Chapter 11

Suborbital Flights into Space

AT 9:34 a.m. on May 5, 1961, about 45 million Americans sat tensely before their television screens and watched a slim black-and-white Redstone booster, capped with a Mercury spacecraft manned by Astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., lift off its pad at Cape Canaveral and go roaring upward through blue sky toward black space.

At 2.3 seconds after launch, Shepard's voice came through clearly to Mercury Control; minutes later the millions heard the historic transmission:

Ahh, Roger; lift-off and the clock is started … Yes, sir, reading you loud and clear. This is Freedom 7. The fuel is go; 1.2 g; cabin at 14 psi; oxygen is go … Freedom 7 is still go!

America's first man in space was in flight only 15 minutes and 22 seconds and was weightless only a third of that time. Freedom 7 rose to an altitude of 116.5 miles, attained a maximum speed of 5180 miles per hour, and landed 302 miles downrange from the Cape. Shepard experienced a peak stress of 6 g during booster acceleration and less than 12 g on reentry. Recovery operations went perfectly, the spacecraft was undamaged, and Shepard was in excellent and exuberant condition.¹

In the light of later American space accomplishments, the flight of Freedom 7 was impressive for its benchmark of technical excellence in the new technology of manned space flight and its hallmark of open media reporting. When compared, as it inevitably was, with the previous April 12 orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin, MR-3 was anticlimatic.

Ever since December 1958, when T. Keith Glennan, the NASA Administrator, had announced Project Mercury, the American public had awaited the first manned Mercury flight with fairly general misgivings. Many people whose expectations had been stimulated by publicity became impatient at the long delays and postponements. Some deplored the whole space program as wasteful and of doubtful value. A few still believed space travel was impossible for human beings.

Then, on February 22, 1961, the Space Task Group announced that Shepard, John H. Glenn, and Virgil I. Grissom had been chosen to begin special training for the MR-3 vault into space. More than a month before the public announcement, Robert R. Gilruth personally had made his choice, even to the exact flight order of the men selected. In early January, back at Langley, the day after he had bid outgoing Administrator Glennan goodbye in Washington, Gilruth had decided to inform the flight crewmen of their selection status. He drove over to the temporary building housing the astronaut offices, called the seven men together, and told them of his decision that Shepard would be the first flight astronaut.² And while the West awaited the next development,Gagarin made his 108-minut near-polar orbit of Earth aboard the five-ton Vostok I (meaning East) spacecraft.

Although some Americans professed disbelief in the Gagarin flight, a majority surely felt a twinge of nationalistic pain in admitting the Soviets had won the first honor in the two-nation race into space. When Shepard's flight took place, barely a month after Gagarin, even the skeptics appeared to derive consolation from the fact that the American launch and recovery had been made in the light of full publicity, with all world news media participating, whereas the Vostok flight had been veiled in official secrecy until after the fact.

Freedom 7, Shepard's capsule, missed what had been widely considered a "realistic" launch schedule by six months. When the capsule had finally been delivered to the Cape on December 9, 1960, some assumed the flight could be made at once. But 21 weeks of preparation - not all of it anticipated - were required by STG's Cape preflight checkout group and a host of McDonnell engineers based at the Florida site. Reaction control system checkout and rework were responsible for a launch schedule postponement to March 6, 1961. Replacement of damaged and corroded peroxide lines forced a further delay of eight days. Rerunning the simulated mission test and correcting structural and equipment defects were other time-consuming problems.³

Thus, technically, it was May 2 before the launch of capsule No. 7 might have been made. Then why not use capsule No. 8 or 9 or 11? Because capsule No. 7 had been selected in the summer and groomed since October 1960 as McDonnell's best product to date, the only porthole version of the capsule that had been or would be man-rated in all respects. By January 1961, after the MR-1A flight had used up Mercury-Redstone booster No. 3, the one originally intended for the first man-launch vehicle, it was clear that Redstone No. 7 would boost capsule No. 7. At the end of March, when booster No. 7 arrived at the Cape, Shepard already knew he was Robert R. Gilruth's prime choice to fly it. "There was no hope," said Shepard, "that a later model of the capsule incorporating our suggestions could be ready in time for MR-3." So capsule No. 7 on booster No. 7 should be the first combination of a series of at least seven flights to put Americans into space. "What better name or call-sign could I choose than Freedom 7?" asked Shepard.⁴

Although the delays were disheartening, there were compensatory benefits in the way of astronaut training. Some psychologists feared that this long time lapse before the flight actually took place might cause "over training" and staleness. But in the postflight debriefing, Shepard complimented the so-called "over training"; he remarked that the similarity of training conditions to actual flight conditions was a key factor in making the mission seem almost routine. In addition, new and better procedures were developed during repeated rehearsals of the mission, which might not have come to light had the training not been expanded a few weeks.

Final Preparation for MR-3

The Space Task Group had decided to train Shepard, Glenn, and Grissom especially for the MR-3 mission because the competitive field had to be narrowed for this particular mission to allow the remaining astronauts to prepare for ground support jobs and the Mercury-Atlas orbital missions. Shepard's activity chart for February 1961 shows that he spent 18 days at Cape Canaveral becoming oriented to spacecraft No. 7 and its peculiarities. Long before the final phases of pilot preparations came about, Shepard and Walter C. Williams had insisted that the designated astronaut must become an integral part of the preflight checkout activities. So, based on this procedure, Shepard and Glenn acquired the special feel of No. 7's attitude control system in hangar checkouts. When the capsule was placed in the altitude test chamber, Shepard went along for the "ride" and exercised the environmental control system.

The most valuable operational training the astronaut received before his mission came from sessions in two McDonnell-built, Link-type trainers, one at Langley and the other at the Cape. These devices were first called "procedures trainers" and later "Mercury simulators." Here the space pilot, supine in a mockup capsule, rehearsed the flight plan for a specific mission. The trainer instruments were capable of being tied in with computers at the Mercury Control Center. Overall operations team practice welded ground controllers and astronaut into a unit. Although not devoted exclusively to the MR-3 mission, the simulators were in use 55 to 60 hours a week during the three months preceding the flight of Freedom 7. During the entire training period, Shepard "flew" 120 simulated Mercury-Redstone flights.⁵

For an eight-week period immediately preceding the flight, the rehearsals became even more exacting. In preparing for the altitude chamber runs at space equivalent altitudes, the astronaut was examined in preflight physicals, fitted with medical sensors, including a rectal thermometer, and helped into his 20-pound pressure suit. The pilot and his medical attendants then went through the mission as realistically as conditions would allow, conducting pressure and medical checks.

Another carefully rehearsed phase of the program consisted of the transfer of the pilot from his quarters on the balcony of Hangar S to the transfer van, the ride to the pad, and simulated flights with the astronaut sitting in the actual spacecraft. Countdowns were conducted while controllers manned their consoles. The first two rehearsal "flights," held on April 18 and 19, kept the service structure, or gantry, against the vehicle, and the capsule hatch was not closed. But the next day, on a third simulated mission, the hatch was closed, the gantry was pulled away, and the spacecraft was purged with oxygen as if an actual mission were in progress. Training like this and in the procedures trainer continued until two days before the scheduled flight.⁶

Three purposes were served by this extensive training program. The astronaut became intimately familiar with the role and voice of each person supporting the mission. He acquired more physical and mental familiarity with all of the associated hardware. And he was made even more aware of the day-to-day status leading to launch date. The operations team benefited by having the astronaut attend the team's technical briefings. These discussions covered both the spacecraft and the launch vehicle and included mission reviews held the week before launch.

MR-3
Preflight

On the eve of the launch, a briefing was conducted exclusively for the astronaut, with specialists in each system reporting on final readiness. Walter J. Kapryan presented the capsule and booster status; Robert B. Voas reviewed astronaut flight tasks; Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., briefed the astronaut on flight control and network status; Robert F. Thompson told him of recovery procedures; and Ernest A. Amman gave him the forecast on weather conditions. Next morning, L. Gordon Cooper, blockhouse communicator, obtained reports from key operations personnel and gave the astronaut his final ready- room briefing before he ascended the gantry. Plans for the postflight debriefing sessions, wherein the student astronaut would become the teacher of his preflight instructors, were also laid out in detail by the end of April.⁷

The planning of recovery operations was as important as any other phase of the mission. Rear Admiral F. V. H. Hilles, in command of the experienced flotilla of eight destroyers known as DesFlotFour, worked with another flag officer, G. P. Koch, aboard the carrier Lake Champlain, on the tactics for this mission. STG's primary strategy was to recover both man and capsule by using land-based Marine helicopters for launch-site abort situations within about 80 miles of the Cape and carrier-based helicopters in the primary recovery area, within a hundred-mile radius. Makeup of the recovery force was similar to that for MR-2, with tiered groups of men and equipment, beginning at Cape Canaveral, ready to cover all contingencies - abort, normal flight, or overflight. The main recovery force of ships was deployed in an elongated pattern 500 miles down along the range. It consisted of the carrier, eight destroyers, and one Atlantic Missile Range radar tracking ship. The helicopters again were manned by Marine Air Group 26, a veteran recovery unit.⁸

Some innovations were added to the recovery plans as a result of experience gained in the MR-2 chimpanzee flight. For one thing, there was still the possibility that Freedom 7 might overshoot its landing target, in which case the time factor could be vital. Obviously a highly mobile unit was desirable. Walter Williams, operations director, requested an amphibian SA-16 aircraft with a pararescue team as an emergency rescue measure. Two such teams were provided, adding the support of the Air Rescue Service and Navy frogmen to Project Mercury.

A second change involved communications. When the spacecraft was near impact it passed below the radio horizon; Williams reminded the Air Force Missile Test Center commander that continuous voice communications with the astronaut in the final moments of flight and after impact required a communications relay plane. The Air Force assigned a communications aircraft, code-named Cardfile 23, to the mission.⁹

The helicopter recovery technique was perfected late during the astronaut preparation period. According to the original helicopter recovery procedures, the chopper would lift the spacecraft with the pilot inside and ferry both to the ship. John Glenn protested that the danger in this procedure to both astronaut and helicopter pilots was too great in case trouble developed during the operation. He strongly recommended further review. After much study and practice of procedures, STG decided at a conference on April 15, 1961, to use helicopters as the primary mode of recovery. The helicopter would arrive, hover over the spacecraft, and talk with the pilot by UHF. The helicopter copilot would snip off the capsule's high-frequency antenna, snare the capsule recovery loop, and raise the vehicle slightly out of the water. By this time the astronaut would be completely out of harness and the hatch would be clear of the water. Then the astronaut would open the side hatch, crawl through, and catch a second sling lowered from the helicopter. The helicopter would hoist both astronaut and spacecraft and carry them to the main recovery ship.¹⁰

Since a man was to be aboard this flight, another vital part of the planning activities involved weather reporting and surveillance. Beginning in June 1960, Francis W. Reichelderfer, chief of the United States Weather Bureau, had promised to Administrator Glennan and provided for the Space Task Group full meteorological support for Project Mercury. By mid-April 1961, a special weather support group, consisting of three units under Kenneth M. Nagler, was utilizing every resource of the Bureau (including the satellite Tiros II) to forecast the weather accurately for STG.¹¹

Before MR-3, the seven-man Miami forecast unit, headed by Jesse R. Gulick, analyzed reconnaissance data on weather conditions for 200 miles beyond the planned launch and recovery areas. Weather Bureau aircraft from Miami overflew the area at altitudes of 5000 to 20,000 feet, then, three hours before launch, dipped down below 1500 feet. The flight plan followed a box pattern, with the amount of surveillance dictated by weather conditions at a particular point. The recovery ships were integrated into a weather-reporting mission, making reports at assigned times and providing special surface observations, such as sea state and wind velocity, at the critical time near launch. Weather observers at the launch site also kept a careful watch on air and seawater temperatures, relative humidity, cloud cover, and winds.¹²

As the flight date neared, STG personnel briefed the ship crews of the recovery force. Martin A. Byrnes, Robert Thompson, and Charles I. Tynan, Jr., of STG found the naval crews not wholly trained in the specifics of this particular mission. So they immediately initiated a brief education program, giving talks, providing reading material, and showing motion pictures of the MR-2 chimpanzee flight. Tynan also carefully briefed each man charged with capsule-handling duties on his particular role. To cradle the recovered capsule the Navy had constructed 20- by-25-foot dollies and topped them with old mattresses. Then aeromedical teams arrived, prepared sick bay areas, and briefed the ships' medical personnel. After one medical group found that two members of one of the destroyers had recently contracted hepatitis, the crew members of that ship were barred from donating blood, even in an emergency. Byrnes, who felt that the recovery-force briefings should become standard procedure for succeeding flights, said that the Navy was pleased with the pep talks.¹³

Last-Minute Qualms

While the entire NASA program was under review by the new Administration in Washington early in 1961, Project Mercury was nearing its manned space flight phase. During the first four months of the year the major discussion would center around a proposed acceleration of the entire United States' space program to include a lunar-landing mission. Conversely, the Mercury program in the same time frame came under direct scrutiny of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), which was charged with reviewing the scientific contents of all major Federal projects. Some members of PSAC were not fully satisfied that Project Mercury was all it should be, particularly with regard to the reliability of the Redstone and Atlas boosters and to the novel life-science hazards.

The Mercury-Atlas and Mercury-Redstone failures of the year before, as was made evident in the January 1961 report of the President-elect's Space Task Force under the leadership of Jerome B. Wiesner, had not helped build the confidence of physical and life scientists that Mercury was truly a man- rated program. An ad hoc Mercury panel was created by PSAC to delve into the scientific details and reliability of the overall Mercury system and advise the President if it appeared likely that the United States would be beset with another well-publicized but inexplicable failure. Basically, the PSAC panel sought to investigate the level of risk involved in Mercury before a man was to be committed to an actual space flight. This inquiry was penetrating. Panel members spent five days in March visiting McDonnell, Space Task Group, and Cape Canaveral, receiving a series of detailed briefings and interviews. Several medical uncertainties appeared outstanding and worrisome, although the panel had found the NASA presentations to be frank, competent, and impressive.

The scientific objective of Mercury in determining the effects of weightlessness upon man, some felt, might have been pursued in a more clinical manner. Before the first manned flight there might have been a greater number of animal flights progressing toward absolute physiological and psychological limits. Past Mercury flight tests appeared more systematic for hardware engineering than for medical problems. As a case in point, it was noted by the panel members that the MR-2 mission had demonstrated excessive vibration and overacceleration in the launch phase, so that an additional booster test flight (MR- BD) had been inserted to precede the first manned suborbital flight. Pilots in the X-15 rocket research airplane, as well as Ham, the "space chimp" aboard MR-2, had recorded surprisingly high pulse rates concurrently with low blood pressures, yet there were no plans to include a blood-pressure measuring device in the upcoming manned flight (efforts to develop such a device were as yet unsuccessful). In addition, the panel members learned that Ham had taken his turn on the centrifuge, but that the acceleration profiles had no precise correlation with stresses and forces of those predicted for the MR-2 mission.

Despite these gnawing medical doubts, in general the PSAC panel members felt that the Mercury hardware and its reliability had been developed with great care. They were especially impressed with the redundant systems of the spacecraft, as well as the procedures and devices that had been integrated to assure pilot safety during launch. In fact, several panel members stated at STG that it seemed everything necessary to assure pilot survival had been considered.

In their final analysis, the PSAC panel assessed all risks and agreed that Mercury was ready to fly a man. The scientific purpose indeed was to determine man's suitability for the stresses and weightlessness associated with space flight.¹⁴

The orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12 seems to have removed any lingering medical qualms about manned flight. Mercury Director Gilruth had full confidence in the Space Task Group physicians and their endorsement by the space medicine community long before Vostok I. W. Randolph Lovelace II, Brigadier General Don D. Flickinger, and others familiar with the medical stresses of flight likewise had been convinced that pilot safety was fully assured. Yet if the medical profession as a whole had voiced scientific opposition to manned flight in Mercury, or if Vostok I had not flown when it did, it would have been impossible to proceed with a man in MR-3 immediately.¹⁵

Centrifuge tests of the astronaut's couch continued to raise NASA confidence in the adequacy of Mercury systems to maintain an astronaut's safety under acceleration into and deceleration from the space environment. But the abrupt negative acceleration of the final impact on Earth remained a nagging worry, particularly in case of a land landing. The aluminum honeycomb shock-attenuation material under the couch had been bought as insurance, but was it enough? Continued experiments early in 1961 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, were conducted to determine how rapidly one could stop, facing aft in the semisupine position, without exceeding human tolerance. These tests showed that forces up to 35 times a person's weight could be endured for a fraction of a second. But the volunteers so tested were momentarily stunned. In theory, this meant that a spacecraft could land without an impact bag, but the idea of having a "slightly stunned" astronaut in what should be made a routine operation was unacceptable. So STG had reassigned the development of a suitable impact bag system to Jack A. Kinzler's technical services team and to Rodney G. Rose and Peter J. Armitage. These men worked around the clock in March and April trying to perfect a seaworthy shock-absorber. All other pilot-safety systems were ready for a safe and successful flight.¹⁶

Barely a month had passed after the three chosen astronauts began training for MR-3 when the press began speculating as to which one would make the flight. On March 25, John Glenn became the favorite contender, although one report added that there was plenty of betting on Grissom, since the Air Force had been designated by the Defense Department to manage and conduct military space missions. This intimation of service competition spread quickly. Some newspapers even implied that the Army and Navy strongly suspected the Air Force had leaked Glenn's name to embarrass NASA and reduce his chances.¹⁷

The astronauts themselves watched all these conjectures with amusement, keeping tight the secret knowledge of their order of succession. According to Voas, their psychologist and training officer, there was only one thing that terrified all seven: the fear that something might prevent one of them from flying his own mission when the time came.¹⁸

Speculation on the designated pilot abated shortly after Robert C. Seamans, Jr., third in command at NASA Headquarters, appeared before the House Science and Astronautics Committee and testified that each astronaut would have his flight training opportunity aboard a Mercury-Redstone at six-week intervals. Gilruth had, of course, long since decided on an order of preference among the three astronauts designated, and had informed them of it, but everyone kept the secret well because of the ever present likelihood of unforeseen changes.¹⁹

Toward the end of April there was so much publicity that some Senators, among them Republican John J. Williams of Delaware and Democrat J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas, thought the flight should be postponed and then conducted in secret lest it become a well-publicized failure. This was not the general view in Congress, however. Most members, while aware of the danger of too much publicity, felt tradition required the press to have free access to events of such magnitude as the first American manned space flight. Besides, the Russians had received international criticism for conducting an ultra- secret space program.

While many highly placed officials, several close to President Kennedy, were apprehensive about the possibility of an overly publicized fiasco, others pressed to get the manned space flight program moving. On March 22, at a White House meeting, Hugh L. Dryden had explained to the President that no unwarranted risks would be involved in the first manned Mercury flight, and that the decision to "go" was that of the project management best qualified to assess the operational hazards. When the notion was raised in late April that MR-3 should be postponed until all possible hazards had been removed, Edward C. Welsh, Executive Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, observed to the President, "Why postpone a success?"

President Kennedy wanted to be assured of a much better than average chance for success and asked for these assurances almost until launch. On the day preceding the flight, the President's personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, called NASA Headquarters Public Information Officer Paul P. Haney at the MR-3 News Center in Cocoa Beach, Florida. She said the President wanted to review television coverage plans. Live coverage was to begin two minutes before launch. After some delay, Mrs. Lincoln said the President had asked Press Secretary Pierre Salinger to handle the call. Salinger said the President was concerned over the reliability of the escape system in the event of a Redstone malfunction. Haney reviewed the history of the launch escape system for the President's office and Salinger said the information should satisfy the President's inquiry.²⁰

Cancellation of the flight on Tuesday, May 2, because of inclement weather, forced a recycle of the systems countdown for a 48- hour period. On Thursday unfavorable weather again prevented the launch. Countdown did begin, however, for a Friday launch.²¹

As it happened, the press and public learned the MR-3 astronaut's identity only after the countdown had been canceled, 2 hours and 20 minutes before launch, on May 2. Shepard had been waiting in Hangar S in his pressure suit ready to go for more than 3 hours. Gilruth reaffirmed his prime pilot decision a day before the scheduled launch, basing Shepard's selection on advice from his medical, training, and technical assistants.²² But he had withheld his announcement because of the chance for a last-minute change.

The American public participated vicariously in the experiment. For the first time, the maiden flight of a revolutionary manned vehicle, climaxing years of research and development, was open wide to public view. Only a handful of spectators saw the Wright Brothers accomplish man's first powered flight in 1903. In many parts of the country and the world, people accepted that event only years afterward. But for the American taxpayers' first manned space flight, NASA arranged procedures well in advance to enable all domestic news media and foreign news services to view and report the events surrounding MR-3. By April 24, some 350 correspondents were registered. As a result of their activities, the dateline "Cape Canaveral" soon became familiar to all the world. Radio and television coverage was equally energetic; telecasts originating at the Cape, particularly on May 5, were enthralling.²³

Starting at 8:30 p.m. on May 4, the countdown proceeded without a hitch. Around midnight a built-in hold was called for the purpose of installing the pyrotechnics, servicing the hydrogen peroxide system, and allowing the operations team some rest. The countdown was resumed in the early morning hours of May 5, and another intended hold occurred some two and a half hours before the 7 a.m. anticipated launch to assure that spacecraft checkout was complete before transporting the astronaut to the pad area.

Shepard, awakened at 1:10 a.m., began an unhurried but precise routine involving a shower and a shave. With his physician, William K. Douglas, his understudy, John Glenn, and a few other members of the operational team, he sat down to a breakfast consisting of orange juice, a filet mignon wrapped in bacon, and some scrambled eggs. Shepard had begun a low- residue diet three days before the anticipated launch. At 2:40 a.m. he received a physical examination. This was followed by the placement of biosensors at points indicated by tattoo marks on his body. He was now ready for Joe W. Schmitt, an STG suit technician, to assist him in donning the pressure suit.²⁴

Shepard entered the transfer van at 3:55 a.m. In the van, on the way to the pad, he lay on a couch while technicians purged his suit with oxygen. When the van arrived at the pad, Schmitt began to attach the astronaut's gloves while Gordon Cooper briefed him on the launch status.

At 5:15 a.m. Shepard, carrying his portable air conditioner, ascended the gantry, and five minutes later he entered the spacecraft. If everything went well, he had two hours and five minutes to wait before liftoff. While Shepard was preparing to lower himself into the couch, his right foot slipped off the right elbow support. But he eased himself into position without further difficulty.

Schmitt fastened the harness and helped with the hose connections. Then he solemnly shook the spaceman's gloved hand. "Happy landings, Commander!" chorused the gantry crew.

For Alan Shepard, this was the most dramatic moment of his 37 years, a moment he would recall with the most acute poignancy for the rest of his life. Afterward he told how his heart quickened as the hatch was closed.

The sensation was brief; his heartbeat soon returned to normal. At 6:25 a.m. he began a denitrogenation procedure by breathing pure oxygen. This was to prevent aeroembolism, or decompression sickness, the airman's equivalent of the deep- sea diver's bends.²⁵

Now the countdown resumed.

At 15 minutes before launch the sky became slightly overcast, so photographic conditions were below par. Weathermen said the conditions would clear in 35 to 40 minutes, and a hold was called. Shepard became resigned to this hold and relaxed by peering through the periscope. He was not uncomfortable, because he was able to shift his body in the couch. Telemetered biomedical data confirmed that his condition was good. While waiting for the clouds to clear away, a hold was called to replace a 115-volt, 400-cycle inverter in the electrical system of the launch vehicle. This hold lasted for 52 minutes, after which the count was recycled to 35 minutes before launch. At the 15-minute point, one of the Goddard IBM 7090 computers in Maryland was found to be in error. Making this correction required a complete computer recheck-run. After a total hold time of two hours and 34 minutes, the count continued and progressed without more trouble. Shepard had been in the capsule four hours and 14 minutes when the final seconds ticked off to liftoff.²⁶

Two minutes before the launch, voice communications between the astronaut and the operations team switched from Cooper in the blockhouse to Donald K. Slayton in the Mercury Control Center. From that point until launch, the "talk" was continuous as each panel monitor advised Slayton of his system's status for relay to Shepard. To the astronaut the monitors seemed slow in reporting the go condition, and this he attributed to his own eagerness to be off. Schirra was now circling above in his F- 106 chase plane, waiting to follow the Redstone and Shepard as high as he could. Because of his excitement, Shepard said he failed to hear much of the closing countdown, with the exception of the firing command. During this period his pulse rate rose from 80 per minute to 126 at the liftoff signal. This rise caused no medical concern, for it was about the same as that of an automobile driver moving out from a service road to a freeway crowded with heavy traffic. Shepard was not alone in his excitement; he was joined by the operations team, the press corps at the Cape, and millions of people viewing the liftoff on television.²⁷

Shepard's Ride

Shepard saw the umbilical cable supplying prelaunch electrical power to the Mercury-Redstone and its supporting boom fall away. He raised his hand to start the elapsed-time clock that ticked off the seconds of the flight. The onboard camera, clicking at six frames per second, confirmed his alertness as the MR-3 combination roared and began to climb. He was surprised by the smoothness of the liftoff and the clearness of Slayton's voice in Mercury Control. All his transmissions were acknowledged without requests for repeat. The ride continued smoothly for about 45 seconds; then the rocket, capsule, and astronaut began vibrating. Conditioned to these circumstances, Shepard realized that he was passing through the transonic speed zone, where turbulence built up. The buffeting became rugged at the point of maximum aerodynamic pressures, about 88 seconds after liftoff; Shepard's head and helmet were bouncing so hard that he could not read his panel dials. Sound levels were noticeably higher at that point but still not uncomfortable. Shortly thereafter both the noise and the vibration abated. Now enjoying a much smoother ride, Shepard told Slayton that the dial-scanning procedure he was supposed to follow was impractical. He had to omit reading the electrical power dials to pay more attention to his oxygen and hydrogen peroxide supply indicators.

The cabin pressure inside Freedom 7 sealed off at 5.5 pounds per square inch, as programmed. Pressed by 6 g at two minutes after launch, Shepard still was able to report "all systems go." The Redstone's engine shut down on schedule at 142 seconds, having accelerated the astronaut to a velocity of 5,134 miles per hour, close to the nominal speed. The trajectory, similar to that of the MR-BD flight, was only one degree off course, which meant a variation of slightly more than a mile in peak altitude. After engine cutoff, Shepard heard the tower-jettison rocket fire and turned his head to peer out the port, hoping that he might see the smoke from the pyrotechnics. There was no smoke, but the green tower-jettison light on his panel assured him that the pylon was gone. Shepard strained in his couch under an acceleration that hit a peak g load of 6.3. Outside the capsule the shingle temperature reached 220 degrees F, but inside the cabin the temperature was only 91 degrees. The astronaut was hardly perspiring in his pressure suit at 75 degrees.

After tower separation, which occurred two minutes and 32 seconds after launch, Shepard disarmed the retrorocket-jettison switch and advised Slayton that his capsule was free from the booster. At three minutes the automatic attitude control system about-faced the capsule to a heatshield-forward position for the remainder of the flight. Momentary oscillations climaxed the turnaround maneuver, whereupon the automatic thrusters cut in for five seconds to steady, or "damp," the capsule into its proper attitude. Now almost at the top of his suborbital trajectory, Shepard went to work on his most important task, determining whether an astronaut could control his spacecraft's attitude.

He began to switch the control system to manual, one axis at a time. First he took over pitch, which he was able to adjust by moving the handcontroller in his right grip forward or backward to give the spacecraft the proper up or down attitude. His first action was to position the spacecraft in the retrofire attitude, tilted 34 degrees above a local horizontal mark. The pitch indicator on Freedom 7 was scribed at 45 degrees, as earlier studies had proposed, but more recent investigations had indicated that 34 degrees was a better angle.

While Shepard was in control of pitch, the automatic system was controlling yaw, or left and right motion, and roll, or revolving motions. When Shepard assumed control of all three axes, he was pleased to find that the feel was about the same as in the procedures trainer, the Mercury simulator. Although he could control his ship well, he was unable to hear the spurting control jets above the noise of his radio. He encountered one small problem while using his hand controller: when he moved his hand to yaw, the wrist seal bearing of his suit bumped into his personal parachute. To make the proper displacement, he had to push hard.²⁸

When he tried to carry out another of his flight objectives, observing the scene below him, Shepard immediately noticed that the periscope had the medium gray filter in place. While waiting on the pad, he had used this filter to eliminate the glare of the intermittently bright sunlight and had planned to remove the filter when he retracted the periscope, just before launch. But being otherwise occupied at the time, he had forgotten to make the change. During spacecraft turnaround he tried to remove the filter, but as he reached for the filter knob the pressure gauge on his left wrist banged into the abort handle. He carefully pulled his hand away. After that he forgot about the intensity filter and observed the wondrous sights below through the gray slide. He first tried to estimate the span of his terrestrial vision. The periscope, located two feet in front of him, had two settings, low and high magnification. On low at the 100-mile altitude, there theoretically should have been a field view of about 1900 miles in diameter, and on high, a segment 80 miles in diameter. Shepard was able to distinguish clearly the continental land masses from the cloud masses. He first reported seeing the outlines of the west coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. He saw Lake Okeechobee, in the central part of Florida, but could not see any city. Andros Island and the Bahamas also appeared in the scope. Later Shepard would remark that Earth displays flashed before him in his air-lubricated free-axis trainer had been most valuable in helping him to distinguish land masses passing beneath the spacecraft.

Flight of Freedom 7
May 5, 1961

As Shepard sped over the peak of his trajectory, now under fully automatic attitude control, he began to notice a slow pitch rate. At this point his flight plan dictated that he switch to the fly-by-wire mode of operation, wherein the astronaut operated the handcontroller to change the position of the capsule, using the hydrogen peroxide jets of the automatic system to effect the changes rather than those of the manual system. Thus Shepard would manually position Freedom 7 for the retrofire that was scheduled to occur shortly after attaining the zenith of his trajectory at 116.5 miles. The astronaut switched to fly-by-wire, but as he started to make a yaw and roll maneuver he noticed that the spacecraft pitch position was low, being 20 to 25 degrees rather than the desired 34 degrees for retrofire attitude. Although he could not remember exactly whether he made a yaw or roll maneuver, he did immediately begin to work on his pitch problem. Then the retrorockets fired, creating a noise that was easily heard but was not as loud as the sound of the ALFA trainer jets. This provided what later astronauts on orbital missions described as "a comforting kick in the pants." Pieces of debris, including a restraining strap, flashed by the capsule portholes as the retropack was jettisoned. Glancing back to the control panel, Shepard saw no confirming sequence light, but Slayton radioed his telemetered knowledge of retropack jettison. So the astronaut pushed the manual override; finally the reluctant light appeared. This was the only failure of an event-sequence light during the MR-3 mission.

While riding down the reentry curve toward a water landing, Shepard again assumed the fly-by-wire mode of control. He later reported that the feel of fly-by-wire was very similar to that of the trainers. Although he had a tendency to overcontrol in the fly-by-wire mode, he had the pleasant feeling of being in full command, for a few minutes at least, of his spacecraft's attitude. Then Shepard allowed the automatic system to regain control and stabilize the spacecraft for reentry. The periscope automatically retracted when Freedom 7 began its plummet into Earth's atmosphere.

On the way down, Shepard tried to look out the awkwardly placed ports to observe the stars. He saw nothing, not even the horizon. These futile attempts at star-finding got him behind in his work. As he commented later, this was the only time during the flight when he did not feel "on top" of the situation and ready for anything. The feeling of indecision passed quickly. He immediately reported when the .05-g light came on, the indication that the g-load buildup was about to commence. He was surprised that the light flashed and zero g ended about a minute ahead of the time he had come to expect from his simulated experience in the procedures trainer. As the reentry loads began to build up to a peak of 11.6 g, the oscillations also increased moderately. As soon as the highest g point had passed and the spacecraft had steadied, Shepard left fly-by-wire and cut in the automatic control system.

Shepard was supposed to give an altimeter reading between 80,000 and 90,000 feet, but since his rate of descent was faster than he expected, he became worried over the deployment of the drogue parachute and forgot to report his altitude. As the altimeter dial slipped past 40,000 feet, the astronaut braced and listened closely for the drogue mortar to fire. He gave the Cape a reading of 30,000 feet, and 9000 feet later the drogue snapped out without a kick. Once his fall was broken the periscope extended, giving a view of the trailing and reassuring drogue. The opening of the air-inlet snorkel valve to accept ambient air pressure at 15,000 feet struck Shepard as coming a trifle late. The antenna canister atop the spacecraft blew off as planned at 10,000 feet, pulling the main parachute with it. Shepard clearly saw and felt it in its initial reefed and partially unfurled condition, which prevented the lines from snapping. Within seconds it spread to its 63-foot diameter, giving the astronaut a reassuring jolt, but one considerably less violent than he had received in centrifuge simulated training. "I was delighted to see it," Shepard remarked with considerable understatement. And well he might be, for at that stage of the flight most of the critical moments had passed. Freedom 7 had closely followed its assigned trajectory and the recovery forces were standing by for its pickup.

Falling toward the water at a rate of 35 feet per second, in contrast to the maximum rate of 6550 feet per second during the powered phase of the flight, Shepard pushed the switch to dump the remaining hydrogen peroxide fuel. Glancing at the dials, he noted another green light, indicating that the landing bag with its four-foot impact skirt had dropped down to cushion the water landing. He reported to the Cape that everything was in order before Freedom 7 dropped below the radio horizon.

The astronaut used the brief remaining time before impact to remove his knee straps, open the faceplate shield, and remove the hose connections of his pressure suit. Then came the thud of water impact, comparable to landing an aircraft on a carrier. Freedom 7 splashed and listed over into the water on the astronaut's right side, about 60 degrees from an upright position. The chutes cast loose automatically on impact to prevent dragging. As the water sloshed over the ports, the spaceman saw the fluoresceing dye spreading over an ever increasing area. Shepard quickly checked the spacecraft interior to see if any leaks had resulted from impact. There were none; it was dry. Now slowly Freedom 7 came to an upright position, taking about a minute's time, and Shepard jubilantly reported to Cardfile 23, the communications airplane, that he was all right.

Helicopters of Marine Air Force Group 26 were waiting. Wayne E. Koons and George F. Cox, pilot and copilot, respectively, of the primary helicopter, had watched the spacecraft for about five minutes on its descent. After splashdown, Koons quickly maneuvered his chopper into position for the retrieval exercise. Glancing at Freedom 7, Cox noted that the high-frequency antenna was not in its correct position as he hooked the cable through the recovery loop. Koons maneuvered the helicopter to lift the spacecraft partially out of the water, awaiting pilot egress. All of a sudden the high-frequency antenna pronged upward, hit and dented the bottom of the helicopter, and broke off. But no damage was done; Shepard told Koons he would debark as soon as Freedom 7's hatch cleared the water.

While Shepard worked himself into a sitting posture, Koons asked again if he was ready. Not yet, he replied; he was still removing his restraint harness and he could still see water against the ports. So the chopper raised the spacecraft further and Shepard unlocked the hatch.

The astronaut then wormed his way over the hatch sill and grappled for his "horse collar" hoisting sling. He soon grasped the line and fitted the sling under his arms. On the way up he brushed against the remainder of the high-frequency antenna, but it was flexible and did no harm. The hovering chopper had no difficulty getting Shepard aboard and in lifting Freedom 7 from the water and transporting it to the carrier Lake Champlain. When Shepard finally stepped on the carrier's deck, only 11 minutes had elapsed since the water landing. About half an hour after he had begun his free-dictation report, Shepard was called to the flag bridge to answer an unexpected telephone call from President Kennedy, who had watched the launching and followed flight details closely via television and who now congratulated the astronaut on his flight into space.²⁹

Aboard the Lake Champlain, the immediate task was determining what shape Shepard was in after that brief but awesome excursion through space, with its accompanying high acceleration load, weightlessness, and deceleration loads. Some physiologists had feared that even a few minutes of weightlessness could cause disorientation, while some psychologists were equally apprehensive about what would happen to a space passenger's mind. But Shepard reported that he found his five minutes of weightlessness quite pleasant. In fact, he said, he was already in the weightless state before he realized it. For evidence, he cited a washer that had floated beside his left ear. The weightless Shepard had grabbed for the weightless washer - and missed. Anticipating his debriefing, the astronaut had used an analogy from his professional experience to describe his sensations. The best comparison in his memory was riding in the back seat of an F-100F airplane. "It was painless," he said, "just a pleasant ride." As for any other effects of weightlessness and g stresses, Shepard had demonstrated by assuming direct pilot control that man was quite capable of functioning in space. He experienced no impairment of his faculties. He had reported to Mercury Control with perfect clarity regarding his and the spacecraft's status, and when two physicians, M. Jerome Strong and Robert Laning, made a preliminary postflight physical examination of Shepard aboard the carrier, they found him to be in excellent condition. From beginning to end the flight mission had been almost perfect. The jubilant but technically perfectionist engineers called it only an "unqualified success."³⁰

Now there remained no possible doubt that man could function intelligently aboard the Mercury spacecraft and with relative safety in a true space environment for 15 minutes. What of the primitive spacecraft that he had inhabited? How well did it perform? The answer seemed to be, very well indeed. But could its systems be trusted to work under even more demanding conditions in orbital flights? Had all the flight preparations been adequate? These were only a few of the questions that the returning astronaut would have to answer, if only partially and indirectly, at the seemingly interminable debriefings.

Briefing the Briefers

The initial postflight period of debriefing, held aboard the recovery ship, included a medical examination and free dictation by the astronaut of his flight impressions. This was followed by a short debriefing questionnaire. From the ship, the astronaut was taken to Grand Bahama Island for an exhaustive two-day debriefing by medical and technical personnel. This session used a prepared list of questions. Interrogations were led by Carmault B. Jackson on medical matters, by Robert Voas on pilot activities and performance, and by Harold I. Johnson and Sigurd A. Sjoberg on systems performance. Some 32 specialists joined in the Grand Bahama debriefing, including program managers, operations physicians, engineers, photographers, and public relations personnel.

His pressure suit, Shepard said, was generally comfortable and allowed sufficient mobility, but the left wrist pressure gauge was difficult to see during acceleration. It should be moved, perhaps to the knee. And there was a circulation problem caused by the rubber cots at the ends of his gloved fingers, which meant he had to keep drawing his fingers back inside the gloves to maintain comfort. The helmet was satisfactory. Shepard had obtained an enlarged faceplate for his own helmet to gain better vision. He had no complaints against the couch or restraint harness. He remembered only minor pressure points from the couch while waiting on the pad. The straps around his shoulders had seemed tight at times before launch, but slight shrugs had relieved the tension and stimulated circulation.

The biosensors caused some skin irritation for Shepard, as they had for others in the Mercury program, both astronauts and test subjects. Better adhesives were promised. Throughout the mission the suit temperature and humidity had been quite comfortable, Shepard reported. During the hours while he was waiting on the pad he was able to maintain a suit reading of 75 degrees, although this rose to 77 degrees a minute or two before liftoff. His suit temperature dropped back to 74.5 degrees for most of the flight, with a brief rise to 82 degrees during reentry. Just before the loss of contact as the spacecraft dropped below the radio horizon, his suit temperature dropped to 77 degrees. Then, in the capsule awaiting pickup, Shepard experienced the hottest part of the mission. When Byrnes suggested that ventilation procedures should be improved, Shepard remarked that he could have obtained some relief by simply unzipping his suit.³¹

Other parts of the environmental control system also worked satisfactorily. The cabin temperature inside Freedom 7 stayed within a tolerable range from 92 to 100 degrees. Only part of one of the two four-pound bottles of oxygen aboard had been needed. The drain on the coolant supply had been slight.

The engineers among the debriefing team quizzed Shepard about the whole of the spacecraft attitude control systems, but especially about the workings of manual control. According to the flight plan, Shepard was to exercise three modes of control - automatic, manual, and the fly-by-wire combination of the two. He reported that the manual mode was quite responsive and felt the same as the manual mode in the procedures trainers. There seemed to be a tendency for the spacecraft to roll slightly clockwise while in the manual control. Postflight inspectors found a small piece of debris lodged in the hydrogen peroxide tubing, which probably caused the jets to leak a tiny increment of thrust. Near the six-minute point in the flight, according to plan, Shepard was supposed to switch to the fly-by-wire mode of control. Apparently he forgot to turn off the manual valve, so the capsule's attitude control system sucked fuel from both manual and automatic tanks. The debriefing interrogators asked him whether he got more control than desired; he replied that rate changes seemed high but that he thought this was caused by microswitch positions rather than the addition of manual proportional fuel. Shepard could not recall for certain whether he had turned off the manual valve; telemetry data monitoring the spacecraft movements and countermovements indicated that he had not.

The accessory rockets and pyrotechnics on the capsule performed adequately during the Freedom 7 mission, each sequence firing on time and as designed. One exception was a secondary escape- tower jettison rocket, which was later disassembled and found to have ignited by manual pull-ring actuation. Since Shepard did not remember whether or not he pulled that ring, how the rocket fired remained a mystery. It was known that this backup component had not been used to separate the escape tower from the spacecraft. Otherwise the capsule rocketry had performed flawlessly. The posigrades effected spacecraft separation, the three retrograde rockets ripple-fired to provide a 510-feet-per-second velocity decrement, and the drogue parachute mortar discharged correctly. The green sequence lights appeared on Shepard's panel with heartwarming regularity except for the retropack jettison indicator.

At impact the landing bag had performed as designed to cushion the shock, but one heat sink stud did pierce the fiber-glass protective shield. While the pressure vessel was undamaged, recovery had been too rapid for the seaworthiness of the impact bag to be tested. Several rips observed in the impact skirt aboard the carrier apparently occurred during postflight handling rather than at impact or by bobbing in the water.

In general the radio communications during flight had been extremely clear. Slayton, the Mercury Control Center capsule communicator ("Cap Com"), said Shepard's voice transmissions were slightly garbled at liftoff but that seconds later the quality improved markedly. Using the ultra-high-frequency system, Slayton was able to maintain crisp contact with Freedom 7. Shepard and Slayton stayed on UHF, using the Cape antenna, but then as distance increased, voice communications deteriorated. In Mercury Control Center the communications technician monitoring the Grand Bahama Island antenna reception switched Slayton onto a relay from Bahama, and Shepard came in loud and clear once again. Slayton and Shepard communicated well with each other until main parachute deployment. The Mercury Control Center communicator then tried unsuccessfully to use Cardfile 23, the communications relay airplane. Having lost contact with Cap Com, Shepard had expected the recovery forces to garble the radio in competition to talk with him, but circuit discipline was businesslike both before and after countdown.³²

Precipitation From MR-3

The "unqualified" success of the Shepard suborbital flight brought immense joy and satisfaction to the managers, engineers, associates, and astronauts of the Space Task Group. They had labored almost two and a half years for this first triumph. Flight failures, schedule slippages, press criticism, and most recently the U.S.S.R.'s attainment of the first orbital flight, all had tempered the pride of the Mercury team. But May 5, 1961, saw the Nation rejoice with relief and pleasure in the success and safety of Alan Shepard. President Kennedy's shore-to-ship radio telephone call to the astronaut was spontaneous, though difficult to link, and symbolic of the American mood that day. Although the seven-member corps of astronauts had combat records and test-pilot experience to their credit, one of them at last was truly a hero and not just a celebrity.

In the aftermath of the flight of Freedom 7, Gilruth once again published a morale memorandum for his staff. This time the subject was not a single favorable newspaper article, as had been the case of a story by Los Angeles newspaperman Marvin Miles the year before, but a compilation of formal congratulations to Alan Shepard from individuals in various walks of life, including the King of Morocco and a group of scientists in Peru.³³

At the postflight press conference, Admiral Hilles quipped that the space race had turned into a world series played with a space ball, and that the Navy, naturally, had "caught the crucial fly." But the much more impressive Gagarin flight tempered everyone's pride but the Soviets'. What most enhanced the United States' prestige was not the technical prowess exhibited by MR-3 but the contrast between the open-door policy toward news coverage of its flight and the impenetrable secrecy surrounding the Soviet program.

One result of all this publicity was a widespread skepticism toward the space claims of the U.S.S.R. Many people around the world questioned whether a Red cosmonaut had flown at all. An Istanbul newspaper called Millyet, for example, reported that Turkish journalists, after viewing official films of both Shepard's and Gagarin's flights, asked of the Soviet consul general, "In the Shepard film we followed all phases of his flight, but in yours we followed only Khrushchev. Why don't you show us your space flight, too?" A Tass correspondent, replying for the consul general, was quoted as having explained, "We are mainly interested in the people's excitement and reaction. This is what we wanted you to see."³⁴ Premier Nikita Khrushchev was supposed to have been much chagrined because the "up and down" flight of Shepard gained such extensive media publicity even though Gagarin had long since orbited the world.

Although NASA had kept a few secrets - such as ground-control command frequencies and persisting classifications of old military data - the agency made reasonable efforts to cooperate with newsmen.

The President awarded NASA's Distinguished Service Medal to Alan Shepard in a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House on May 8. Although little notice was given, crowds of people lined Pennsylvania Avenue, cheering the veteran Navy pilot and new spaceman as he rode to the Capitol for lunch and back. Here and abroad, millions of people later filed by an itinerant NASA display to inspect Freedom 7 at close hand. Members of Congress sensed a formidable change in the public's attitude toward the space program. In place of widespread apathy or lack of understanding toward space exploration, many of their constituents now seemed aware of the meaning of the adventures into the space void. Congressmen who had been reviewing manned space flight plans and proposals since early April began thinking about increased allocations of national resources, such as scientific manpower, for future manned space exploration.

On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy presented a special message to Congress on "urgent national needs." At one point he spoke of space and of Shepard:

Now is the time to take longer strides - time for a great new American enterprise - time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.

I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decision or marshalled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment.

Recognizing the head start obtained by the Soviets with their large rocket engines … and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this lead for some time to come in still more impressive successes, we nevertheless are required to make new efforts on our own. For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last. We take an additional risk by making it in full view of the world, but as shown by the feat of Astronaut Shepard, this very risk enhances our stature when we are successful… .

I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.³⁵

The Congress, believing that the American people were also ready to support an expanded and ambitious long-term space exploration program, quickly endorsed these words of leadership from President Kennedy. Project Apollo shifted from a circumlunar expedition plan to a lunar landing endeavor, to be achieved before 1970, or "before this decade is out."

All through March, April, and May, members of the space committees of the Senate and the House busily quizzed James E. Webb, Dryden, Seamans, and other leaders of NASA about the implications of the Russian program and about how the planned time for the development of Apollo could be cut in half. But the appropriations debate was brief. By August 7, the Senators and Representatives had agreed on $1,671,750,000 for NASA's fiscal 1962 budget. This was the first time Congress had appropriated over a billion dollars for NASA's space program at one time. Only $113 million less than President Kennedy had requested, this billion and a half dollars was but an initial appropriation, for the legislators understood that NASA would ask for a supplement about January 1962.³⁶

Thus American aspirations in space, personalized by Astronaut Shepard on May 5 and codified by President Kennedy's endorsement of NASA's follow-on plans on May 25, 1961, gained clear direction, ample funds, and official sanction. The national mood for space had definitely changed from what it had been at the uncertain beginning of the Kennedy administration. A goal of developing space technology for space exploration was a tangible means to "get the country moving again."

Industries born of the frantic missile race of the mid-fifties would turn more and more to space-related research and development. Unlike military technology, such products were not needed in quantity; reliable performance was their highest criterion. Whereas Project Mercury, toward the end of its manufacturing phase in June 1961, supposedly affected approximately one out of 90 people in the United States through industrial support of some 10,000 companies, Project Apollo as redefined by NASA and approved by the President would take far more of a national effort.³⁷ Kennedy had promised that expanded conquest of space would be difficult and costly. But so impressive and dramatic an enterprise was Apollo, so full of engineering and gadgetry, that the project seemed made to order for a new American destiny. To President Kennedy, the United States could win an open competition with the Soviet Union in space because of the inherent superiority of an open society.

Besides its portents, the President's decision had an immediate impact on the Space Task Group, an organization that had been studying the possibilities of advanced manned flight as early as 1959. In September 1960, the Apollo projects office formally appeared on the organization chart of the Space Task Group's Flight Systems Division, indicating the fulltime status of planners for Apollo. But the day after President Kennedy's speech of May 25, Wesley L. Hjornevik, formerly Glennan's administrative assistant and now Gilruth's, signed a notice to the Space Task Group that reassured the Mercury team of a future with Apollo. New funds and facilities, if approved by Congress as expected, would certainly affect the personal lives of the Space Task Group members by the necessity to reorganize and perhaps to relocate.³⁸

NASA Headquarters had recognized for some time that a center was needed to survey the whole spectrum of manned space flight programs. On January 3, 1961, the Space Task Group had at last been designated an autonomous field element, no longer to be considered a part of the Goddard Space Flight Center. The Space Task Group's personnel strength had increased to a total of 794 people in mid-1961. Until Kennedy's lunar landing decision was endorsed by the Congress, the Space Task Group had had only one responsibility, Project Mercury, and no authorization to proceed with more ambitious endeavors. The end of Project Mercury could have meant the end of the Space Task Group.

But President Kennedy's clarion message to Congress verified a new course for the Space Task Group's civil servants. Back in February 1961, Gilruth had asked his second in command, Charles J. Donlan, to begin considering the most feasible programs to succeed Project Mercury. Whatever the future programs were, they would require new, separate, functional facilities. By May a draft study was completed on how such undertakings should be managed. Entitled "Organizational Concepts and Staffing Requirements" for a "Manned Spacecraft Development Center," the study declared in its preamble:

One of the essential elements required to implement an aggressive national effort for manned space exploration is a capability within government to conceive, manage, and technically monitor the development of large manned spacecraft and to operate the spacecraft and related ground support equipment. This portion of the total job is in itself one of the largest, if not the largest research and development job ever undertaken in war or peace.

The nucleus of the capability now exists in the Space Task Group, which has handled, with industry and other government resources, the Mercury Program. However, a program of the much larger magnitude now contemplated would require a substantial expansion of staff and facilities and instituting an organizational and management concept consistent with the magnitude of the program. How - and how effective - the capability is organized will have a direct bearing on the success or failure of the total program.³⁹

Only a few days had elapsed after President Kennedy's call to Congress for approval of the lunar landing program when the rank and file members of the Space Task Group began to read speculations in their local Virginia newspapers about where they might have to move. Few were eager to leave the Virginia peninsula. Many were glad to stop worrying about a move to Beltsville, Maryland, but no one knew what the alternative site would be. While wives and families fretted, the men and women of the Space Task Group were busier than ever before, because the group had just entered the final manned phase of the Mercury program. In August 1961, NASA Headquarters ordered John F. Parsons, Associate Director of the Ames Research Center, to head a survey team to recommend the permanent location for a manned spacecraft center. One of the members of the Parsons team, Martin Byrnes, was subsequently assigned to study relocation programs for STG's members.⁴⁰

Responsibilities lay heavily upon STG. It had to accelerate the Mercury program to achieve its primary objective, manned orbital flight. It should start to recruit personnel and organize activities for the newly authorized Project Apollo. And, most immediately, it must carry out the second suborbital Mercury flight as scheduled. Once the next astronaut was recovered, the operations team in concert with the Space Task Group management would have to decide just how far to carry the Mercury-Redstone suborbital program. Many of the 30 or so who had attended Shepard's postflight debriefing felt that this phase had served its purpose and that now the manned orbital phase should be initiated. This point was discussed in June but not by any means decided. From Shepard's success, however, one thing seemed clear: it was certainly not necessary to train all the astronauts on suborbital flights before trying to duplicate or triplicate Gagarin's feat.

Second Suborbital Trial

Preparation for the second suborbital flight of man into space was essentially the same as that for Shepard and Freedom 7. Much of the astronaut and ground support training, spacecraft checkout, and booster preparation had been accomplished concurrently with the grooming of MR-3, since the anticipated six-week interval was too short to begin anew. Thus Air Force Captain Virgil I. Grissom, told by Gilruth in January 1961 that he would probably be the pilot for Mercury-Redstone 4, and John H. Glenn, Jr., once again the suborbital backup pilot, returned to work quickly after Shepard's flight. In April all three had undergone refresher centrifuge training at Johnsville, and now they were well fortified to endure the actual Redstone acceleration profile.

Most of their training period was spent at the Cape so that Grissom and Glenn could follow the technical progress of spacecraft and launch vehicle by participating in minute checkout operations. In Hangar S the astronauts exercised themselves and all their capsule systems in the simulated high-altitude chamber tests. Their physicians recorded metabolic data and refined physiological reactions. Communication checks, manual control system checks, sequence system verifications, and many simulated missions in the procedures trainer kept them busy. Twice Grissom and Glenn went back to Langley for sessions in the ALFA trainer. In all, each simulated about 100 Mercury-Redstone flights before the upcoming MR-4 launch, scheduled for July.⁴¹

Spacecraft No. 11, designated since October for the second manned Mercury flight, had come off the production line at McDonnell in May 1960. As the first operational capsule with a centerline window, No. 11 more nearly approximated the orbital version of the Mercury capsule than Shepard's Freedom 7, or spacecraft No. 7.⁴²

Among other innovations in No. 11 for MR-4 was an explosive side hatch, whose evolution, encouraged by the astronaut corps, had begun early in the Mercury program. The original egress procedure had been to climb out through the antenna compartment,a difficult maneuver that required the removal of a small pressure bulkhead. Since all the astronauts had found it hard to snake out the top of the frustum and cylinder, the STG and McDonnell designers had concluded that removal of an injured astronaut would be even more precarious. Moreover, valuable time would be lost in such a rescue operation; to open the hatch from the outside, someone had to remove several shingles and 70 bolts.

MR-4
Preflight

McDonnell engineers set to work on the problem and came up with two egress hatch models - one with a latch, which was used on Ham's MR-2 and Shepard's MR-3 missions, the other with an explosive hatch cover. The simple latch mechanism weighed 69 pounds, too much of a weight addition for incorporation in the orbital version of the spacecraft. The explosive hatch, on the other hand, utilized the 70 bolts of the original design; a .06-inch hole was bored into each of the quarter-inch titanium bolts to provide a weak point. When a mild detonating fuse, placed in a groove around each bolt, was energized, the bolts were sheared simultaneously and the hatch sprang open.

There were two ways to activate the explosive egress hatch during recovery. About six to eight inches from the astronaut's right arm, as he lay in his couch, was a knobbed plunger. The pilot would remove a pin and press the plunger with a fist-force of five or six pounds, detonating the small explosive charge and blasting the hatch 25 feet away in a second. If the pin was in place, a fist-force of 40 pounds was required. A rescuer outside the capsule could blow open the hatch simply by removing a small panel from the fuselage side and pulling a lanyard. This complete explosive hatch weighed only 23 pounds.⁴³

The welcome new trapezoidal window assembly on spacecraft No. 11 replaced the two 10-inch side ports through which Shepard strained to see. The pilot now could look upward slightly and see directly outside. Visually the field covered 30 degrees in the horizontal plane and 33 degrees in the vertical. The Corning Glass Works of Corning, New York, designed and developed the multilayered panes. The outer pane was made of Vycor glass, .35-inch thick, and could withstand temperatures on the order of 1500 to 1800 degrees F. Three panels were bonded to make the inner pane, one a .17-inch- thick sheet of Vycor, the two others made of tempered glass. This fenestration was as strong as any part of the capsule pressure vessel.⁴⁴

The manual controls for the second manned flight incorporated the new rate stabilization control system. With it the astronaut could control the rate of spacecraft attitude movements by small turns of his hand controller rather than by jockeying the device to attain the desired position. This rate damping or rate augmentation system, like power steering on an automobile, gave finer and easier handling qualities and another redundant means of driving the pitch, yaw, and roll thrusters.

By the time of the MR-4 flight, Lewis Research Center and Space Task Group engineers had analyzed the thrust rating of the posigrade rockets and had made a valuable discovery. Fired into the booster-spacecraft adapter, the posigrade rockets developed 78 percent greater thrust than when fired openly. Accordingly the capsule separation rockets when ignited inside the adapter,producing what the NASA testers called a "popgun effect," afforded an initial separation velocity of about 28.1 feet per second. This determination provided the engineers with the confidence that spacecraft-booster separation would occur with little likelihood of recontact.

STG's calculations indicated that the Redstone booster and the Mercury spacecraft should be about 4,000 feet apart on their suborbital trajectory at retrofire. The unbraked booster would hit the water some 566.2 seconds after launch, while the longer and steeper trajectory of the spacecraft would keep it aloft 911.1 seconds. The booster would land about 16 1/2 miles beyond the spacecraft.⁴⁵ Because of the relatively short distance between the two impact points, STG was concerned enough to assign John P. Mayer and Ted H. Skopinski to study the problem, especially as related to possible recontact of the spacecraft and the booster after separation. As a result of the studies, Skopinski's recommendations for minor changes in the sequencing of retrofire were accepted as solutions to prevent recontact.

Other hardware changes involved attaching a redesigned fairing for the capsule adapter clamp-ring, rearranging the capsule instrument panel, and adding more foam padding to the head area of the contour couch. The fairing and some more insulation should overcome the vibration and consequent blurred vision Shepard had complained about, while the rearrangement of the instruments sought to improve the eye-scan pattern, which Shepard had found poor. These changes cost several more weeks' time. On July 15, 1961, Gilruth affirmed that Grissom would be the prime pilot for Mercury-Redstone No. 4 and that Glenn would be his stand-in. Grissom in turn announced that he had chosen the name Liberty Bell 7 as the most appropriate call-sign for his bell-shaped capsule, because the name was to Americans almost synonymous with "freedom" and symbolic numerically of the continuous teamwork it represented.⁴⁶

Modifications made on Grissom's pressure suit reflected the experiences of Shepard's flight. Nylon-sealed ball-bearing rings were fitted at the glove connections to allow full rotation of the wrists while the suit was pressurized. A new personal parachute harness was designed to keep the chute out of the way. On the chest of Grissom's suit was a convex mirror, called a "hero's medal" by the astronaut corps, that served simply to allow the pilot-observer camera to photograph instrument readings. Another welcome addition to the suit was a urine reservoir, fabricated the day before the flight. Although during his flight Grissom would find the contraption somewhat binding, it did work. Lastly, Grissom's helmet was equipped with new microphones that promised to filter out more noise and make transmission quality even better.⁴⁷

Materials successfully used in other phases of the space program also became a part of the second manned flight. In the continuing quest for weight reduction, a lightweight, radar-reflective life raft was developed jointly by the Langley Research Center and the Space Task Group. Weighing three pounds and four ounces (45 percent lighter than the original version), this raft was constructed of Mylar and nylon, the same materials used in Echo I, the passive communication satellite balloon that began circling the globe in August 1960. The survival pack, with the raft inside, was secured on a shelf in the spacecraft conveniently near the astronaut's left arm.⁴⁸

Grissom's flight plan was revised rapidly and altered substantially as a result of MR-3. Shepard had really been overloaded with activities during his five minutes of weightlessness. Now Grissom was given a chance to look through his new trapezoidal window to learn more about man's visual abilities in space. If he could recognize landmarks for flight reference, the pilot tasks for the Mercury orbital flights might be considerably simplified. Shepard had assumed manual control of only one axis of movement - yaw, pitch, or roll - at a time, whereas Grissom had instructions to assume complete manual control as soon as he could, to make three maneuvers in about one minute instead of Shepard's 12 minutes, and then to spend as much time as possible making exterior observations.

Mercury-Redstone booster No. 8 had arrived at Cape Canaveral on June 8. Kurt H. Debus' contingent of Wernher von Braun's team and G. Merritt Preston's capsule checkout team had proceeded with the mating of the launch vehicle and capsule and the checkout requirements. On July 13, the flight safety review was held and the spacecraft was pronounced ready for flight. Two days later Walter Williams heard the reports during the mission review; the Redstone and Liberty Bell 7 were pronounced ready to go. The recovery ships, anticipating the launch date on Tuesday, July 18, moved into their assigned positions.

Essentially a repeat of MR-3, Grissom's flight was to reach an apogee of 116 miles, over a range of 299 miles, with the astronaut feeling a maximum acceleration load of 6.33 g and deceleration of 10.96 g. Only the launching azimuth, changed by three degrees to stay within range bounds, varied from Shepard's flight into space.⁴⁹

On July 16 the news media received a weather bulletin predicting that the cloud cover in the launch area for the next 48 hours would be below average, but that the impact area would be slightly cloudier than usual. The mission was postponed early Tuesday, the 18th, in hope of better weather. Fortunately the frosty liquid oxygen had not been loaded so the launch delay was only 24, rather than 48, hours.

Early Wednesday, July 19, Grissom, asleep in his quarters on the balcony of Hangar S, was awakened by his physician, William Douglas, who told him that Walter Williams' operations team was pushing for a 7 a.m. launch to beat the weather. The launch day routine began again. By 5 a.m. Grissom was up in the gantry. He slid into his niche; the count resumed and continued unbroken until 10 minutes and 30 seconds before launch, when a hold was called to wait for a rift in the cloud cover. When no break appeared, the mission was scrubbed again. This time the liquid oxygen had been tanked, so a dreary 48-hour delay would be necessary.⁵⁰

The weather conditions on July 21 were still not ideal. The view from an altitude of a hundred miles would show that all the northern portion of Florida was completely obscured by high cirrus and lower patches of cumulus clouds. Southern Florida and Cuba would be splotched by scattered cumulus. The operations team nevertheless decided that since the view was not essential to the success of the mission, the launch should come off as scheduled.⁵¹

Because Grissom had shaved and showered before going to bed rather than before his low-residue breakfast, and because Slayton, the blockhouse communicator, briefed the astronaut on the status of the capsule and booster during the van ride to the pad rather than just before gantry ascent, the routine was a bit less hurried. George E. Ruff, an Air Force psychiatrist, had time to interrogate Grissom about his feelings before he lay in his contour couch for MR-4's liftoff.⁵²

Grissom was unruffled, calm, and poised as he entered Liberty Bell 7 again. The count resumed and proceeded smoothly until 45 minutes before launch time, when a gantry technician discovered that one of the 70 hatch bolts was misaligned. A 30-minute hold was called, during which the McDonnell and STG supervisory engineers decided that the remaining 69 bolts were sufficient to hold and blow the hatch, so the misaligned bolt was not replaced. The countdown was resumed, but two more holds for minor reasons cost another hour's wait.⁵³

Alone in his capsule awaiting liftoff, Grissom experienced a wide range of impressions. As the gantry, or service structure, moved back from the launch vehicle, he had the illusion that he was falling. His pulse rate ranged from 64 to 162 beats per minute, depending upon his feelings. His heart beat rose during the oxygen purge, fell while the hatch bolt repair decision was being made, rose again when the go decision was made, and finally doubled at launch. His liftoff was at 7:20a.m.⁵⁴

Liberty Bell Tolls

Grissom later admitted at the postflight debriefing that he was "a bit scared" at liftoff, but he added that he soon gained confidence along with the g buildup. Hearing the engine roar at the pedestal, he thought that his elapsed-time clock had started late. Like Shepard, he was amazed at the smooth quality of the liftoff, but then he noticed gradually more severe vibrations, never violent enough to impair his vision. To the watchers on the ground, the Redstone and the capsule appeared to rise slowly and to pass through a thin, broken cloud window. Then the rocket disappeared, leaving a contrail that was visible on the beach for about a minute. Grissom's cabin pressure sealed off at the proper altitude, about 27,000 feet, and he felt elated that the environmental control system was in good working order. The suit and cabin temperature, about 57.5 and 97 degrees F, respectively, were quite comfortable. Watching his instruments for the pitch rate of the Redstone, Grissom saw it follow directions as programmed, tilting over about one degree per second.

Under a 3-g load on the up-leg of his flight, Grissom noticed a sudden change in the color of the horizon from light blue to jet black. His attention was distracted by the noise of the tower-jettison rocket firing on schedule. The pilot felt the separation and watched the tower through the window as it drifted off, trailing smoke, to his right. At two minutes and 22 seconds after launch, the Redstone's Rocketdyne engine cut off after building a velocity of 6561 feet per second. Grissom had a strong sensation of tumbling during the transition from high to zero g, and, while he had become familiar with this sensation in centrifuge training, for a moment he lost his bearings.

The Redstone coasted for 10 seconds after its engine cut off; then a sharp report signaled that the posigrade rockets were popping the capsule loose from the booster. Although Grissom peered out his window throughout his ship's turnaround maneuver, he never caught sight of his launch vehicle. Angular motion was perceptible to Grissom only by watching the needle move on the dial or by seeing an Earth reference by chance. Another cue to the spacecraft's movement was the Sun's rays, which gradually moved up his torso toward his face, threatening temporary blindness. Grissom fretted over the automatic turnaround that should have reversed the capsule faster.

With turnaround accomplished, the Air Force jet pilot for the first time became a space pilot, assuming manual-proportional control. A constant urge to look out the window made concentrating on his control tasks difficult. He told Shepard back in Mercury Control that the panorama of Earth's horizon, presenting an 800-mile arc at peak altitude, was fascinating. His instruments rated a poor second to the spectacle below.

Turning reluctantly to his dials and control stick, Grissom made a pitch movement change but was past his desired mark. He jockeyed the handcontroller stick for position, trying to damp out all oscillations, then made a yaw movement and went too far in that direction. By the time the proper attitude was attained, the short time allocated for these maneuvers had been used, so he omitted the roll movement altogether. The manual controls impressed Grissom as very sluggish when compared to the Mercury procedures trainer. Then he switched to the new rate command control system and found perfect response, although fuel consumption was high.⁵⁵

After the pitch and yaw maneuvers, Grissom made a roll-over movement so he could see the ground from his window. Some land beneath the clouds (later determined to be western Florida around the Apalachicola area) appeared in the hazy distance, but the pilot was unable to identify it. Suddenly Cape Canaveral came into view so clearly that Grissom found it hard to believe that his slant-range was over 150 miles.

He saw Merritt Island, the Banana River, the Indian River, and what appeared to be a large airport runway. South of Cape Canaveral, he saw what he believed to be West Palm Beach. He tried to report to Shepard on the high-frequency communications circuit every landmark he saw, but his transmissions were not received. These observations got Grissom behind in his work procedures, as he realized when he saw the periscope retract.

With Liberty Bell 7 at an altitude of 118.26 miles, it was now time to position the spacecraft in its reentry attitude. Grissom had initiated the retrorocket sequence and the capsule was arcing downward. His pulse reached 171 beats per minute.Retrofire gave him the distinct and peculiar feeling that he had reversed his backward flight through space and was actually moving face forward. As he plummeted downward, he saw what appeared to be two of the spent retrorockets pass across the periscope view after the retrorocket package had been jettisoned.

Pitching the spacecraft over into a reentry attitude of 14 degrees from Earth-vertical, the pilot tried to see the stars out his observation window. Instead the glare of sunlight filled his capsule, making it difficult to read the panel dials, particularly those with blue lights. Grissom felt that he would not have noticed the .05-g light if he had not known it was about to flash on.

Reentry presented no problem. Grissom could not feel the oscillations following the g buildup; he could only read them on the rate indicators. Meanwhile he continued to report to the Mercury Control Center on his electric current reading, fuel quantity, g loads, and other instrument indications. Condensation and smoke trailed off the heatshield at about 65,000 feet as Liberty Bell 7 plunged back into the atmosphere.

The drogue parachute deployed on schedule at 21,000 feet. Grissom said he saw the deployment and felt some resulting pulsating motion, but not enough to worry him. Main parachute deployment occurred at 12,300 feet, which was about 1,000 feet higher than the design nominal altitude. Watching the main chute unfurl, Grissom spotted a six-inch L-shaped tear and another two-inch puncture in the canopy. Although he worried about them, the holes grew no bigger and his rate of descent soon slowed to about 28 feet per second. Dumping his peroxide control fuel, the pilot began transmitting his panel readings.

A "clunk" confirmed that the landing bag had dropped in preparation for impact. Grissom then removed his oxygen hose and opened his visor but deliberately left the suit ventilation hose attached. Impact was milder than he had expected, although the capsule heeled over in the water until Grissom was lying on his left side. He thought he was facing downward. The capsule gradually righted itself, and, as the window cleared the water, Grissom jettisoned the reserve parachute and activated the rescue aids switch. Liberty Bell 7 still appeared watertight, although it was rolling badly with the swells.

Preparing for recovery, he disconnected his helmet and checked himself for debarkation. The neck dam did not unroll easily; Grissom tinkered with his suit collar to ensure his buoyancy if he had to get out of the spacecraft quickly. When the recovery helicopters, which had taken to the air at launch time and visually followed the contrails and parachute descent, were still about two miles from the impact point, which was only three miles beyond the bullseye, Lieutenant James L. Lewis, pilot of the primary recovery helicopter, radioed Grissom to ask if he was ready for pickup. He replied that he wanted them to wait five minutes while he recorded his cockpit panel data. Using a grease pencil with the pressure suit gloves was awkward, and several times the suit ventilation caused the neck dam to balloon, but the pilot simply placed his finger between neck and dam to allow the air to escape.

After logging the panel data, Grissom asked the helicopters to begin the approach for pickup. He removed the pin from the hatch-cover detonator and lay back in the dry couch. "I was lying there, minding my own business," he said afterward, "when I heard a dull thud." The hatch cover blew away, and salt water swished into the capsule as it bobbed in the ocean. The third man to return from space was faced with the first serious emergency; Liberty Bell 7 was shipping water and sinking fast.

Grissom had difficulty recollecting his actions at this point, but he was certain that he had not touched the hatch-activation plunger. He doffed his helmet, grasped the instrument panel with his right hand, and scurried out the sloshing hatchway. Floating in the sea, he was thankful that he had unbuckled himself earlier from most of his harness, including the chest restraints. Otherwise he might not have been able to abandon ship.

Lieutenant John Reinhard, copilot of the nearest recovery helicopter, reported afterward that the choppers were making their final approach for pickup. He was preparing to cut the capsule's antenna whip (according to a new procedure) with a squib-actuated cutter at the end of a pole, when he saw the hatch cover fly off, strike the water at a distance of about five feet from the hatch, and then go skipping over the waves. Next he saw Grissom's head appear, and the astronaut began climbing through the hatch. Once out, the pressure-suited spaceman swam away.

Instead of turning his attention to Grissom, Lewis completed his approach to the sinking spacecraft, as both he and Reinhard were intent on capsule recovery. This action was a conditioned reflex based on past training experience. While training off the Virginia beaches the helicopter pilots had noted that the astronauts seemed at home in and to enjoy the water. So Reinhard quickly clipped the high-frequency antenna as soon as the helicopter reached Liberty Bell 7. Throwing aside the antenna cutting device, Reinhard picked up the shepherd's hook recovery pole and carefully threaded the crook through the recovery loop on top of the capsule. By this time Lewis had lowered the helicopter to assist Reinhard in his task to a point that the chopper's three wheels were in the water. Liberty Bell 7 sank out of sight, but the pickup pole twanged as the attached cable went taut, indicating to the helicopter pilots that they had made their catch.

Reinhard immediately prepared to pass the floating astronaut the personnel hoist. But at that moment Lewis called a warning that a detector light had flashed on the instrument panel, indicating that metal chips were in the oil sump because of engine strain. Considering the implication of impending engine failure, Lewis told Reinhard to retract the personnel hoist while he called the second chopper to retrieve the pilot.

Flight of Liberty Bell 7
July 21, 1961

Meanwhile Grissom, having made certain that he was not snared by any lines, noticed that the primary helicopter was having trouble raising the submerged spacecraft. He swam back to the capsule to see if he could assist but found the cable properly attached. When he looked up for the personnel line, he saw the helicopter start to move away.

Suddenly Grissom realized that he was not riding as high in the water as he had been. All the time he had been in the water he kept feeling air escape through the neck dam. The more air he lost, the less buoyancy he had. Moreover, he had forgotten to secure his suit inlet valve. Swimming was becoming difficult, and now with the second helicopter moving in he found the rotor wash between the two aircraft was making swimming more difficult. Bobbing under the waves, Grissom was scared, angry, and looking for a swimmer from one of the helicopters to help him tread water. Then he caught sight of a familiar face, that of George Cox, aboard the second helicopter. Cox was the copilot who had retrieved both the chimpanzee Ham and Astronaut Shepard. With his head barely above water, Grissom found the sight of Cox heartening.

Cox tossed the "horse-collar" lifeline straight to Grissom, who immediately wrapped himself into the sling backwards. Lack of orthodoxy mattered little to Grissom now, for he was on his way to the safety of the helicopter, even though swells dunked him twice more before he got aboard. His first thought was to get a life preserver on. Grissom had been either swimming or floating for a period of only four or five minutes, "although it seemed like an eternity to me," as he said afterward.

As the first helicopter moved away from Grissom, it struggled valiantly to raise the spacecraft high enough to drain the water from the impact bag. Once the capsule was almost clear of the water, but like an anchor it prevented the helicopter from moving forward. The flooded Liberty Bell 7 weighed over 5,000 pounds, a thousand pounds beyond the helicopter's lifting capacity. The pilot, watching his insistent red warning light, decided not to chance losing two craft in one day. He finally cast loose, allowing the spacecraft to sink swiftly. Martin Byrnes, aboard the carrier, suggested that a marker be placed at the point so that the capsule might be recovered later. Rear Admiral J. E. Clark advised Byrnes that in that area the depth was about 2,800 fathoms.

On the carrier Randolph, examining physicians Strong and Laning, the same men who had gone over Shepard, found Grissom extremely tired. But the MR-4 astronaut elected to proceed with his preliminary debriefing before going on to Grand Bahama. The recovery finale, of course, continually intruded in the discussion. Grissom said he was extremely grateful to Walter Schirra for the developmental work he had done on the neck dam. He felt that this had saved his life, although later tests disclosed other difficulties. The debriefing sessions aboard the Randolph and at Grand Bahama centered on the need for more egress training (there had been none since April) and the formulation of specific emergency recovery procedures. Grissom said that he thought he should have been a little more precise in his attitude control functions. This was a moot point in view of the sluggishness he had encountered with the manual system and the apparent play in the control stick linkage. Other than this anomaly, the spacecraft had performed well; noises of the sequential events had provided good cues; vibrations had been minimal; the new window had been a delight and should prove useful on orbital flights; and the environmental control system had functioned well. But, said Grissom, there were too many couch restraint straps; the panel lights were too dim; the oxygen consumption rate was high; the urinal device needed further development; the high-frequency communication circuit was unsuccessful; and hydrogen peroxide fuel consumption proved to be high on the rate control system. The last item of that list caused little concern among the Space Task Group engineers, for they had decided that the rate command mode would be used primarily for reentry, when fuel economy was less important.

At Grand Bahama, Grissom rested and appeared to have suffered no abnormal effects from flight into space. The evaluators conceded, however, that the abnormal recovery experience would have made any such effects difficult to analyze or to attribute to flight causes. Further questioning of the astronaut followed the routine established in Shepard's debriefing.⁵⁶

Obviously one of the major problems to be explained and resolved following the flight of Liberty Bell 7 was the malfunction of the explosive egress hatch. Before the mission, Minneapolis-Honeywell had conducted environmental tests to qualify the hatch and igniter assembly. Although the tests had been run with the pin installed, conditions had been severe. The component had been subjected to low and high temperature ranges, a 100-g shock force, and salt-spray and water-immersion tests. After MR-4, the Space Task Group established a committee that included Astronaut Schirra to study the hatch problem. Tests were conducted in an environment even more severe than that used by the manufacturer, but no premature explosions occurred. Studies were made of individuals operating the panel switches on the side nearest the actuator; the clearance margin appeared to be adequate. According to Schirra, "There was only a very remote possibility that the plunger could have been actuated inadvertently by the pilot."

The mystery of Grissom's hatch was never solved to everyone's satisfaction. Among the favorite hypotheses were that the exterior lanyard might have become entangled with the landing bag straps; that the ring seal might have been omitted on the detonation plunger, reducing the pressure necessary to actuate it; or that static electricity generated by the helicopter had fired the hatch cover. But with the spacecraft and its onboard evidence lying 15,000 feet down on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, it was impossible to determine the true cause. The only solution was to draft a procedure that would preclude a recurrence: henceforth the astronaut would not touch the plunger pin until the helicopter hooked on and the line was taut. As it turned out, Liberty Bell 7 was the last manned flight in Project Mercury in which helicopter retrieval of the spacecraft was planned. In addition, Grissom would be the only astronaut who used the hatch without receiving a slight hand injury. As he later reminded Glenn, Schirra, and Cooper, this helped prove he had not touched his hatch plunger.⁵⁷

Titov Widens the Gap

Despite the loss of Liberty Bell 7, the Mercury-Redstone phase of the program had been so successful that there was little reason for keeping it alive. The termination of the manned suborbital flights had seemed predictable after Gagarin and certain after Shepard. A month and a half before Grissom flew, the Space Task Group had decided to cancel the fourth such flight, MR-6. Silverstein and Gilruth also had considered canceling the third flight, MR-5, to concentrate on Mercury-Atlas operations. But Silverstein believed that data obtained from Grissom's MR-4 should be appraised before deciding whether to bypass the MR-5.

Besides, at that time the subject was politically sensitive. Since three astronauts were training for the Mercury-Redstone missions, the public expectation, expressed in Congress and through the press, was that there would be at least three manned Redstone flights. But if Mercury-Atlas could be expedited, an astronaut making three orbits would eclipse the cosmonaut who had made one orbit.

On August 7, 1961, all such hopes were erased by the day-long, 17- orbit flight and successful recovery of Cosmonaut Gherman S. Titov. When the U.S.S.R. announced its spectacular second space flight, some Americans were filled with awe, some with admiration, and some even with fear, while a few expressed only scornful disbelief. At 9 a.m., Moscow time, on August 6, 1961, the Soviet pilot rocketed into orbit aboard Vostok II. The space voyage of this 26-year-old Russian covered 17.5 orbits and took 25 hours and 18 minutes.⁵⁸

After the data gathered from the Grissom flight had been evaluated, NASA and Space Task Group managers decided that little could be gained from any further Mercury-Redstone missions. On August 14, Paul Purser drafted a termination recommendation for Gilruth's submittal to Silverstein. Purser pointed out that the Redstone had done well its job of qualifying the spacecraft, astronauts, and most other critical aspects of the operation. Mercury-Redstone also had validated the various training devices, and it had uncovered many technical problems, none of which appeared to be insoluble before an American orbital flight.⁵⁹ Now it was time to turn to the principal Mercury-Atlas problem areas, such as explosive hatch, inverter heating, oxygen usage rate, control system linkage, and egress training, and to cope with the more complex Atlas program. Four days later, on August 18, NASA Headquarters publicly announced that the objectives of the Mercury- Redstone program had been achieved, and that accordingly it was canceled. Six days later, Joachim P. Kuettner, Mercury-Redstone Project Chief at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, told his subordinates that the Redstone must now be retired after helping gain a toe hold on space.⁶⁰

Several accounts of the Soviet manned space feats indicated striking similarities in cosmonaut and astronaut selection and training. The Russians were chosen by a strenuous selection program, which was much like the American procedure, but their selection emphasized youth and stamina, rather than flight experience and engineering. Soviet training, like American, employed the human centrifuge, altitude chamber, isolation,technical systems study, and personal physical training. Also, three pilots trained in competition for the first flight, Titov being Gagarin's backup pilot on Vostok I of April 12. Gagarin's and Titov's accounts of liftoff and orbital flight described the same phenomena - g-load buildup, vibrations, and impressions of weightlessness.

Titov was reported to have exercised manual control. This transliteration was taken in some circles to mean that he changed his orbital plane, but the Mercury experts believed that Titov's manual control was for attitude only, like that exercised by Shepard and Grissom. Titov reported sleeping seven hours or more, and some translations indicated that he was awakened by his weightless arms floating. This last claim was too much for David Lawrence, a syndicated columnist, who suggested that the flight might have been a hoax. But the members of the Space Task Group never doubted the authenticity of either Vostok I or Vostok II. Too much was similar. Although only two or three people in the Space Task Group could read Russian, the reports translated from Soviet journals seemed to correspond to their own experience.

One of Titov's publicized problems caused concern among NASA and Space Task Group medical specialists. Before entering his rest period, Titov complained of feelings "akin to seasickness" and became nauseated. He had to be careful not to move his head too swiftly in any direction. After sleep, his nausea apparently abated; it finally disappeared completely when Titov began to feel reentry pressures. NASA aeromedical advisers suggested that the first American in orbital flight ought to guard against, watch for, and test out this peculiar physiological reaction reported by Titov and the Soviets.⁶¹

Psychologically, the Russian Vostok feats created some uneasiness in the United States. Many people admired the Soviet's technological proficiency but were concerned by the strategic implications. The fact that Titov's orbital track in a near-polar plane carried him over the United States three times was alarming to some people. In spite of the fact that the decision for the accelerated space program was confirmed, the term "space lag" began appearing more frequently in the press and in the statements of some Congressmen. Criticism of NASA, the departed Eisenhower administration, and even the Kennedy administration mounted. After the Gagarin flight, for example, Democratic Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri caustically pointed to the years of indecision that had so long delayed the Saturn launch vehicle. After the Titov flight, John W. Finney, aerospace and science writer for the New York Times, pictured Washington officialdom as carping over NASA's "easy pace" in implementing the lunar landing program outlined by President Kennedy. No specifications for a lunar spacecraft yet were evident; no agreement on the route to take or on the necessary launch vehicle had been reached. But these were mostly NASA Headquarters worries; the primary task of the Space Task Group still lay ahead. Regardless of the fact that Mercury could now only duplicate the feats of the Vostoks, Project Apollo, the manned lunar-landing project, depended upon Mercury Mark II (later named Gemini), the two-man rendezvous and docking project; and Gemini depended upon the fulfillment of Mercury; in turn, that depended upon the strength and stability of Atlas. The day Titov came back to Earth, NASA's Space Task Group announced candidly, if not calmly, that the first try at putting an American in orbit might slip unavoidably into January 1962.⁶²