wiesner, simultaneously with its release, Chairman of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) for the new administration. Aviation Week said that Kennedy had rejected the committee's advice to revamp or scrap Mercury and that he had decided to risk receiving the blame if the first manned shot failed. To Roscoe Drummond, a syndicated columnist, the Wiesner report read like "a melange of observations based on superficial study." Drummond was highly critical of the entire political transition, noting that T. Keith Glennan had departed from Washington on Inauguration Day, January 20, 1961, leaving NASA headless, since no one had yet been named as his successor. Hugh L. Dryden, too, had resigned in accordance with protocol, but he remained on hand until he should be relieved. Drummond further charged that no Kennedy representative had consulted NASA to study the workings of the agency nor had any Kennedy official read or listened to briefings that had been prepared for the new leaders by outgoing Administrator Glennan and his staff.¹⁰

In this time of transition NASA officials expected a stronger challenge to the civilian space agency's sphere of influence from the military, perhaps supported by some defense industry contractors. Part of the "military-industrial complex" against which Eisenhower had warned in his farewell address seemed to be lobbying to shrink NASA's function to that of the former NACA - applied research and development engineering.¹¹ The retiring President also had warned against the domination of science by the needs of the Federal government and against the domination of public policy by a "scientific-technological elite." On the other hand, the editors of Aviation Week had expressed alarm several times over NASA's tendency toward enlargement of its own technical bureaucracy and assimilation of other space research organizations.¹² Whether or not there was actually any "power struggle" among the Air Force, Army, and Navy over the spoils from a stripped NASA, any such fears of the Pentagon were premature while the Mercury-Redstone attempt to fly and recover an "astrochimp" was still pending.

For some time, NASA had endured attacks from various eminent American men of science. The Wiesner report both reflected and encouraged such attitudes. Vannevar Bush, James R. Killian, and George B. Kistiakowsky were all long since on record as considering manned space flight a technological luxury that ought not to be allowed to eclipse more urgent scientific necessities. Even within NASA, some scientists would have reallocated resources for manned space efforts beyond Mercury so as to give more funds and priority to instrumented, more purely scientific, research flights.¹³

Such political opinions of scientists to a large degree had been translated into official policy under the Eisenhower administration, whose last budget recommended a manned space flight research and development cut of $190.1 million from NASA's request for fiscal year 1962 of $1,109,600,000. The Bureau of the Budget in January allowed a total NASA request of $919.5 million, only $114 million of which was earmarked for manned space flight, including Project Mercury. Some $584 million was requested for military astronautics within the total $41.2 billion request for the Defense Department's budget.¹⁴ Surely this contrast in funding carried significant meaning.

The criticisms of NASA and its struggle for money in Washington were serious enough, but of far greater concern to the civil servants, contractors, and servicemen working with NASA and STG was the problem of "Mercury-rating" the Atlas. Since the unsolved MA-1 disaster at the end of July 1960 had been blamed on, but never isolated in, the interface area where the capsule and booster were mated, both the Air Force and NASA shared uneasily the responsibility for finding preventive medicine before MA-2 could be launched.

The Wiesner Committee apparently had been unaware of the Rhode-Worthman Committee, established on December 19, 1960, four days after the explosion of the Atlas-Able 5-D Moon probe. NASA and the Air Force, acutely aware of Wiesner's activity, were pressuring the high-level investigating committee of seasoned engineers to find solutions to the interface problem. NASA Headquarters was very much concerned by the poor performance of the lighter-gauge Atlas modified for NASA launches and by the inability of STG and the Air Force complex to pinpoint the reason for the MA-1 failure. Richard V. Rhode, NASA Headquarters' senior structural engineer, was sent to California to press for a solution. The Air Force Ballistic Missile Division, under Major General O. J. Ritland and Brigadier General H. W. Powell, likewise had appointed a senior technical officer, Colonel Paul E. Worthman, to work with Rhode as co- chairman.

During the last week of December 1960 and the first week of January 1961, the 12 members of the Rhode-Worthman Committee met continuously at Convair/Astronautics in San Diego and at the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles. One of the objectives of this meeting was to find a majority agreement on the diagnosis for MA-1 and the prognosis for MA-2. Paul E. Purser and Robert E. Vale, representing STG, with the aid of G. L. Armstrong of Convair, argued that a "quick-fix belly band" could be effectively used to reinforce the structural strength of the "thin-skinned" Atlas. Specifically they had in mind Atlas No. 67-D, which had been at the Cape since September, being prepared for mating with capsule No. 6 for the MA-2 launch. On the other hand, Bernhard A. Hohmann of Aerospace urged strengthening the adapter ring. James A. Chamberlin forthwith had redesigned the fillets and stringers in that casing also. Because a "thick-skinned" Atlas - one whose upper conical sections would be made of stainless steel approximately .02 instead of .01 inch in thickness, costing thereby an extra 100 pounds in weight - could not be finished and shipped to the Cape before late March 1961, the Rhode-Worthman Committee finally, but not unanimously, agreed not to wait for a replacement booster. NASA assumed the risk of a messy technical and political situation in the event of failure, and the Air Force agreed to make every effort to push MA-2 through the region of maximum aerodynamic and political stress as soon as possible. But precisely how to do this still remained debatable.¹⁵

New band stiffeners in the adapter ring, some 20 extra accelerometers, strain gauges, pressure sensors, and mandatory operational restrictions for mild weather, winds, and complete photographic coverage, plus the use of the improvised truss or corset, called the "belly band," for MA- 2, were all included in the interim report of the Rhode-Worthman Committee, issued on January 19, 1961. The joint team effort required for these decisions, said Purser to Rhode, "admittedly has not always been easy, but we believe it has worked. 'Resolution of conflicts of technical judgment' has been achieved by mutual discussion and education rather than by manager edicts."¹⁶ The reluctance of Aerospace and STL representatives to accept the "belly band" truss was symbolized at first by their use of the invidious metaphor "horse collar" to describe it. So apt and fitting was the "horse collar" in distributing the load of max q over the Atlas airframe that all parties accepted the nickname and the hardware by mid-February. Meanwhile work proceeded frantically in laboratories and wind tunnels at Ames and at Tullahoma, Tennessee, to provide all the information possible through simulated conditions before subjecting this "quick-fix" to a flight test. But there was great drama and suspense in the technological preparations for the vitally important launching known as Mercury-Atlas 2.¹⁷

Now that Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, an early advocate of a strong space program and slated to become the new chairman of the strengthened Space Council, promised energetic leadership among the countervailing powers in Washington, the aerospace community waited impatiently to hear who would be named the new NASA Administrator. Kennedy assigned Johnson this task of selection. Considering Johnson's long-standing interest in space matters, many observers had supposed that the selection would be made soon after the election and that the designee might be a member of the Wiesner Committee.¹⁸ But the case was not so simple. The problem seemed to be one of settling on qualifications and then finding a man who would agree to preside over an agency with an uncertain future. The risk of becoming a political scapegoat was great indeed. The Wiesner report stipulated that one of the prerequisites for a member of the Space Council was that he be technically well-informed, and this requirement would apply also to the NASA Administrator. But whereas a university scientist with engineering and executive experience might meet this qualification, Washington and management experience also was essential.¹⁹

Kennedy remarked at a press conference, five days after his inauguration, that the NASA Administrator should be chosen by the end of the week, thereby deflecting newsmen's attention to the Vice-President for the name of the new Administrator. Johnson, in turn, received suggestions from his former Congressional colleagues on the space committees, and Wiesner called to Washington the man who accepted the post. On February 2, 1961, Senator Robert S. Kerr, Democrat from Oklahoma and Johnson's successor as chairman of the Senat Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, presided at the confirmation hearings on the nomination of James Edwin Webb.

An experienced business head of numerous corporations, a lawyer, Director of the Bureau of the Budget from 1946 to 1949, and Under Secretary of the Department of State from 1949 to 1951, James E. Webb also had been a director of the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and a reserve officer and pilot in the Marine Corps. Although his background was not that of a scientist, he was widely known in governmental and industrial circles for having worked with scientists on committees and with engineers as a director of such organizations as Educational Services, Incorporated; the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies; Sperry Gyroscope Company; and as a trustee of George Washington University.²⁰ Webb's appointment as NASA Administrator came as a surprise to those who expected one of the Wiesner Committee to be chosen. A few critics said that he lacked the technical background necessary to attract scientists and eminent engineers to NASA and that his nomination was a result of Senator Kerr's influence. But Wiesner supported and the Senate confirmed Webb's nomination after Webb severed all his business connections with McDonnell Aircraft. His active interest in science suggested that Webb would strive to keep a balance between science and technology in space activities. His governmental and executive experience promised that he could work well with the Bureau of the Budget and with the aerospace industries to promote NASA's interests. Webb's intellectual interests in public administration and international affairs indicated that he might become instrumental in achieving international agreements to prevent space from becoming a new theater for conflict in the cold war. Indeed, Webb's supporters felt certain that he actively would invite the Soviets to cooperate in American space exploration projects, a proposal that Kennedy had made notable in his inaugural address.²¹

With a vigorous new Administrator as its spokesman, and with the reconfirmation of Dryden as second in command, NASA quickly regained confidence regarding the scientific, budgetary, and military-industrial obstacles to its manned space flight program. In facing the military, Webb had the support of Representative Overton Brooks, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. Early in 1961, Brooks became the first highly placed government official to lambaste the presumed campaign to build, at the expense of NASA, a stronger military space program.²²

MR-2: Ham Paves the Way

By the end of January 1961, the technical outlook for Project Mercury was much improved. The end of the qualification flight tests was in sight, if only the Little Joe, Redstone, and Atlas boosters would cooperate. First priority was to make sure the Mercury-Redstone combination was prepared for the first manned suborbital flights. Now, according to the progressive buildup plan, the reliability of the system required demonstration by the second Mercury-Redstone (MR-2) flight, with a chimpanzee aboard, as a final check to man-rate the capsule and launch vehicle.

Preparations for the MR-2 mission had begun long before the actual flight. Between manufacturing the capsule and flight readiness certification, several months of testing and reworking were necessary at the McDonnell plant, at Marshall Space Flight Center, and at Cape Canaveral. Capsule No. 5, designated for the MR-2 flight, had been near the end of its manufacturing phase in May 1960. When it was completed, inspectors from the Navy Bureau of Weapons stationed at St. Louis, in cooperation with STG's liaison personnel at McDonnell, watched it go through a specified series of tests, and the contractor corrected all detected deficiencies.²³ After capsule systems tests and factory acceptance tests, capsule No. 5 was loaded into an Air Force cargo plane and shipped to Marshall Space Flight Center on September 3, 1960. At Huntsville, Wernher von Braun's team hurried through its checkouts of the compatibility of capsule No. 5 with Redstone booster No. 2, and had finished well before its 16-day time limit.²⁴ On October 11, 1960, the capsule arrived by air at the Cape, where the first checkout inspections, under the direction of F. M. Crichton, uncovered more discrepancies, raising to 150 the total of minor rework jobs to be done. Because of the complexities of the stacked and interlaced seven miles of wiring and plumbing systems in the Mercury capsule, however, each minor discrepancy became a major cost in the time necessary for its correction. Checkout work in Hangar S required 50 days for systems tests and 60 days for rework. The capsule designated for the first manned space flight, No. 7, also had arrived at the Cape for preflight checkouts, but the launch vehicle for MR-2 was delivered to the Cape by air freight on December 20, 1960, the day after MR-1A was launched. It too had undergone exhaustive reliability testing in the shops and on the stands in the hills west of Huntsville, Alabama. When Joachim P. Kuettner, representing von Braun, transferred the MR-2 booster to Emil P. Bertram, representing Kurt H. Debus' Launch Operations Directorate, their confidence in this particular booster of the "Old Reliable" series was high but not towering.²⁵

Using the "quick-look" evidence from the MR-1A flight, Marshall guidance engineers set about correcting the conditions that had made the trajectory too steep and accelerations too high. MR-1A had climbed to its programmed apogee of about 130 miles and landed 235 miles downrange, and high altitude winds had carried it too close to the range borders. Range safety restrictions dictated that a launch vehicle must get out and away from the Cape as soon as possible. For these reasons, Walter C. Williams, STG's Associate Director for Operations, agreed with H. F. Gruene and Kuettner that the MR-2 trajectory should be flattened. An apogee of 115 miles on a downrange distance of 290 miles should be well within the allowable safety limits. Gruene and others calculated that this trajectory would still provide almost five minutes of weightless flight and a reentry deceleration of 10 g. Since this g load was slightly less than that desired by STG, Williams had to use his best persuasion during a series of consultations on the reentry loads to get Marshall to match the 12-g median reentry load by moving the engine cutoff time ahead to assure such conditions. At the same time, the range safety officer felt that the designated 105-degree launching azimuth was uncomfortably close to the shoreline. Williams, Charles W. Mathews, and Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., held out against a requested change to a 100-degree azimuth, because they wanted to minimize pilot retrieval time in case of an abort. To this STG later acceded, in exchange for its point on the 12-g reentry load; Marshall added a timer switch that would cut off the ignition if the accelerometer cutoff signal should fail before fuel depletion.²⁶

Capsule No. 5 contained several significant innovations. There were five new systems or components that had not been qualified in previous flights: the environmental control system, the attitude stabilization control system, the live retrorockets, the voice communications system, and the "closed loop" abort sensing system. Capsule No. 5 also was the first in the flight series to be fitted with a pneumatic landing bag. This plasticized fabric, accordion-like device was attached to the heatshield and the lower pressure bulkhead; after reentry and before landing the heatshield and porous bag were to drop down about four feet, filling with air to help cushion the impact. Once in the water, the bag and heatshield should act as a sort of sea anchor, helping the spacecraft to remain upright in the water. Chronic problems with wave-induced fatigue of the fabric bag led STG and McDonnell engineers to concentrate on the harness linkages inside. After the Big Joe ablation flight test in September 1959, STG had decided to use on the Redstone flights, simply because they were on hand, the expensive beryllium heatshields that had first been ordered for orbital reentry. Since the anticipated reentry temperature would reach only 1000 degrees F, the beryllium shields were not necessary as heatsinks, but they served as readymade impact bumpers. Temperatures on the conical portion of the spacecraft might approach 250 to 300 degrees F, but, compared with about 1,000 to 2,000 degrees for an orbital mission, the ballistic flights should be cool.²⁷

Publicity once again focused on the biological subject in the MR-2 experiment. The living being chosen to validate the environmental control system before committing a man to flight was a trained chimpanzee about 44 months old. Intelligent and normally docile, the chimpanzee is a primate of sufficient size and sapience to provide a reasonable facsimile of human behavior. Its average response time to a given physical stimulus is .7 of a second, compared with man's average .5 second. Having the same organ placement and internal suspension as man, plus a long medical research background, the chimpanzee chosen to ride the Redstone and perform a lever-pulling chore throughout the mission should not only test out the life-support systems but prove that levers could be pulled during launch, weightlessness, and reentry.²⁸

A colony of six chimpanzees (four female and two male), accompanied by 20 medical specialists and animal handlers from Holloman Air Force Base, where the "astrochimps" were stationed and trained, moved into quarters behind Hangar S on January 2, 1961. There the animals became acclimatized to the change from the 5,000-feet altitude in New Mexico to their sea level surroundings at the Cape. Separated into two groups as a precaution against the spread of any contagion among the whole colony, the animals were led through exercises by their handlers. Mercury capsule mockups were installed in each of the compounds. In these, the animals worked daily at their psychomotor performance tasks. By the third week in January, 29 training sessions had made each of the six chimps a bored but well-fed expert at the job of lever-pulling. To condition the chimps to respond properly, they received banana pellets as rewards and mild electrical shocks as punishments.²⁹

Although recovery procedures had worked well until now, recovery operations for MR-2, carrying life into space from the Cape rather than from Wallops Island, demanded extra care and attention. So STG provided the Navy with the detailed requirements, and the Navy again assigned Rear Admiral F. V. H. Hilles to command the recovery forces. Under Hilles were several task elements. One, located on the beach near the launch pad, consisted of numerous amphibious vehicles and several helicopters. Should an abort occur near the pad, these vehicles on the scene would pick up the pieces. Offshore the next recovery perimeter was covered by a small naval vessel, the Opportune (Auxiliary Recovery Ship 41). The largest recovery unit, the one in the anticipated landing area, consisted of six destroyers and a landing ship dock (LSD) with three helicopters on board. If the capsule were shot beyond the expected impact area, an air recovery unit consisting of four P2V aircraft from Jacksonville, Florida, would go into action.³⁰

STG's man in charge of recovery operations was Robert F. Thompson, a Navy veteran who once had been first lieutenant of the deck crew aboard a destroyer and who by now had coordinated STG's recovery requirements for over two years. Through Walter Williams, Thompson asked the Navy to provide for the recovery personnel participating in the exercise and to take along photographers and public information people as well. Thompson assigned Donald C. Cheatham to brief the naval crews from Charleston, South Carolina, on postflight procedures for removing the biopack and primate from the spacecraft.³¹

According to the "Master Operational Schedule," a guidebook prepared by Debus' experienced staff, a simulated or dress rehearsal flight must always be conducted three days before launch. For this exercise, the countdown started only 180 minutes before "launch," when Complex 56, Pad 5, the site of all the Mercury-Redstone launches, switched on the power to all systems in the Redstone. The team training of the launch crew, even for the old Redstone, required thousands of coordinated actions and easy familiarity by each of the 70 or so members of the blockhouse crew, by each of the 100 men in the Mission Control Center, and by each of another 100 people around the launch site to get a flight off the ground. While the booster was ready for mate with the capsule as scheduled in mid-January, the capsule was not ready, and the simulated flight test was carried out on January 27 for a "mission" that lasted 455 minutes.³²

One of the procedural safeguards developed in the effort to man- rate the Redstone was the "split-count," with a built-in hold in the countdown checklist. The count began at 640 minutes before launch and stopped for a rest period 390 minutes short of liftoff time (T). At 640 minutes the complex went on critical power and the prescribed systems checks were started, the communication network readiness was verified, range equipment was checked, and the launch vehicle telemetry was tuned. At T minus 390 minutes all systems were secured for the standby period so that the crew could relax. This "split-count" became a standard part of manned preflight operations.

Before the second half of the count began, on the following day, the booster was again supplied its electrical power, the escape rocket igniter was installed but not connected, the liquid oxygen trailer truck was moved into position, weather forecast and range clearances were checked, and the booster guidance and control battery safety wires were installed. When the count was resumed at T minus 390, there were still at least 330 specific jobs to be performed or functions to be validated before liftoff.

The launch plan for the MR-2 mission followed closely all of the foregoing preparations, with each event preplanned and budgeted on the schedule. Many new systems were being qualified and, with the chimpanzee aboard, the control systems had to operate in the automatic mode. The operations directive for MR-2 specified that in case of an unduly long hold, the test would be canceled at high noon to avoid the risks of a recovery in darkness.³³

Telemetry was to be all-important for the MR-2 mission. For that purpose two transmitters were installed in the capsule, providing eight channels of information to ground stations. These included three aeromedical channels to transmit pulse, respiration rate, and breath-depth information. The other channels carried information on structural heating, cabin temperatures, pressures, noise, and vibrations from 90 different points throughout the spacecraft.³⁴

All six chimps in the colony were accorded equal treatment until the day before the flight, when James P. Henry of STG and John D. Mosely, the veterinarian from Holloman, had to choose the test subject and his substitute. First the animals were given a physical examination, and then they were each checked on sensors, the psychomotor programmer, and consoles for comparative ratings. The competition was fierce, but one of the males was exceptionally frisky and in good humor. A female was selected as his alternate. At nineteen hours before launch these two animals were put on low-residue diets, fitted with biosensors, and checked out in their pressurized couch-cabins. Seven and one-half hours before the flight a second physical examination was given, followed by more sensor and psychomotor tests. About four hours before launch, the two chimps were suited up, placed in their couches, and brought aboard the transfer van, where their environmental control equipment was attached. The trailer truck arrived at the gantry alongside MR-2, and there, an hour and a half before the scheduled launch time, the chimpanzee named "Ham," in honor of Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, still active and spirited although encased in his biopack, boarded the elevator to meet his destiny.³⁵

At sunrise on January 31, 1961, feverish preparations were underway in the community around Launch Complex 56. Walter Williams was directing operations for the third time from the newly completed Mercury Control Center. Supporting him were some 500 men from NASA, the military services, and industrial contractors. Key supervisors included the recovery force commander, range commander, launch director, capsule test coordinator, flight director, Atlantic Missile Range coordinator, network status monitor, range safety observer, and director of medical operations.³⁶ About 5 o'clock systems checks were progressing well, and Tecwyn Roberts, flight dynamics officer, reported that the command checks were all working "A. OK."³⁷ Communications checks were the same, with the exception of the Goddard link from Mercury Control on the data selection loop, and trajectory checks and displays appeared to be in order. The broken link with Goddard, discovered well before the flight, was cleared and the data selection loop restored. Although the weather was threatening and five-foot waves were reported in the recovery area, the second half of the countdown began at 7:25 a.m. After the count had progressed 20 minutes, the first trouble of the morning appeared with a report that a tiny but important electronic inverter in the capsule automatic control system was overheating. Nevertheless, at 7:53 Ham was inserted into the spacecraft, and the clear-the-pad signal horn was sounded.

A few minutes after Ham went aboard, the inverter temperature began to rise again, causing several more holds. As the wait wore on, Christopher Kraft, the flight director, sought advice about Ham's ability to endure a long hold. William S. Augerson, medical monitor in the blockhouse, assured Kraft that the animal was all right. Ham's suit temperature remained in the comfortable mid-60s, while the inverter temperature was at least three times that hot. Eventually the inverter cooled to 150 degrees F, and the count was resumed at 10:45. As soon as the power was turned on again, the inverter temperature shot up again. So another cooling-off period was called until 20 minutes before noon, when it was decided that now or never was the time to go today. The countdown had been delayed almost four hours because of the hot inverter, but there were some other minor problems as well. The gantry elevator got stuck; too many people took too long to clear the pad area; checking the environmental control system required 20 minutes longer than planned; and the booster tail-plug cover flaps were jammed for a while.³⁸

At last, five minutes before high noon on the last day of January 1961, MR-2 ignition occurred and liftoff of the Redstone followed in less than a second. As the launch vehicle rose, a transistorized television camera mounted externally near the top of the Redstone scanned the surface of the capsule and adapter ring to provide engineers with bird's-eye data on the flight behavior of the spacecraft when it blasted away from the launch vehicle. Computers sensed one minute after launch that the flight path angle was at least one degree high and rising. At two minutes, the computers predicted a 17-g load. Then, 137 seconds into the flight, the liquid oxygen supply became depleted, and in another half second the engine shut down according to the new timer-programmed plan. The closed-loop abort system on the Redstone sensed the change in engine chamber pressure upon depletion of the lox supply and fired the capsule escape system earlier than planned, within another half second. The abort properly signalled the expected Mayday message to the recovery forces, and they sped off toward a computed impact point farther downrange.³⁹

The high flight angle, coupled with the early abort, added 52,000 pounds of thrust for one second, and yielded a maximum velocity of 7,540 feet per second, against a planned 6,465 feet. The retrorockets jettisoned prematurely when the tower aborted, which meant that the spacecraft on reentry would not be artificially slowed down and therefore would gain still more downrange mileage.⁴⁰

An unexpected and nearly ultimate test of the chimpanzee's air circuit arose just before the abort, 2 minutes and 18 seconds into the flight, when cabin pressure dropped from 5.5 to 1 pound per square inch. This malfunction was traced later to the air inlet snorkel valve, a device that was spring-loaded to the closed position and held in place by a small detent pin. Apparently vibrations had loosened this pin and allowed the valve to open, as it was intended to do only after the main parachute opened on descent toward a water landing. Ham did not suffer, for although cabin pressure was lost, his couch pressure remained nominal, and suit temperature stayed well within the 60- to 80-degree optimum range. But the open valve caused problems after the capsule splashed.⁴¹

Because of overacceleration of the launch vehicle plus the added energy of the escape rocket, a speed of 5,857 miles per hour was attained instead of the 4,400 miles per hour planned, resulting in an apogee of 157 miles rather than the charted 115. At its zenith Ham's spacecraft was already 48 miles farther downrange than programmed, and Ham endured the weightless state for 1.7 minutes longer (6.6 minutes total) than the 4.9 minutes scheduled. He landed 422 miles downrange after a 16.5-minute flight; the preplanned figures called for 290 miles and 14.25 minutes. His peak reentry g was 14.7, almost 3 g greater than planned.⁴²

How did Ham fare through all this? The physician in the blockhouse, William Augerson, reported that at liftoff he was stable and working his levers perfectly to avoid the punishment that came from inattention. At waist level in the chimpanzee's couch was a dashboard with two lights and two levers that required two pounds of effort to depress. Ham knew well how to stay comfortable by avoiding a series of electrical shocks. Each operation of his right-hand lever, cued by a white warning light, postponed the next scheduled shock for 15 seconds. At the same time, the animal had to push the left-hand lever within five seconds after a blue light flashed, about every two minutes, in order to avoid another series of shocks to the soles of his feet.

Ham performed these tasks well, pushing the continuous avoidance (right) lever about 50 times and receiving only two shocks for bad timing. On the discrete avoidance (left) lever, his score was perfect. Reaction time on the blue-light lever averaged .82 second, compared with a preflight performance of .8 second. Ham had gone from a heavy acceleration g load on exit through six minutes of weightlessness and to another heavy g load on reentry hardly missing a trick. Onboard cameras filming Ham's reaction to weightlessness also recorded a surprising amount of dust and debris floating around inside the capsule during its zenith. The cleanliness problem still was not licked.⁴³

When Ham's capsule touched down, about 12:12 p.m., no human being was in sight. Some 12 minutes later, the first electronic recovery signal from the capsule was received, and quick triangulations showed that the capsule was about 60 miles from the nearest recovery ship, the destroyer Ellison. Some 27 minutes after landing, Technician G. T. Beldervack, aboard a P2V search plane, sighted the capsule floating upright alone in the Atlantic. Reckoning that the Ellison would require at least two hours to reach that point, STG officials decided to request the Navy to dispatch its helicopters from the next closest ship, the LSD Donner. When the helicopters arrived on the scene, they found the spacecraft on its side, taking on water, and submerging. Wave action after impact had apparently punished the capsule and its occupant severely. The beryllium heatshield upon impact had skipped on the water and bounced against the capsule bottom, punching two holes in the titanium pressure bulkhead. The plastic fabric in the landing bag had worn badly, and the heatshield was torn free from the spacecraft before recovery. After the craft capsized, the open cabin pressure relief valve let still more sea water enter the capsule. When the helicopter pilot, First Lieutenant John R. Hellriegel, and his copilot George F. Cox, finally latched onto and picked up Ham's spacecraft at 2:52 p.m., they estimated there was about 800 pounds of sea water aboard.⁴⁴ After a dangling flight back to the Donner, the spacecraft was lowered to the deck and nine minutes later Ham was out. He appeared to be in good condition and readily accepted an apple and half an orange.⁴⁵ Ham had functioned like a normal chimpanzee in his flight into space. Could homo sapiens do as well?

Ham's flight on MR-2 was a significant accomplishment on the American route toward manned space flight. Now the Space Task Group knew that even with some hazardous malfunction it might reasonably hope to complete a manned ballistic mission successfully. Ham's survival, despite a host of harrowing mischances over which he had no control, raised the confidence of the astronauts and the capsule engineers alike. Except for an intensive effort to redesign the harness and impact attenuation system inside the landing bag, an exhausting final "quick-fix" led by Rodney G. Rose and Peter J. Armitage of STG, the Mercury capsule and all its systems seemed ready to carry man into space. Since overacceleration had occurred in both the MR-1A and MR-2 missions, however, the booster engineers responsible for "Old Reliable," Wernher von Braun and Joachim Kuettner, Kurt Debus and Emil Bertram, neither shared STG's optimism nor yet were satisfied that their launch vehicle was man-rated.⁴⁶

MR-2
Jan. 21, 1961

MA-2: Trussed Atlas Qualifies the Capsule

So long and anguished had been the time since July 29, 1960, when the first Mercury-Atlas combination had exploded out of sight overhead, that members of the Mercury-Atlas launch team from STG were most eager to try to fly MA-2. Laboratory and wind tunnel tests of the "belly band," or "horse collar," in late January were practically prejudged as offering no ill omens. On Inauguration Day, January 20, 1961, Robert R. Gilruth, Charles J. Donlan, Williams, Maxime A. Faget, Mathews, William M. Bland, Jr., and Purser had attended an important meeting of the STG senior staff to decide what to do about MA-2. The preliminary recommendations of the Rhode-Worthman Committee were reconsidered; after more technical talks STG decided to accept the risk and proceed with the trussed Atlas for MA-2 if top NASA management could be persuaded. While a speedup of the flight schedule leading to the orbital mission and of plans for a program to follow after Mercury's manned 18-orbit mission were being discussed at length, the STG senior staff advised NASA Headquarters that MA-2 could wait no longer.⁴⁷

A few days later the basic mission directive document appeared in its third revised edition; in turn it was superseded by a fourth edition and by a technical information summary. At the end of January, Robert Seamans and Abe Silverstein of Headquarters accepted Gilruth's STG recommendation to fly MA- 2. Before the middle of February preparations were complete. NASA had become convinced, but the Air Force was not sure MA-2 should fly yet. This was a hazardous and complex decision, shared by a number of people in Washington, at Langley, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and San Diego.⁴⁸ On February 17, Seamans called Rhode at Convair, asking his technical judgment as to MA-2's chances for success with its "belly-band fix." Rhode replied that MA-2 was structurally ready within acceptable wind velocities at launch.⁴⁹ George M. Low reported to the new Administrator, James Webb, that MA-2 was scheduled for launch on February 21 at 8 a.m.:

Atlas 67-D will be the launch vehicle for this test. This is the last of the "thin-skinned" Atlases to be used in the Mercury program. It differs from the booster used in the MA-1 test in that the upper part of the Atlas has been strengthened by the addition of an 8-inch-wide stainless steel band. This band will markedly decrease the stresses of the weld located just below the adapter ring on top of the Atlas; the high stress region is shifted by about 8 inches, to a point where the allowable stresses are considerably higher. In addition to this strengthening of the top section of the Atlas, the bracing on the oxygen vent valve, which fits into the top of the Atlas tank, has been changed. The adapter between the Atlas and the capsule has also been stiffened.

* * *

The Atlas will be cut off prematurely at a velocity of about 18,000 feet per second. The resulting trajectory will yield the most severe reentry conditions that could occur during an abort in an orbital launching.⁵⁰

Webb and Seamans, pressed by Air Force worries over the technical, political, and public effects if MA-2 should fail, decided to trust the judgment of Rhode and Gilruth and to back NASA's commitment to accept all the blame if the worst should happen. Timely decisions by NASA had been required to permit deployment of the recovery forces to maintain the scheduled launch date.

There was so much concern over the Atlas-Mercury compatibility problem that many people almost forgot the first of several first-order objectives for the capsule and its booster. That was to test the integrity of the structure, ablation shield, and afterbody shingles of the capsule for reentry from the most critical abort situation. A second first-order objective required the Atlas abort sensing and implementation system (ASIS) to be operated "closed-loop" on the Mercury-Atlas configuration for the first time. But because MA-2 had already been made into a Federal test case, with the President, Congress, and top echelons in the Pentagon and NASA Headquarters vitally interested in its outcome, the engineers at the working levels were more anxious than ever to make this one go. Its specific results were politically less important than its general appearance of success.

MR-2
Feb. 21, 1961

The preflight checkouts had ticked off nicely the last several days before capsule No. 6 was to undergo its ordeal. And spirits were rising with the Sun on the morning of February 21, 1961. The Mercury crew for launch operations was much the same as that for MR-2, but just as Atlas was an entirely different vehicle from the Redstone, so was its military/industrial launch operations crew quite different. From the factory in San Diego had come most of the senior engineers in the Mercury booster program office, including Philip E. Culbertson, Charles S. Ames, Howard Neumann, Joseph A. Moore, and Richard W. Keehn, as well as the same machinists, welders, and test supervisors who had made the "horse collar" work in bench and tunnel tests in California. At the Cape they worked alongside the executive agent for Mercury-Atlas launchings, the 6555th Aerospace Test Wing of the Air Force, and with Thomas O'Malley and Calvin D. Fowler, who had the industrial responsibility for actual launch operations of the Atlas. The Air Force Ballistic Missile Division representatives, Lieutenant Colonel R. H. Brundin and Major C. L. Gandy, together with Aerospace engineers Bernhard Hohmann and Ernst R. Letsch, were also on hand, watching final preparations to make this "bird" fly. Their special concern with the design and implementation of the chief reliability component of the Atlas, namely the abort system or "ASIS," also brought Charles Wilson and J. W. Schaelchlin of Convair/ Astronautics, and D. R. White of Space Technology Laboratories, into the blockhouse of Launch Complex 14 on this special morning. John J. Williams was the Mercury-Atlas test conductor presiding there.

Engineers and workers at lower levels in the industrial and military hierarchy were beginning to call all these senior men "tigers" and to speak of them collectively as "tiger teams." They were the senior designers and the old-line specialists on Atlas subsystems who came out to the launch site to help the field engineers actually doing the work of final preparation for a launch.⁵¹ Walter Williams and Christopher Kraft, in the Mercury Control Center about three miles southwest of the beach-side launch pad, watched the lights turn green one by one as the gantry backed away and "loxing" commenced about 7:30 a.m. The weather was perfect at the Cape, but 1200 miles downrange in the recovery area there were scattered squalls, which delayed the launch for one hour. Outside the Control Center that day stood Gilruth, Low, and Major General Ritland of the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division, waiting and watching for the liftoff. Each had prepared press releases in his pocket making this shot a NASA "overload" test in case of failure.

MA-2 roared off its pad at 9:12 a.m., and for the next 2 minutes the tiger teams and the managers of Mercury hardly dared breathe. An audible sigh of relief spread through the Control Center and blockhouse about one minute after liftoff, when it was announced that the "horse-collared" booster had gone through max q intact and was accelerating. At that point, said Low, "Gilruth became a young man again." Telemetry verified "BECO" and the staging of the booster engines, escape tower separation, a good trajectory, capsule separation, capsule retrofire attitude, retrorocket firing, and retropackage jettison.⁵² Capsule entry attitude looked excellent at the time tracking and telemetry were lost, because of extreme range, about 9:22 a.m. Three minutes later, lookouts aboard the uprange destroyer Greene reported observing the reentry of both capsule No. 6 and Atlas booster No. 67-D.

The capsule passed directly overhead and was lost in the sun at 09:37. Reentry was clearly visible and the capsule could be seen ahead of the booster tankage. The capsule was not glowing but a distinct smoke trail was seen streaming behind it. The booster tankage was glowing with an intense white glow. Several fragments appeared to be traveling along with the tankage and tumbling at a high rate. One of the ship's observers tracked the reentry on a gun mount and indicated a separation distance between the capsule and tankage of 50 miles when it passed overhead.⁵³

The landing ship dock Donner, almost at the center of the 20-by-40-mile elliptical dispersion area, also sighted the reentry but lost sight over the horizon northeastward before the parachute descent. Within 10 minutes, however, radio signals from the sarah beacon pinpointed the floating capsule's locations, and helicopters were dispatched to pick it up after only 24 minutes in the water. It was returned to the LSD less than one hour after launch.

MA-2 was a magnificent flight, "nominal in nearly every respect." This second mission followed a flight path essentially the same as that for MA-1. The Atlas-Mercury compatibility problem had been resolved, the sequence system for the booster/capsule combination had worked perfectly, and the tracking and real-time data transmission had given immediate and excellent impact prediction from the computers at Goddard to the control centers at the Cape and on Bermuda and to the recovery forces at sea. The capsule was in extremely good condition, its ablation heatshield being charred no worse than that for Big Joe, its afterbody shingles neither burned nor warped. The Space Task Group was pleasantly surprised to find the jettisoned antenna canister and to learn, even more surprisingly, that the "mousetrap" aerodynamic destabilizing flap had not, as expected, burned away.⁵⁴

At a press conference later that day, Gilruth beamed as he announced that this was "a very successful test" that "gives us new confidence in the integrity of the system, although I would like to caution you all that there are still a number of critical tests that have to be made before we contemplate manned orbital flight." Asked if a man could have survived this flight, Gilruth said yes. When asked whether this flight also would aid the Mercury-Redstone program, Gilruth again gave an affirmative answer, stressing the identical nature of the capsule electrical, power, abort, and parachute systems. The Earth-fixed maximum velocity of the MA-2 capsule had been approximately 12,000 miles per hour, the highest velocity achieved by a Mercury launch since Big Joe had demonstrated the boiler plate model of the Mercury concept. As a cap stone for this happy occasion, Gilruth read a statement announcing that three out of the seven astronauts, namely "Glenn, Grissom and Shepard, in alphabetical order," had been selected to begin concentrated preparations for the initial manned Mercury space flights. The nominees had known about and been in training for their missions since January, but most Mercury engineers did not know who was assigned to which flight.⁵⁵

When is a Vehicle Man-Rated?

As soon as they had recovered from their jubilant celebration after the MA-2 flight, the men responsible for Project Mercury at NASA Headquarters and in the Space Task Group looked east and west to see where they stood in the race to put the first man into space. The Soviets had announced, on February 4 and February 12, two more unsuccessful attempts, with heavy Sputniks IV and V, to launch interplanetary space probes to Venus. These were impressive attempts by instrumented vehicles to achieve scientific firsts, but they apparently had no direct relationship to any immediate manned space flight. It had been three months since the failure of Sputnik Cosmic Ship No. 3 on December 2, 1960. At the end of February 1961, the Soviets' open record of two failures out of three attempts with their prototype manned spacecraft made it appear that they were having as many technical difficulties as the Americans were.

During the last week in February, therefore, the international space race seemed to have cooled. At home the reliability of the Redstone was very much at issue. It was at this juncture that the von Braun and Debus Mercury-Redstone teams presented to NASA Headquarters the results of three intensive reliability studies that they had made at Marshall since the overacceleration of MR-2 had given Ham such a rough ride. The first of these three separate probability studies was based on 69 Redstone and Jupiter flight histories; the second was based on a mathematical model using a reconstruction of the flight record of all components and subsystems of the Mercury-Redstone; and the third was a still more refined reliability study using adjusted values of the human factor and system design improvements. Together these studies yielded confidence figures that "led MSFC to opinion that the Mercury-Redstone launch vehicle reliability was in the range of 88 percent to 98 percent probability for launch success and crew survival, respectively."⁵⁶ While President Kennedy, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, and Administrator Webb were learning their executive empires and were instituting a thorough review of the Nation's space program, Dryden, Seamans, Silverstein, and Gilruth accepted von Braun's insistence to postpone the first manned flight and to insert an extra Redstone booster test into the Mercury flight schedule.⁵⁷

Whereas the Space Task Group had been elated with the performance of Ham in spite of difficulties with the capsule and the booster on the MR-2 flight the last day in January, the von Braun team at Marshall and the Cape had undergone an anguished period of reappraisal during the first two weeks in February as they tried once again to explain the "chatter" in the guidance system of their Redstone rocket. On February 6, Debus recorded in his daily journal his position with respect to the readiness status of the booster to be used for the first manned flight: "At least one unmanned shot must be obtained with flawless performance of the Mercury-Redstone mission booster flight, or at least no major shortcoming must be discovered in the vehicle system." Eberhard F. M. Rees, von Braun's Deputy Director for Research and Development, concurred and so informed von Braun. The next day Kuettner drew up an elaborate memo for internal use in deciding what should be Marshall's technical recommendation on whether to man the next Mercury-Redstone flight. In a covering note, Kuettner explained the situation to von Braun,⁵⁸ and concluded that he personally would not advise calling a halt yet.

On Monday, February 13, 1961, Gilruth, Williams, Faget, Jerome B. Hammack, G. Merritt Preston, and Kenneth S. Kleinknecht of STG, along with John F. Yardley and R. L. Foster of McDonnell, met with the von Braun group at Huntsville to decide on "man or no man" for MR-3. By that date Debus had provided Kuettner with a list of 10 weak links, both in the hardware and in procedure, that needed correction before MR-3. The Marshall engineers incorporated their numerical guesswork into a "priority list of weak spots" that itemized seven major component problems, five minor component discrepancies, and six procedural difficulties still under study in mid-February.⁵⁹

As Kuettner expected, political and medical considerations in the final decision to launch the first manned flight elevated the final choice to NASA Headquarters in Washington. Gilruth, his Redstone project engineer, Hammack, and the rest of STG were satisfied with the "quick fixes" made by Marshall and ground tested after MR-2. Certainly the seven astronauts felt impatiently ready to go. But von Braun and Debus reminded the Task Group of its own original ground rule for reliability: no manned flight would be undertaken until all parties responsible felt perfectly assured that everything was in readiness. Marshall engineers doubted that the difficulties encountered on the MR-1A and MR-2 missions would have endangered a human passenger. But they were committed to scrupulousness in their reliability program, too, and during the last week in February there were still seven significant modifications to the Redstone booster that seemed to require another unmanned flight test. So during this last week in February, Robert Seamans, Abe Silverstein, and Robert Gilruth acquiesced in the demands of Marshall Space Flight Center to insert one more Redstone flight into the Mercury schedule. The fateful decision was made to postpone MR-3, the first manned flight, until April 25 so something then called "MR-2A" could be inserted for a launch on March 28. On March 3 there seemed little question of the technical wisdom of this decision, although there was extreme sensitivity about the time set for the launch and about its possible public consequences.⁶⁰

Marshall undertook to correct everything and asked STG only to provide the payload for the additional mission. Neither the Task Group nor McDonnell had an extra production capsule, so the boilerplate model that had been used on Little Joe-1B in January 1960 was refurbished and sent to Huntsville for the first mating with Redstone booster No. 5. Instead of the normal designation for the second try at an unfulfilled mission, MR-2A was renamed "MR-BD" (Mercury-Redstone Booster Development). Gilruth and company made no plans either to separate the capsule from the launch vehicle or to recover the remains. MR-BD was left primarily to von Braun and Debus, while STG turned most of its attention to Little Joe 5A. Only the operations team from STG would participate in manning the Control Center. As Marshall and the Cape made ready this flight with the booster that had formerly been designated for the third manned suborbital training flight (MR-5), they were unaware that the Soviet Union was making ready another series of heavy Sputniks.⁶¹

On March 9, 1961, the U.S.S.R. announced it had launched into orbit its fourth cosmic ship, or Korabl Sputnik IV, weighing some 4,700 kilograms (10,364 pounds) and containing a dog passenger named Chernushka. When the dog was recovered, later that day, the Soviet recovery record suddenly became two out of four tries, and NASA saw the possible consequence of its MR-BD decision. Outside of NASA, the implications were by no means clear. The newspaper space race continued unabated.

In a highly publicized letter, Representative Overton Brooks wrote to President Kennedy on March 9, 1961, of his concern over military and trade journal reports that the space program might veer toward military control. Brooks thought the Wiesner report had implied this, and he knew of a special PSAC investigating committee of scientists, called the "Hornig panel" after its chairman, Donald F. Hornig. This group, charged with an overall review of the manned space program, had just finished spending the first four days of March traveling around investigating Project Mercury. Brooks reminded the new President that the intent of the Space Act of 1958 was to ensure that control of space research remain in civilian hands so that resulting information and technological applications would be open for the benefit of all enterprise, both private and public. Too much information would become classified, he said, if the military were preeminent in space research, development, and exploration. Brooks asked for and received Kennedy's reassurance that neither he nor Wiesner had considered subordinating NASA to the military.⁶²

With Kennedy's affirmation of NASA's leadership role and its 10-year plan for space research, development, and exploration, Administrator Webb concentrated on the scientific criticisms and budgetary deficiencies of the agency. Program priorities and the funds necessary for them were taken up first. Webb found that most of his staff and field scientists were enthusiastic about getting on with advanced manned space exploration beyond Mercury. They wanted large booster development and manned spacecraft and space flight development leading to exploration of the Moon. Webb also learned that the scientific community outside of NASA was not so disenchanted with manned space flight as some had supposed. Lloyd V. Berkner, a geophysicist and chairman of the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences, championed the cause of NASA programs. Berkner and Hugh Odishaw had just edited an anthology, Science in Space, attempting to garner the support of many disciplines for an expanded space program.⁶³

On March 13 and 14, Administrator Webb and his chief lieutenants began a new series of annual presentations to Congress justifying their financial requests for the coming fiscal year 1962. Abe Silverstein, spurred several times by Chairman Brooks of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, departed from his prepared text on the progress of Mercury to explain the MR-BD decision in connection with the imminent first manned mission into space:

I don't know whether you heard our briefing here several weeks ago in which we pointed out that this Redstone booster traveled 400 miles out when it should have gone 293, and went to an altitude of about 150 miles, when it should have gone to 110. These were due to some booster malfunctions. We have tracked these down and we intend to go ahead and make changes in the booster so that we have better control of it. We are not about to operate with a booster that is as sloppy in performance as that.⁶⁴

Several days later in a speech before the American Astronautical Society, Administrator Webb publicly stated that NASA's program should be expanded to include more scientific space exploration.⁶⁵ The effort of NASA management to get White House approval at this time for post-Mercury manned flight and basic funding for booster development was to prove of historical importance.⁶⁶ On March 22, President Kennedy called Webb, Dryden, and Seamans to meet with himself, the Vice-President, and key White House staff to review the need for supplementing the NASA fiscal 1962 budget. As a result a $125.76 million increase was approved for NASA.⁶⁷ In the mind of the general public, unaware of these deliberations on an accelerated space program, NASA was thoroughly identified with Project Mercury and attention was pointing toward the first manned mission in the near future.⁶⁸

LJ-5A Still Premature

"The purpose of the Little Joe 5A," began the technical information summary document issued for this flight on March 6, 1961, "is to qualify the Mercury capsule, escape system, and other systems which must function during and after escape at the combination of dynamic pressure, mach number, and flight path angle that represent the most severe conditions that can be anticipated during an orbital launch on an Atlas booster." Using McDonnell's capsule No. 14, the Little Joe flight test engineers at Wallops Island were behind schedule and eager to improve on the Little Joe 5 test, which had failed on Election Day in 1960. The premature ignition of the escape rocket motor, followed by the failure of the capsule to separate from the booster, still remained unexplained. It had made the prevention of such a recurrence one of the unstated first-order test objectives of LJ-5A. Using another of the beryllium heat-sink heatshields, two Castor and four Recruit rocket motors in the booster, a special backup retrorocket system, and much better instrumentation, William Bland and his crew from STG, together with John C. Palmer, the Wallops Island range director, also hoped to get better data on the capsule's structural integrity and on its sequential, landing, and recovery systems.⁶⁹ The close simulation that Little Joe 5A should have with the Mercury-Atlas configuration was shown by the following table: ⁷⁰

On Saturday, March 18, 1961, after a four-hour delay caused by checkout problems, Little Joe 5A roared and soared up from the beach at Wallops Island at 11 minutes before noon. The takeoff looked good, but 20 seconds later and 14 seconds too early the capsule escape rocket again fired without the capsule. Warren North described this flight graphically:

At 35 seconds the normal abort signal released the capsule clamp ring. A single retrorocket, which was installed as an emergency separation device, received a premature firing signal at 43 seconds. The dynamic pressure at this point was 400 psf - ten times as great as dynamic pressure at apogee where emergency capsule separation should have taken place. The capsule tumbled immediately upon separating and narrowly missed the booster as it decelerated. The retropack and escape tower were inadvertently jettisoned or torn off as the capsule tumbled. Apparently the centrifugal force and/or the escape tower removed the antenna canister, deploying both the main and reserve parachutes. The capsule descended on both parachutes which were only slightly damaged during high q deployment.⁷¹

Postflight analyses showed that both LJ-5 and LJ-5A had failed primarily because of structural deformations near the clamp rings that fouled the electromechanical separation systems.

The impact bag on Little Joe 5A was deployed by its barostat at 10,000 feet. The capsule drifted 10 miles on both its parachutes and finally splashed down 18 miles from the launch site, almost twice as far as planned. On top of that, the parachutes fell unreleased over the capsule as it floated in the water, thereby preventing helicopters from recovering it; a Navy salvage ship made the pickup an hour later. The capsule was in fairly good condition, with only one shingle damaged from its ordeal, and parachute loads six times higher than expected had caused no significant damage to its structure.

Spectacular but disappointing had been this test. The primary objective of qualifying a Mercury capsule during a maximum-q abort had to be rescheduled four weeks later, utilizing the last Little Joe booster. Capsule No. 14 was cleaned up,repaired where necessary, and furnished with another set of sensors, instrumentation, and telemetry for the reflight coming up, the seventh in the Little Joe series and for that reason called prematurely "LJ-7." The postlaunch report for LJ-5A summarized the reason for renaming the last Little Joe flight LJ-5B:

Analysis of data show that the escape-rocket motor fired prematurely and prior to capsule release, thus precluding accomplishment of most of the first-order test objectives. The premature ignition was apparently caused by unscheduled closure of at least two of the capsule main clamp ring limit switches.

Operation of a capsule backup system by ground command separated the capsule from the booster and released the tower, making it possible for the parachutes to deploy. The main and reserve parachutes were deployed simultaneously under very severe flight conditions and enabled the capsule to make a safe landing. However, in spite of the descent rate of 60 percent less than normal, the heat shield caused some damage upon recontact. Examination of the recovered capsule showed that it did not sustain any structural damage sufficient to preclude its rapid refurbishment for another flight test.⁷²

There was no time for more contingency planning if the United States hoped to orbit a man before the end of 1961. But for the moment the question in STG was not what could be done in nine months but what might be done in nine weeks.

MR-BD is not MR-3

In the midst of the restudies of Mercury-Redstone reliability in early February, Wernher von Braun talked with his chief of public information, Bart J. Slattery, Jr., about the way the public had been "conditioned" to believe that the Mercury astronaut would not be allowed to ride the vehicle until 100 percent assurance of his safe return was obtained from testing. "There isn't such a thing!" proclaimed von Braun, and he added that future publicity releases should emphasize that there "is a risk," perhaps greater than the traffic risks Americans take every day but possibly no greater than test pilots take with maiden flights of new jet aircraft.⁷³

During the following month, while trying to reduce that risk to a minimum, the von Braun team represented by Slattery, the Space Task Group represented by John A. Powers, and NASA Headquarters represented by Paul P. Haney, agreed to plan the public information for MR-BD to avoid "over-emphasis or overly optimistic assumptions relating to future manned flights."⁷⁴

Redstone engineers meanwhile quickly fixed the MR-BD launch vehicle, making their seven technical changes during the first two weeks in March 1961. The foremost cause of previous Redstone booster overaccelerations was a small servo control valve that had failed to regulate properly the flow of hydrogen peroxide to the steam generator, which in turn powered, and in the case of MR-1A and MR-2 overpowered, the fuel pumps. Modifications were made to the thrust regulator and velocity integrator, in hopes that MR-BD would be physically incapable of exceeding the speed limit again. Another technical difficulty had been some harmonic vibrations induced by aerodynamic stress in the topmost section of the elongated Redstone. Four stiffeners were added to the ballast section and 210 pounds of insulation was applied to the inner skin of the upper part of the instrument compartment. Although oscillations at the second bending mode frequencies were less on MR-2 than on MR-1A, several other electronic changes were made to reduce the dangers from noise and vibration. High winds aloft probably had added some extra stress in the former case, but in any event the next trajectory would smooth out the tilting maneuver in the region of high dynamic pressure, and 65 telemetry sensors were placed where the rocket's bending moments needed to be monitored. Finally, after a great deal of diagnostic study, five resettings were made to ensure that the booster engine cutoff time would not precede oxidizer depletion and hence cause another premature abort signal, as had happened with MR-2. All these changes proceeded smoothly while the boilerplate capsule was ballasted and corrugated to approximate the production model, McDonnell spacecraft No. 7, and fitted with an inert escape rocket. The capsule did not have a posi-retrorocket package.⁷⁵

MR-BD
Mar. 24, 1961

On the morning of March 24, 1961, the second half of the split countdown for MR-BD was in progress, and so far everything had proceeded without a hitch or a "glitch." To test procedures for the launch pad rescue crews, a manned M-113 armored personnel carrier was parked only 1,000 feet southwest of the unmanned Redstone. The firemen in this vehicle were going to endure bone-jangling noise and vibration during the launch to see how much emergency rescue crews could stand. Closer still, an unmanned asbestos-covered truck was parked 65 feet from the MR-BD blast deflector to simulate the position that the "cherry picker," or mobile egress tower, would occupy during the launch of a manned missile.

Liquid oxygen loading for MR-BD began only two hours before the scheduled launch time. During the automatically controlled loading process, winds of about 20 knots swayed the Redstone and produced sloshing during the "topoff" operation. The fuel temperature began to rise toward the boiling point, and soon an overflow bled out the booster standpipe and boil-off valve. This potentially dangerous situation was governed by a computer, which, when its electronic bias in the topping circuit was lowered, continued the "lox- topping" normally. No holds were called, and the countdown proceeded to launch without further incident.

At 12:30 p.m., MR-BD lifted off straight and smooth from Cape Canaveral on its programmed trajectory. The people in the armored vehicle on the ground watched it all without discomfort, and a truck driver later moved the simulated "cherry picker" away undamaged. Although the actual exit velocity was 89 feet per second higher than planned, there was in general, said Hammack in his report to STG, "hardly a plotting difference between the actual trajectory data computed … and the nominal trajectory published in NASA working paper 178."⁷⁶ The whole configuration impacted in the Atlantic 307 miles downrange (five miles short of the plan) and sank to the bottom, exploding a sofar bomb en route. MR-BD was highly successful; as George Low reported to Administrator Webb, it "demonstrated that all major booster problems have been eliminated."⁷⁷ Telemetry revealed that the Redstone still wriggled a bit with high vibrations in the instrument compartment, but all the "quick-fixes" had worked properly. MR-BD satisfied von Braun's team, Debus' crew, and all of NASA that the Redstone was now trustworthy enough to be called "man-rated." Enough experience was at hand to tackle the next step in Project Mercury, manned suborbital flight.⁷⁸

But the very next day, March 25, the Soviets announced the successful launch and recovery of their fifth Korabl Sputnik, containing a dog named Zvesdochka, or Little Star. Three out of five was their record now for successful recovery of "cosmic ships" and dogs from orbit. Three days later, at a Soviet Academy of Science press conference in Moscow, six of Strelka's pups, as well as four other space dogs, were on exhibit as evidence and harbingers of the imminent flight of man into space. MR-BD might have been that first flight had it been "MR-3," as originally scheduled, but the decision of a month before froze the Mercury-Redstone schedule for at least two months afterward. And the Mercury team, aware of but not dominated by the space race, could only hope that the "Sputnik Spacecraft Team" was having comparable final checkout difficulties.

At the beginning of April 1961, Mercury-Redstone launch vehicle No. 7 was erected on its launch pedestal at pad No. 5 and made ready for the first mating of the man-rated capsule No. 7. Feverish activity pervaded Hangar S and the service structure, where another "white room" was being hastily rigged on the third level of the gantry at MR-3's capsule height. Rework on the capsule's reaction control system was completed during the first week in April, while the three chosen astronauts went through final procedures training and acceleration conditioning in centrifuge runs at Johnsville. The Space Task Group now believed that the development phase of the project was practically over. Symbolizing this shift, the Associate Director responsible for development, Charles Donlan, left STG formally on the first of April to return to Langley Research Center, leaving Walter Williams, the operations chief, as Gilruth's sole Associate Director.⁷⁹

The Space Task Group nevertheless could not afford to become too preoccupied with the preparations for MR-3 because MA-3 and Little Joe 5B were scheduled first, and within two weeks, as prerequisites for the orbital objective. On April 10, foreign correspondents in Moscow reported rampant rumors sweeping the city that the U.S.S.R. had placed a man into space. That same day at Langley Field, Virginia, another rumor reached the attention of STG to the effect that the 10 members and four consultants of the President's Hornig panel were recommending at least 50 more chimpanzee runs before putting man in space. Gilruth remarked facetiously that if this were true, the Mercury program ought to move to Africa.⁸⁰

This hearsay recommendation did not become a part of the "Report of the Ad Hoc Mercury Panel" or of the Hornig Committee, as it was more widely known, which was submitted on April 12, 1961. Having been delegated by President Kennedy and his scientific adviser, Wiesner, the panel visited the McDonnell plant, Cape Canaveral, and Langley Field and talked with representatives of supporting services and contractors. In its 18-page report it reviewed the accomplishments and failures of the Mercury program, assessed the risks and probability of success, and commented upon medical aspects of Project Mercury as a whole and medical readiness for manned suborbital flight in particular. It concluded with some reasonable medical reservations that a Redstone flight now would be "a high risk undertaking but not higher than we are accustomed to taking in other ventures," such as in the initial flights of the Wright Brothers, Lindbergh, and the X-series of research aircraft.⁸¹

In its reliability assessments, the Hornig panel graded the Mercury subsystems or components according to three classes of reliability percentages: Class 1, 95-100 percent; Class 2, 85-95 percent; Class 3, 70-85 percent. Eleven items were rated as Class 1: Capsule structure and reentry properties; separation mechanism and posigrade rocket; tower and abort rockets; voice communications; abort sensing instrumentation system; manual control system; retrorocket system; parachute landing system; ground environment system; recovery operation; and pilot training. Three items were rated in Class 2: Landing bag; environmental control system; and automatic stabilization and control system. The two items in the Class 3 category, booster (Redstone or Atlas) and telemetry, were explained as "not per se a cause for alarm" for pilot safety but only for mission success.⁸²

Vostok Wins the First Lap

The first unofficial rumors out of Moscow were confirmed by an Associated Press dispatch on April 12 that translated an official Soviet news agency Tass announcement:

The world's first space ship Vostok with a man on board, has been launched on April 12 in the Soviet Union on a round-the-earth orbit.

The first space navigator is Soviet citizen pilot Maj. Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin. Bilateral radio communication has been established and is maintained with Gagarin.

Aside from this assertion, the news out of Moscow and Turkestan on April 12 was neither crisp nor very detailed. For a few days a great deal of speculation over conflicting reports, fuzzy photographs, and the lack of eyewitnesses encouraged those disappointed Westerners who wished to believe that Gagarin's flight in Vostok I (meaning East) had not occurred. The danger that history might be made to order in a closed society was compounded by the rumors in the London Daily Worker and elsewhere since April 7. The propagandistic exploitation of this magnificent deed was evident from the fact that no confirmed announcement was made during the 108 minutes of flight - not until Yuri Gagarin landed intact near the Volga River, some 15 miles south of the city of Saratov. The present tense in the Tass dispatch above could easily have been doctored for control purposes, drama, or even for more serious reasons.⁸³

Be that as it may, NASA officials from Webb and Dryden down to Gilruth and Powers, at least six months earlier, had planned their comments for this occasion, just in case. About 4 a.m., telephones began buzzing up and down the east coast of the United States as reporters demanded responses from NASA officials to the Tass dispatch. John A. "Shorty" Powers half-consciously replied to his first inquisitor, "We're all asleep down here." Some journalists ignored the fact that Gilruth had long since gone on record as saying he would not be surprised to be awakened some morning in this manner. Webb went on nationwide network television at 7:45 a.m. to extend congratulations to the Soviets, to express NASA's disappointment, and to reassure the nation that Project Mercury would not be stampeded or panicked into a premature speedup of the Mercury timetable. The next morning Webb and Dryden were roasted before the verbal fire of the House space committee as they were asked to explain what had happened. All the information available to the United States government, said Dryden, and past experience with Soviet technical statements, tended to confirm the report of Gagarin's flight. Representatives James G. Fulton of Pennsylvania, J. Edgar Chenoweth of Colorado, Victor L. Anfuso of New York, and David S. King of Utah were especially disappointed that the name Gagarin would "go down in the history books." Webb and Dryden held up well under this heat, taking the position that this particular race was lost "before the space agency was founded." But Representative Joseph E. Karth, a Democrat from Minnesota, gave the most popular rationale of why a Russian had won the first lap in the manned space race:

The United States and the Soviet Union have proceeded along two different lines of attack. The Soviets have pretty much rifled their program, if I may use the word, as opposed to the United States shotgunning their effort. We have been interested in many programs and I think the Soviets have been interested primarily in putting a man in space.⁸⁴

The flight of the first cosmonaut seemed remarkably similar in many respects to the plans for the first Mercury astronaut's orbital mission, but there were momentous differences as well - the single near-polar orbit, the lack of a worldwide tracking network, and the provisions for pilot ejection before impact.⁸⁵ According to the corrected and reduced data obtained from their measurements and published in Pravda on April 25, 1961, the twin module spaceship-satellite, or Korabl Sputnik VI, was renamed generically as the first in the Vostok series. Specifically its call sign was Swallow. The payload compartment, manned by 27-year-old, 154-pound Gagarin, weighed altogether 10,417 pounds, and attained an apogee of 203 miles and a perigee of 112 miles, with an orbital inclination of 65 degrees to the equator. Cosmonaut Gagarin was probably launched by a two-stage booster from the Baikonur cosmodrome, east of the Aral Sea, south of the industrial district of Magnitogorsk, near Tyura Tam, a boom town comparable to Cocoa Beach, Florida. Apparently the Gagarin flight had not been preceded by a parabolic manned suborbital flight into space. The anonymous engineers behind him, mysteriously called "the chief designer" and "the chief engineer," evidently had developed a mixed-gas air supply at sea-level pressures for his life support system. Vostok I also had a separate and separable instrument section and retrorocket package for telemetry, television, and radio telephone communications during orbit and for braking the spacecraft velocity 5,000 miles and 30 minutes before the desired impact point. Gagarin rode in a capsule almost three times the weight of the Mercury spacecraft and inside a spherical pressure vessel 7.5 feet in diameter, both of which were automatically controlled. Gagarin was the first person in history to attain an Earth-fixed speed of 17,400 miles per hour, and at this speed around his 25,000-mile course, as high as 203 miles from sea level, he was also the first man ever to endure 89 minutes of weightlessness.⁸⁶

What the Soviets announced after the fact was indeed true:

History's first flight in outer space, accomplished by the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in the space ship Vostok, has made it possible to draw the immensely important scientific conclusion that manned flights in space are practicable. It demonstrated that man can normally bear up against the conditions of a space flight, the placing of a ship in orbit, and the return to earth. This flight showed that in a state of weightlessness man fully retains his capacity for work, his coordination of movements, and his clarity of thought.⁸⁷

And while it was hardly an overstatement to claim, as the Soviets did after the celebrations in Red Square were over, that "in the progress of science, the flight of a Soviet man in outer space pushed all other developments into the background," it must certainly have been an oversimplification that prompted Gagarin to say in retrospect: "I felt very well before the flight. I was fully confident of its successful outcome. Our machines and equipment are very reliable and I and all my comrades, the scientists, engineers and technicians, never doubted the success of the undertaking."⁸⁸

Gagarin's flight, while not having the depressive impact of Sputnik I in October 1957, nonetheless came as a crushing disappointment to many Americans. The announcement was received in this country with a variety of reactions: admiration for the flight's purely scientific merits; disbelief, since various Russian accounts carried conflicting statements, at least in transliteration and at most in their technical secretiveness; and the feeling that the United States had lost face once again. The Associated Press conducted a poll in Miami, Detroit, Akron, Charlotte, Denver, Dallas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, and Washington, D.C., by having its reporters call all the Joe Smiths in the telephone directories. The Joe Smiths registered a wide range of emotions, but perhaps the persons feeling the keenest disappointment were the American astronauts. They knew how close and yet how far they had come toward being first in space, if not in orbit. Of the four who made statements, Glenn was most articulate and magnanimous:

The Russian accomplishment was a great one. It was apparently very successful and I am looking forward to seeing more detailed information. I am, naturally, disappointed that we did not make the first flight to open this new era. The important goals of Project Mercury, however, remain the same - ours is peaceful exploration of space. These first flights, whether Russian or American, will go a long way in determining the direction of future endeavors. There is certainly work for all to solve the tremendous problems involved. I hope the Russians have the same objectives and that we can proceed with mutual dissemination of information so that these goals which all mankind shares can be gained rapidly, safely, and on a progressive scientific basis.⁸⁹

"News will be Worse Before it is Better:" MA-3 and LJ-5B

Although Project Mercury was not stampeded by the flight of Vostok I, Congress nearly was. As Mercury approached its goal, its ends became merely a means to the Moon. While the funding for Project Apollo was being discussed in Congress, the Gagarin flight provided a tremendous impetus to the desires of Americans, as mirrored in the lower house of their national legislature, to become first once again. In the chagrin of the moment, some Congressmen appeared willing to appropriate more money than NASA could spend. Robert Seamans, third in command of NASA as Associate Administrator and general manager, actually had difficulty restraining the House space committee's demands for an all-out crash program for a lunar landing. President Kennedy, consistent with one of his campaign promises, reacted to the Gagarin announcement by saying, "We are behind … the news will be worse before it is better, and it will be some time before we catch up."⁹⁰

The President knew not how well he had prophesied the major Mercury events of the next two weeks. The time was up for Mercury to be first in space, but the qualification flight tests were still far from over. Mercury-Atlas 3, composed of "thick-skinned" Atlas 100-D and capsule No. 8, was, on April 10, 1961, standing on the pad at the Cape being groomed for a long ballistic flight over Bermuda and the Atlantic Ocean. A primary purpose of MA-3 was to test the dual abilities of the Cape and Bermuda to handle an abort about the time of orbital insertion. Walter Williams had already satisfied himself that this was no problem and that the MA-3 mission should be more ambitious. After Gagarin's flight the Mercury senior staff on April 14 decided it was technically feasible to change the MA-3 mission objectives to a full-scale one-orbit goal. When Warren North informed Silverstein of this change on April 17, he also noted that MA-4 should be a chimp-carrying orbital flight about mid-July.⁹¹ However, Low, acting for Silverstein, in direct consultation with Seamans, Gilruth, Williams, and others after Gagarin's flight, had already approved the speedup in the mission objectives for MA-3.

MA-3
Apr. 25, 1961

Carrying a "crewman simulator," an electronic mannequin that could "inhale" and "exhale" manlike quantities of gas, heat, and water vapor, MA-3 should test not only the capsule systems but also the reliability of this standard Mercury-Atlas. The critical tracking system and computer arrangement at Goddard, the Cape, and Bermuda must prove its ability to predict the "go/no go" decision before the danger of impacting in Africa. It was too late to change most of the documentation for MA-3, including the information summary and mission directive, but revised preflight trajectory data were hastily computed and disseminated. Computer programmers James J. Donegan of Goddard and John P. Mayer of STG worked their men through the eve of the flight checking the changed flight plan.⁹²

MA-3 failed tactically, but strategically this orbital flight attempt probably did more than anything else in the Mercury program to implement the "gold-plating," or the real man-rating of the Atlas. It carried the last of the first series of capsules with the dual ports and without a landing impact bag. The capsule was to be inserted into orbit at an altitude of 100 miles and a slant range of 515 miles from Cape Canaveral. If the velocity of Atlas 100-D was not high enough, it could be aborted into any one of several preplanned recovery zones between Bermuda and the Canary Islands.

As it happened, the Atlas attempt to orbit a robot, made at 11:15 a.m. on April 25, 1961, was intentionally destroyed by the range safety officer only 40 seconds after launch when the autopilot programmer on the Atlas failed to roll and pitch the vehicle over toward the horizon. The mission having aborted, however, the entire Mercury escape system worked perfectly and the launch site recovery team responded exactly as if there had been a pilot's life at stake. The spacecraft was towed to a maximum altitude of 24,000 feet by the escape rocket and lowered gently by its main parachute a short distance offshore. The capsule came through this relatively easy abort with only minor damages and was quickly recovered and refurbished for reuse on MA-4.⁹³ Destroyed after its failure to initiate roll and pitch programs, booster 100-D left few artifacts as memorials of its existence. Before the official investigation board could complete its report two months later, however, a significant piece of the MA-3 autopilot, the programmer, was found buried in the mud near the beach, thereby leading to the corroboration of one of the prime hypotheses for this failure.⁹⁴

Meanwhile, back at Wallops Island, the seventh and last booster in the Little Joe series was fitted with capsule No. 14 and made ready for a repeat of LJ-5 and LJ-5A in hopes that the third try would be charmed. This was to be an extremely critical test before MR-3. Gilruth, from Low's home in Washington, called William Bland at Wallops Island to encourage the launching if weather permitted. The preflight documentation was virtually identical to that of the previous Little Joe flight, as was the refurbished spacecraft. Still more instrumentation and even more careful checkout procedures to ensure that the abort would occur at the right time were instituted in addition to the redesigned clamp ring and limit switches. A steep trajectory up to about 45,000 feet was desired before tower separation and drogue chute deployment. The max-q punishment of about 990 pounds per square foot was desired to match the worst of the Atlas abort conditions.⁹⁵

LJ-5B
Apr. 28, 1961

When on April 28, 1961, at 9:03 a.m., LJ-5B rammed upward, technical observers cringed when they saw immediately that one of the booster's Castor rocket motors failed to ignite for 5 seconds after liftoff. This resulted in a much lower trajectory than planned, giving a maximum altitude of only 14,600 feet, but the dynamic pressure, instead of 990 pounds per square foot, was about twice that amount, 1920 pounds. The abort was initiated about 33 seconds after launch as intended, and all events following the abort occurred as they should have. Recovery by helicopter was quick and clean, even though the low-flying capsule impacted two miles farther downrange after skidding through the atmosphere rather than vaulting through it. Lewis R. Fisher, Leo T. Chauvin, and Norman F. Smith of the STG Little Joe team were able therefore to wind up their program with a boast despite the erroneous trajectory:

This launching successfully demonstrated the structural integrity of the Mercury capsule and escape system and sequential system under significantly more severe conditions than those expected to be encountered during a nontumbling type of abort from an Atlas booster during a Mercury orbital launch … . Changes in circuitry and redesign of clamp-limit-switch installations in Capsule 14 for the Little Joe 5-B mission successfully eliminated the problem of premature ignition of the escape rocket motor.⁹⁶

One by one the major obstacles to the growth of the manned space flight enterprise seemed to have dissolved. The opposition of some in the scientific community was not expected to become a factor in national policy. The so-called "military-industrial complex" had failed, if indeed it had ever tried, to reduce NASA. The White House and NASA administrators were determined to advance national capability in space technology. Political dangers were now neutralized. Except for the Atlas and the spacecraft's orbital capacities, all Mercury systems were qualified. Despite the embarrassment to American nationalism brought by Gagarin's flight, Mercury as a technological accomplishment was on the verge of sending a man to visit the edge of the black sea of space. And certainly this year of grace 1961 should also see an American citizen orbit the globe.⁹⁷