Mercury Mission Accomplished

Prospects looked bright to the managers of Project Mercury at the beginning of 1962. In store was Mercury-Atlas 6, scheduled as a manned orbital flight and viewed by some as a salvage operation for America's space prestige. If one of its citizens, Marine pilot John Glenn, journeyed successfully through space on a multi-orbit global mission, the United States would at least begin matching the pace set by the Soviet Union. Although a 3-orbit trek would by no means equal the 17-orbit, day-long voyage of Gherman S. Titov, the imminence of the mission had helped to allay national uneasiness somewhat. The notion that the manned orbital launch should be made in 1961 to coincide with Russian feats in the history books subsided with the end of the old year; 1962 was now here. Whatever regrets the American people had harbored over the numerous delays in Project Mercury, they seemed reconciled to schedule slippages if safety demanded them.

But the new year was barely three days old when the news media learned that the announced launch date of January 16 had been postponed until January 23, at the earliest, because of technical problems in the booster fuel tanks. With each succeeding delay, and there would be several more, journalists and Congressmen became a little more critical and fidgety. Once again, as on several previous occasions, the press spoke of the "space gap," and doubts were raised by some writers that the Mercury undertaking would ever succeed. A senior member of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, Republican James G. Fulton of Pennsylvania, apparently subscribed to this feeling when he remarked, after viewing a January 27 MA-6 launch attempt, that the Mercury spacecraft and Atlas booster could be described as "a Rube Goldberg device on top of a plumber's nightmare." President Kennedy disclosed at a news conference on February 14 that he too shared the general disappointment voiced about delays in the program, but he added that the decision to go or not to go should be left to the "group who are making the judgment." Moreover, he reaffirmed his faith in the NASA Mercury team: "I'm going to follow their judgment, even though we've had bad luck."¹

Statements issued by the Manned Spacecraft Center's operations team after each postponement of the MA-6 mission were terse and technical, and their frankness in reporting the reasons for these delays prompted some favorable news comment. The Wall Street Journal commended NASA for its open information policy, and pointed out that anything but "Candor at Canaveral" could only hurt the "national image." In response to their persistent and sometimes annoying questions, reporters were quietly told that this mission had been in the planning processes for almost three years and that a few more days' or weeks' delay was of little consequence if confidence in its success could be raised another notch. This acceptance of the situation by the Cape launch crew and operations team stemmed from the program's composite flight test experience. John Glenn, knowing all of this, enjoined the press representatives covering the event not to worry:²

This mission has been in preparation for a long time. I can't get particularly shook up about a couple of days' delay. As a matter of fact, I'm so happy to have been chosen to be the pilot for this mission that I'm not about to get panicky over these delays. I learned very early in the flight-test business that you have to control your emotions - you don't let these things throw you or affect your ability to perform the mission.

The Mercury team alone knew what had to be right to make it go.

Back in October 1959, the MA-6 flight, possibly carrying a chimpanzee in spacecraft No. 18, had been scheduled for launch in January 1961. But the fortunes or misfortunes of manufacture and the ensuing flight test program forced many schedule slippages, redesignation of flight order, and capsule configuration changes to meet altered test objectives. According to an April 1960 chart, the first manned orbital attempt (originally MA-7) was slated for a May 1961 launch. Six months later the planners moved the target date for this mission to July, and after a similar interval they foresaw October as the likely launch date. NASA Headquarters' approval of the proposal to add one-day missions to the Mercury flight series required further schedule alterations. Several spacecraft had to be modified for the flights of longer duration. Spacecraft No. 13 was allocated to the MA-6 mission, replacing No. 18, which now was entered into the modification cycle. In spite of all this shuffling, as late as October 1961 the program managers held hopefully to an anticipated manned orbital liftoff within 1961. MA-6, instead of MA-7, the managers indicated, would carry the first astronaut into orbit, providing the MA-5 chimpanzee flight succeeded in November.³

A host of manufacturing changes had delayed the progress of spacecraft No. 13 as it traveled through the McDonnell production and checkout line. Number 13, beginning to take form in May 1960, also met with the usual fabrication problems its predecessors had faced during assembly. On October 10, for example, McDonnell reported to the Space Task Group that a shortage of environmental control system components had completely halted work on the capsule's interior. At the end of January 1961, however, the company had started a three-month test shakedown of the vehicle. Shortly after the completion of this work the failure of the MA-3 mission on April 25 had forced a rearrangement of spacecraft allocations, and McDonnell had been told by the NASA planners to redesign No. 13 for the initial manned orbital mission. The factory finished and delivered the spacecraft to the Cape on August 27. Four months later, after a thorough checkout by the Manned Spacecraft Center's (formerly Space Task Group) Cape team, on January 2, 1962, it was mated to its launch vehicle, Atlas 109-D.⁴

These had been some of the trials that made planning and scheduling difficult occupations, especially in a program that had been so often under national scrutiny. Therefore, the successive MA-6 launching delays logged in the early days of 1962 simply were noted and accepted, and the planners met to decide when they could be ready to try again.

Preparing a Man to Orbit

Of course, hardware was only part of the problem of readying MA-6. What about the second half of the "spacecraft-man" combination? Would the man be just a passenger-observer or a participating system? By mid-September 1961, Robert B. Voas, the astronauts' training officer, had drawn up a number of basic specifications concerning the pilot's duties in MA-6 in answer to questions of this sort. If some part of the automatic attitude control system should fail, for example, the pilot would need to control spacecraft attitude using the manual system. Or if displayed information on the spacecraft's attitude position should malfunction, the pilot would have to take over and rely on his visual abilities for position reckoning by external references. Voas had studied high-altitude photographs of the MA-4 flight and he knew that on the sunlit side of Earth the horizon should quickly provide an excellent capsule attitude reference, but the nightside might present problems unless there was bright moonlight. Possibly known stars could serve as attitude reference points, he theorized. Voas also felt that a comparison of window and periscope reference was needed.⁵

To measure man's potential as a spatial navigator, Voas wanted the astronaut to look for the smallest detectable landmark, to estimate the effects of weather conditions on visibility, and to judge precisely the occultation of the stars by Earth's atmosphere. Theoretically, from the vantage point of the orbital flight trajectory an astronaut should see about a 900-mile arc of the horizon. He should be able to determine how much of this was effective horizon in terms of his ability to recognize a landmark with the unaided eye. One important facet of any later space exploration, Voas said, would be man's visual acuity in estimating spatial depth and distance; tracking an artificial object in a nearly identical orbit during a Mercury circumnavigation would partially test this ability. The spent Atlas tankage trailing the capsule should offer an excellent opportunity in this respect.

Ever since the Soviet reports of Gherman Titov's sensations of dizziness and nausea caused by his head and body movements, some aeromedical specialists had worried that perhaps the prolonged absence of gravitational stress did adversely affect a space passenger or pilot. Voas, considering this subject, contended that it was impossible to say whether Titov had had a purely personal aversion to weightlessness or whether men in general would have similar troubles under zero g. Neither Alan Shepard nor Virgil Grissom had experienced vertigo during the two Mercury suborbital flights. Voas felt that if disorientation and nausea were in fact products of longer durations of weightlessness, as some physicians and physiologists believed, the symptoms could be remedied through preflight training, proper flight procedures, or, if necessary, by drugs.

Voas acquainted the astronauts with the probable effects of weightlessness on their sensory organs. The otoliths, the ear's angular accelerometers, should not be affected, he said. Muscle and skin sensory functions should be affected only slightly, but those muscles sensing the amount of gravity would lose their acuity completely. By and large, the general diminution of sensory perception accompanying space flight should be overcome by the astronaut's eyes and his memory. To test his theories, Voas prescribed an experiment to be conducted on the dark side of Earth. The pilot would touch certain panel dials with his eyes open and then with his eyes closed, after moving his head quickly to the right, left, and forward. Gordon Cooper expressed qualms felt by several people over Voas' "blind flying" test when he remarked, "You shouldn't be reaching over on this panel with your eyes shut."

Other tasks planned by Voas included taking pictures through the window and periscope with a hand-held camera, describing the cloud cover on the day side, and looking for lightning in squall lines as requested by the United States Weather Bureau. On the night side the pilot should repeat those tasks and observe the aurora and luminescence of Earth's clouds. Finally, he should scan the star fields, the Milky Way, and note the size and appearance of the Moon as well as describe a moonset.⁶

The September study by Voas included the initial efforts of the Space Task Group to foster a scientific inroad into the manned space flight program. After distributing his paper among the astronauts and receiving favorable comment from several, Voas then sought the assistance of NASA Headquarters to obtain a broader base for possible astronaut activities in space from the various scientific disciplines that were available. Homer E. Newell and Nancy G. Roman of that organization reacted by directing the formation of an ad hoc committee for astronomical tasks for the Mercury pilots, assigning Jocelyn R. Gill as the committee chairman. This group was an offshoot of the formal Astronomy Subcommittee, a part of NASA's Space Sciences Steering Committee.⁷

As a beginning Gill and Voas attended a meeting of the Astronomy Subcommittee held at the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, Bethpage, New York, on October 30-31, 1961. Voas reviewed the abilities of the astronauts to assume some additional tasks, such as observations of astronomical phenomena. He also cautioned that any integration of scientific equipment inside the spacecraft would have to be severely restricted in weight. The Astronomy Subcommittee discussed the possibilities and then suggested 10 tasks that an astronaut might accomplish. A few of these were: observe the night airglow as to its intensity and structure, look for comets before sunset and after dawn, note the frequency of meteor flashes, look for the aurora and describe its intensity, sketch the zodiacal light relative to the star background, and observe the size and position relative to the star background of the gegenschein.⁸

Besides generally acquainting the Mercury astronauts with the spatial environment, their possible reactions, and what they might accomplish in the way of operations and scientific observations, Voas also had pressed forward with a plan for a specific training program to prepare the crewmen to operate and manage the spacecraft systems on orbital missions. He first compiled a list of proposed training activities, and then he called a meeting at Langley on September 26 to discuss his report. The STG officers present adopted the training proposal, which became a formal working paper on October 13. With slight subsequent amendments, this working paper, No. 206, spelled out the astronaut training and preparation procedures that would be followed for the rest of the Mercury program.⁹

The first stated prerequisite for the astronaut, as formulated by Raymond G. Zedekar of STG, was a thorough familiarity with the spacecraft and all its systems. He must know every mission detail, including every flight and ground rule; he would be expected to demonstrate peak performance in every task during the flight; and his skills must include making failure diagnoses and taking the proper corrective action.

Preparing the pilot for his role during an orbital mission, the astronaut training personnel obviously could draw heavily on Shepard's and Grissom's suborbital experiences. The nine separate checkouts of the spacecraft after it arrived at the Cape, they felt, would provide excellent familiarization and systems training for the prime pilot and his alternate, who would be assigned to take turns in the capsule's contour couch. Then, if any modifications to the hardware or change in methods should become necessary, either man would be fully prepared to give valuable advice as well as to learn how the component change or new procedure would affect the mission. But by all accounts, as particularly ascribed to by the Mercury suborbital pilots, the best training sessions for practicing both normal and abnormal flight conditions in the Mercury program were those held in the procedures trainer. There all phases of a mission - prelaunch, countdown, launch, orbit, reentry, recovery, and emergency - could be simulated. The training planners decided that at least 30 hours of practice would be scheduled in this McDonnell-made trainer. On some occasions the simulation called for hooking the trainer in with the Mercury Control Center and the Bermuda tracking site, an exercise that also would help the flight controllers check, promulgate, or practice their communications and control procedures.

Voas and his colleagues scheduled numerous other training activities that would supposedly hone the astronauts to a fine edge. One such plan called for the pilot or his designated stand-in to attend the spacecraft scheduling meetings, operational planning sessions, and booster, spacecraft, and mission reviews. After the spacecraft had been mated with the booster, the astronaut would have a key role in the capsule systems test, sequential and abort exercises, and the simulated flight that accompanied each countdown launch simulation. With the astronaut sitting in the spacecraft, all countdown checks would be run up to the point of hatch installation. Voas' training document stipulated that even the exercise of slipping the pilot into his capsule should be practiced until the insertion crew had it down perfectly. Besides all this work at the Cape, preflight trips were planned to the Morehead Planetarium in North Carolina, so that the astronaut and his backup pilot could fix star patterns in their minds as an aid to their orbital celestial observations. To obtain a familiarity with angular motion, they would attend sessions in the Pensacola Naval Air Station's "rotating room" and on the human disorientation device. Egress training, the value of which Grissom vouched for after his harrowing recovery, was scheduled on the open water in the Atlantic. Finally, there were Morse code instruction, map study, and briefings by the Weather Bureau support team on observation procedures.¹⁰

All these varied tasks had to be scheduled in logical progression to bring about a status of "flight readiness." The original training directive specified that an intensive training program for an upcoming flight should begin with a comprehensive study of all capsule instrumentation about 81 days before the launch was scheduled. Nine days later, after the astronaut and his alternate had memorized everything they could about the capsule instrument panel, they would start spending at least three hours per week in the procedures trainer, making brief excursions to Langley for sessions on the air-lubricated, free-axis (ALFA) trainer. In the procedures trainer they would go through specific mission profiles. These included a normal one-orbit mission, lasting about 90 minutes, with the astronaut in casual clothes; five-hour sessions simulating three orbits, with the astronaut wearing a pressure suit on some occasions; and 30-minute abort simulations, including such hazards as the failure of the retropackage to jettison, failure of the spacecraft's main batteries shortly after orbital insertion, and many other malfunctions covering every conceivable contingency that the training officers could devise.¹¹

By December 1961, after Glenn and Carpenter had been publicly named for the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission, training plans were expanded to include their medical evaluations. For the altitude chamber simulated flight conducted about 45 to 60 days before the anticipated launch, Glenn was examined, fitted with biosensors, suited, pressure-checked, and then loaded into the transfer van and medically observed during the trip to the altitude test chamber. After he seated himself in the couch, his biosensor data were checked, his electrocardiogram leads were monitored, and the newly fabricated blood pressure equipment was exercised. Also there was a checkout of the spacecraft's environmental control system.¹²

MA-6
Preflight

Jocelyn Gill also began planning the scientific aspects that Glenn might attend to while he was in orbit, when she called the first meeting of the ad hoc committee in Washington on December 1, 1961. William K. Douglas, Voas, and John J. Van Bockel attended from the Manned Spacecraft Center. The main purpose of this gathering was to adjust the suggestions emanating from the earlier meeting of the Astronomy Subcommittee into a workable order to provide the astronauts with as much background as possible of what they might expect to see in space. The first piece of equipment for scientific purposes aboard the spacecraft discussed was a small filter planned for use in studying the irregularities of the night-sky illumination and aurorae. For later missions an ultraviolet camera was suggested for possible use in photographing the stellar spectra.¹³

Some eight days later Glenn, Carpenter, and Schirra accompanied Voas and Douglas to a second meeting called by Gill. Point by point the requested astronomical observations were explained to the three astronauts. Because of their evident interest, Gill was of the opinion that such briefings, perhaps with even more detailed information, should be provided at intervals as well as just before flight time.¹⁴

During the month before the MA-6 mission, Glenn underwent at the launch site a realistic test termed "Pad Rehearsal No. 1." This exercise started with biosensor and suiting-up preparations at the hangar, transportation to the pad, and insertion of the astronaut into the spacecraft. Both the blockhouse and the Mercury Control Center were tied into and participated in this exercise. Several days later this operation was carried out again, and this time the gantry was pulled away to make conditions more realistic. Then about three days before the scheduled flight, after he had already begun his low-residue diet, Glenn went through a simulated mission encompassing the entire flight plan.

Other preflight medical activities included a complete physical examination two days before the anticipated launch. The Mercury physicians issued Glenn a number of medications for his survival pack, including morphine for pain, mephentermine sulfate for shock, benzylamine hydrochloride for motion sickness, and racemic amphetamine sulfate (a common pep pill) for a stimulant. Radiation-measuring film packs were tucked inside the spacecraft.¹⁵

Glenn and Carpenter had completed most of their preflight training program by the end of January, but the continuing delay of the MA-6 launch forced them to go on with their crowded routine. Glenn spent 25 hours and 25 minutes in the spacecraft during the hangar and altitude test chamber checks and uncounted hours on the pad after the launch rocket and spacecraft were mated. On the procedures trainer between December 13, 1961, and February 17, 1962, he logged 59 hours and 45 minutes (far beyond the 30 required by the training directive) and worked through 70 simulated missions in the process, reacting to some 189 simulated system failures. Glenn and Carpenter, along with Donald Slayton and Walter Schirra, already picked for MA-7, participated in a two-day (December 11 and 13, 1961) recovery exercise on the Back River near Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, easily making both top and side hatch exits. Later Glenn and Carpenter, wearing life vests, carried out a survival equipment exercise off the beach at Cape Canaveral.¹⁶

Not only the pilots but many others were training for the MA-6 mission. On January 15, 16, and 17, 1962, recovery team swimmers practiced jumping from helicopters and placing the new auxiliary flotation collar around a boilerplate capsule. The flight controllers who were to deploy to the remote tracking sites got their final briefing on January 3 and left for their respective stations, where they engaged in seven rather extensive network exercises. Mercury Control, Goddard, and the Bermuda site conducted tests to check the Control Center-Bermuda abort command sequence. On January 25, Eugene F. Kranz reported to Christopher C. Kraft, the flight director, that the network team was at its peak condition. He feared that motivation and performance might decline if the flight continued to be delayed.¹⁷

Although this was to be the first manned orbital flight in Project Mercury, earlier flights set many precedents in the planning process for such items as recovery requirements, mission rules, and test objectives, and consequently the mission planning for MA-6 was almost routine. The launch azimuth heading was to be the same that Enos had followed into orbit riding MA-5; the recovery forces, now thoroughly seasoned, although somewhat larger than for MA-5, were stationed to cover essentially the same landing areas; ignition procedures and range rules for the launch were about the same as on previous Mercury-Atlas missions.¹⁸

Buildup for the Space Offensive

Again NASA invited the world's news media to send representatives to cover one of its launches. On December 5, 1961, Headquarters informed newspaper and magazine editors that NASA was planning to accommodate up to 400 accredited reporters. No exact flight date was mentioned, but the press was told that the launch would occur "either late this year or early the next."¹⁹ All hopes for a 1961 shot were dashed two days later when NASA Headquarters announced the postponement of MA-6 until early 1962.

Work to assist the news media in covering the event had been proceeding at the Manned Spacecraft Center for some time. Several months before the MA-6 launch, its Public Affairs Office, then under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel John A. "Shorty" Powers, began preparing a "Public Information Operating Plan," giving the estimated dates on which particular phases of the mission plan would be carried out. Powers evaluated each segment of the plan and recommended to the press various training and hardware preparation activities that the reporters might be interested in covering, as well as arranging for the reporters to cover flight-day activities. News release handouts were prepared covering almost every conceivable phase of the flight, from what the pilot would have for breakfast to an intricate discussion of how a spacecraft attitude control system should work. About five days before the anticipated launch date, Powers and his troupe established a news center at Cocoa Beach, Florida. Some of his men were assigned to pass out fact sheets, some were to record pictorial events surrounding the flight for use by the news media, some were to seek answers to the myriad technical queries posed by newsmen, and some were assigned to prepare advisories concerning mission progress status.

Correspondents accredited by NASA, many clad in colorful beach raiment, descended on the area. They avidly consumed the space agency's prepared information, interviewed key figures of the NASA-DOD-industry operations team, sunned on the beach, and pressed for more news and anecdotes after the evening meal. Some critics likened the atmosphere to that of a circus, but literally hundreds of thousands of words about every conceivable phase of the manned space program poured out for the edification of the tax-paying masses.²⁰ Surely in history no program that still essentially was in its research and development stage had ever been so open to the public through the eyes of the Fourth Estate.

The first "gathering on the beach" to view the MA-6 launch occurred on a cloudy Saturday morning, January 27, 1962, after bad weather had forced the launch to slip day-to-day from January 23, when the firing was first intended. The countdown ticked on but the overcast remained solid, and a general feeling swept through the crowd of faithful "bird watchers" that this still was not the day. Finally, at T minus 20 minutes Walter C. Williams, the mission director, canceled the shot. The overcast was so heavy that the necessary camera coverage of the early trajectory events would be impossible. "It was one of those days," said Williams later, "when nothing was wrong but nothing was just right either. I welcomed that overcast."²¹ John Glenn had been in his spacecraft, Friendship 7, named in a contest by his own family, a little over five hours. The rescheduling of the launch for February 1, four days ahead, necessitated emptying and purging the Atlas of its propellants.

On January 30 the ground support crew once more began fueling Atlas 109-D. During preflight checkout, a mechanic discovered, by a routine opening of a drain plug, that there was fuel in the cavity between the structural bulkhead and an insulation bulkhead separating the fuel and oxidizer tanks. The launch vehicle team estimated that, since the insulation had to be removed, a maximum of 10 work days would be needed to correct the problem and to check out the systems. This delay would slip the launch date, and slipping the launch date caused problems for the recovery force. Some 24 ships, more than 60 aircraft, and a number of specialized units, manned by a combined total of 18,000 personnel around the world, had to consider whether they could remain at their stations for a new date that might very well slip again. When all the tallies from the widespread units were before the recovery force commander, Rear Admiral John L. Chew, February 13 seemed the earliest possible next try at MA-6.²²

On January 31, amidst an audible groan from more than 600 news-media representatives who had managed to become accredited, the new launch date two weeks ahead was announced. Two weeks more at the Cape was too much for most of the benumbed newsmen; the exodus from the Florida peninsula began immediately. Only the spacecraft and launch vehicle technicians were left to minister, as Walter Williams termed it, to the "sick bird." Glenn took several days off to spend some time with his family at home in Arlington, Virginia. On one occasion he crossed the Potomac River to the White House for a brief visit with President Kennedy, who asked him many semitechnical questions about plans and systems for the orbital flight.²³

On February 9, as NASA personnel began to move back to the Cape, the weather was still foul. Evidently the newsmen felt there was little chance for a launching on the scheduled date; by the 13th only 200 had checked in at the motels in nearby Cocoa Beach. They received some grist for the journalistic mill at a press briefing arranged by NASA's Paul P. Haney and "Shorty" Powers. Robert L. Foster from McDonnell answered some questions about the spacecraft and Major Charles L. Gandy and Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth E. Grine of the Air Force answered others on the launch vehicle work and the general state of readiness for the flight.²⁴

The turbulent February weather in Florida improved little in succeeding days, and the space pilot continued to train. On the 15th, for example, Glenn, learning upon awakening that the weather still held up the launch, slept until 9:30 a.m:, had breakfast, spent two hours on the procedures trainer, and that afternoon studied the flight plan and technical documentation.

On February 19 the sky brightened; so did the spirits of the operations crew, who immediately began the 610-minute split countdown. During the afternoon the Department of Defense recovery force weather observers in the Atlantic reported to Williams that they had favorable weather conditions. At the Cape, however, the Weather Bureau personnel observed a frontal system moving across central Florida which, they surmised, could cause broken cloudiness over the Cape area on Tuesday morning (February 20). Williams, hoping for the best, decided to continue and ordered the launch crew to pick up the second half of the countdown at 11:30 p.m. on the evening of the 19th.²⁵

Meanwhile Glenn restudied the detailed mission sequence, first reviewing the countdown progress and then looking over his flight plan and checking the equipment list. That afternoon he attended another "final" mission review meeting, called by Williams. Glenn believed an astronaut should study his spacecraft's systems until the last possible minute before a flight. Shortly before he went to bed that night he read a section in the flight controller's handbook on the automatic stabilization and control system.²⁶

An American in Orbit

Glenn was awakened once again at 2:20 a.m. on February 20. After showering, he sat down to a breakfast of steak, scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, and coffee. At 3:05 the astronauts' flight surgeon, William Douglas, gave him a brief physical examination.

Douglas, Glenn, and his suit technician, Joe W. Schmitt, were only three of a multitude hard at work on the cloudy February morning. In the Mercury Control Center procedures log, the flight control team noted at 3:40 that they were "up and at it." The team immediately conducted a radar check, and although ionospheric conditions made the results poor the controllers believed the situation would improve soon. So they went on to check booster telemetry and the Control Center's voice intercom system, both of which were in good order. Shortly thereafter they found a faulty communication link that was supposed to be obtaining information about the capsule's oxygen system, but within minutes they had corrected the problem.²⁷

At 4:27 a.m. Christopher Kraft, sitting before his flight director's console, received word that the global tracking network had been checked out and was ready. In Hangar S, Douglas placed the biosensors on Glenn, and Joe Schmitt began helping the astronaut don his 20-pound pressure suit. At 5:01 the Mercury Control Center learned that the astronaut was in the van and on his way to the launch pad. The van moved slowly and arrived at 5:17, 20 minutes behind schedule. But the delay was of little consequence, for at 5:25 (T minus 120 minutes) trouble had cropped up in the booster's guidance system. Since this came during the built-in 90-minute hold part of the countdown for the astronaut insertion activity, the delay was not likely to halt the readying procedures for very long. The installation of a spare unit and an additional 45 minutes required for its checkout, however, made a total of 135 minutes lost.²⁸

Because of overcast weather and the guidance problem in the Atlas, Glenn relaxed comfortably in the van until 5:58, when the sky began to clear. The capsule and booster validation checks were progressing normally as he emerged from the van, saluted the onlookers, and boarded the gantry elevator. At 6:03, the operations team noted in its procedures log, the astronaut "put a foot into the spacecraft." Once inside Friendship 7, Glenn noticed that the respiration sensor - a thermistor attached to the astronaut's microphone in the air stream of his breath - had shifted from where it had been fixed during the simulated flight. Stanley C. White pointed out to Williams that a correction could only be made by opening the suit, a very tricky operation atop the gantry. So the two officials decided to disregard the slipped thermistor, even though faulty data would result. White advised the range to ignore all respiratory transmissions.²⁹

At last the technicians began to bolt the hatch onto the spacecraft, but at 7:10, with the countdown proceeding and most of the 70 bolts secured, a broken bolt was discovered. Although Grissom had flown in MR-4 with a broken hatch bolt, Williams, taking no chances this time, ordered removal and repair. Taking the hatch off and rebolting would require about 40 minutes, so the operations team took this opportunity to run still another check of the guidance system on Atlas 109-D. Glenn evidently maintained his composure during this hold, with his pulse ranging between 60 and 80 beats per minute. When a little more than half of the bolts had been secured, he peered through the periscope and remarked to Scott Carpenter and Alan Shepard in the Control Center, "Looks like the weather is breaking up."³⁰

Minutes later the hatch installation was completed and the cabin purge was started. A check of the cabin oxygen leakage rate indicated 500 cubic centimeters per minute, well within design specifications. At 8:05, T minus 60 minutes, the countdown continued, but after 15 minutes a hold was called to add about 10 gallons of propellant to the booster's tanks. Glenn had been busily going over his capsule systems checklist. As the holds continued, he occupied his time and relieved the pressure at various points on his cramped body by pulling on the bungee-cord exercising device in front of his head in the capsule. The countdown resumed while the liquid oxygen was being pumped aboard the Atlas, but at T minus 22 minutes, 8:58, a fuel pump outlet valve stuck, causing still another hold.³¹

At that point in the countdown, Glenn, the blockhouse and Control Center crews, and workers scurrying around and climbing on the gantry were joined by some 100 million people watching television sets in about 40 million homes throughout the United States. Countless others huddled around radios in their homes or places of business and about 50,000 "bird watchers" stood on the beaches near Cape Canaveral, squinting toward the erect rocket gleaming in the distance. Some of the more hearty and sun-tanned spectators had been at the Cape since mid-January and had organized trailer towns, complete with "mayors." Mission announcer Powers, popularly known as "the voice of Mercury Control," who had been at his post in the Control Center since 5 o'clock that morning, went on the air to advise the waiting public of the status of the countdown and the cause for the present hold.

With the stuck valve cleared, the count picked up at 9:25, but another suspenseful moment came at 6 1/2 minutes before launch time, when the Bermuda tracking station experienced an electrical power failure. Although the breakdown was brief, it took several more minutes to steady the Bermuda computer.

Flight of Friendship 7
Feb. 20 1962

At 9:47, after two hours and 17 minutes of holds and three hours and 44 minutes after Glenn entered his "office," Friendship 7 was launched on its orbital journey. The Atlas, supported by its tail of fire, lifted off its pad, and Powers made the announcement that this country had waited three long years to hear: "Glenn reports all spacecraft systems go! Mercury Control is go!" As Atlas 109-D lunged spaceward, Glenn's pulse rate climbed to 110, as expected. The Atlas and its control systems telemetered signals that they were functioning perfectly.³²

Half a minute after liftoff the General Electric-Burroughs guidance system locked onto a radio transponder in the booster to guide the vehicle until it was through the orbital insertion "window." The vibration at liftoff hardly bothered Glenn, but a hundred seconds later at max-q he reported, "It's a little bumpy about here." After the rocket plunged through the max-q region, the flight smoothed out; then two minutes and 14 seconds after launch, the outboard booster engines cut off and dropped away. Glenn saw a wisp of smoke and fleetingly thought the escape tower had jettisoned early, but that event occurred exactly on time, 20 seconds later.³³

When the tower separated, the vehicle combination pitched over still further, giving Glenn his first view of the horizon, which he described as "a beautiful sight, looking eastward across the Atlantic." Vibration increased as the fuel supply spewed out the sustainer engine nozzle, then abruptly stopped when the sustainer shut down. The sustainer had accelerated the capsule to a velocity only seven feet per second below nominal and had put the Atlas into an orbital trajectory only .05 of a degree low. Joyously the operations team noted in the log, "9:52- - -We are through the gates." Glenn received word that he could make at least seven orbits with the orbital conditions MA-6 had achieved. To Goddard's computers in Maryland the orbital insertion conditions appeared good enough for almost 100 orbits.³⁴

Although the posigrade rockets kicked the capsule loose from the booster at the correct instant, the five-second rate-damping operation started two and a half seconds late. This brief lapse caused a substantial initial roll error just as the capsule began its turnaround. The attitude control system managed the deviation very well, but it was some 38 seconds before Friendship 7 dropped into its proper orbital attitude. Turnaround spent 5.4 pounds of fuel from a total supply of 60.4 pounds (36 for automatic and 24.4 for manual control). Despite his slow automatic positioning maneuver, Glenn made his control checks with such ease that it seemed, he said, as if he were sitting in the procedures trainer. As Voas had asked him to do, the astronaut peered through the window at the tumbling Atlas tankage. It had come into view exactly as Ben F. McCreary of MSC had predicted it would. He could see the spent vehicle turning end over end, and he called out estimates of distances between the separating vehicles: "One hundred yards, two hundred yards." At one point Glenn's estimate matched the telemetry signal exactly. He visually tracked the sustainer intermittently for about eight minutes.³⁵

Glenn, noticing the onset of weightlessness, settled into orbital free flight with an inertial velocity of 17,544 miles per hour and reported that zero g was wholly pleasant. Although he could move well and see much through his trapezoidal window, he wanted to see even more. "I guess I'd like a glass capsule," he later quipped. Weightlessness also helped him as he used the hand-held camera. When his attention was drawn to a panel switch or readout, he simply left the "weightless" camera suspended and reached for the switch. Dutifully carrying out all of the head and body movements requested by Voas, he experienced none of the sensations reported by Gherman Titov. While any Glenn-Titov comparison might be ruled invalid since Titov reportedly became nauseated on his sixth orbit and Glenn flew only three orbits, MA-6 at least was to demonstrate to the American medical community that there were no discernible adverse physiological effects from over four hours of weightlessness.³⁶

The first orbit of Friendship 7 began ticking off like clockwork with the Canary Islands reporting all capsule systems in perfect working order. Looking at the African coastline, and later the interior over Kano, Nigeria, Glenn told the tracking station team that he could see a dust storm. Kano flight communicators replied that the winds had been quite heavy for the past week.³⁷

Glenn, completing his spacecraft systems checks over the Canaries, had commented that he was getting a little behind in his schedule but that all systems still were "go." Then, over Kano, he had commenced his own first major yaw adjustment, involving a complete turnaround of the capsule until he was facing his flight path. Glenn noted that the attitude indicators disagreed with what he could see were true spacecraft attitudes. Despite the incorrect panel readouts, he was pleased to be facing the direction his spacecraft was going.³⁸

Over the Indian Ocean on his first orbit, Glenn became the first American to witness the sunset from above 100 miles. Awed but not poetically inclined, the astronaut described the moment of twilight simply as "beautiful." Space sky was very black, he said, with a thin band of blue along the horizon. He could see the cloud strata below, but the clouds in turn prevented his seeing a mortar flare fired by the Indian Ocean tracking ship. Glenn described the remarkable sunset: the sun went down fast but not quite as quickly as he had expected; for five or six minutes there was a slow but continuous reduction in light intensity; and brilliant orange and blue layers spread out 45 to 60 degrees on either side of the sun, tapering gradually toward the horizon.

On the nightside of Earth, nearing the Australian coastline, Glenn made his planned star, weather, and landmark observations. He failed to see the dim light phenomenon of the heavens called the zodiacal light; he thought his eyes had not had sufficient time to adapt to the darkness. Within voice radio range of the Muchea, Australia, tracking station, Glenn and Gordon Cooper began a long space-to-Earth conversation. The astronaut reported that he felt fine, that he had no problems, and that he could see a very bright light and what appeared to be the outline of a city. Cooper answered that he probably saw the lights of Perth and Rockingham. Glenn also said that he could see stars as he looked down toward the "real" horizon - as distinguished from the haze layer he estimated to be about seven or eight degrees above the horizon on the nightside - and clouds reflecting the moonlight. "That sure was a short day," he excitedly told Cooper. "That was about the shortest day I've ever run into."³⁹

Moving onward above the Pacific over Canton Island, Glenn experienced an even shorter 45-minute night and prepared his periscope for viewing his first sunrise in orbit. As the day dawned over the island, he saw literally thousands of "little specks, brilliant specks, floating around outside the capsule." Glenn's first impression was that the spacecraft was tumbling or that he was looking into a star field, but a quick hard look out of the capsule window corrected this momentary illusion. He definitely thought the luminescent "fireflies," as he dubbed the specks, were streaming past his spacecraft from ahead. They seemed to flow leisurely but not to be originating from any part of the capsule. As Friendship 7 sped over the Pacific expanse into brighter sunlight, the "fireflies" disappeared.⁴⁰

The global circuit was proceeding without any major problems, and Glenn still was enjoying his extended encounter with zero g. He ran into some bothersome interference on his broadband HF radio when he tried to talk with the Hawaiian site at Kauai. An aircraft from the Pacific Missile Range tried unsuccessfully to locate the noise source. Other than the mystery of the "fireflies" and the intermittent HF interference, the mission was going fine, with the capsule attitude control system performing perfectly.

Then the tracking station at Guaymas, Mexico, informed the control center in Florida that a yaw reaction jet was giving Glenn an attitude control problem that, as he later recalled, "was to stick with me for the rest of the flight." This was disheartening news for those in the operations team, who remembered that a sticking fuel valve discovered during the second orbital pass of the chimpanzee Enos had caused the early termination of MA-5. If Glenn could overcome this control problem he would furnish confirmation for Williams' and others' contention that man was an essential element in the loop. If the psychologists' failure task analyses were correct, the flexibility of man should now demonstrate the way to augment the reliability of the machine.

Glenn first noticed the control trouble when the automatic stabilization and control system allowed the spacecraft to drift about a degree and a half per second to the right, much like an automobile with its front wheels well out of alignment. This drift initiated a signal in the system that called for a one-pound yaw-left thrust, but there was no rate response. Glenn immediately switched to his manual-proportional control mode and eased Friendship 7 back to orbital attitude. Then, switching from mode to mode, he sought to determine how to maintain the correct attitude position with the least cost in fuel. He reported that fly-by-wire seemed most effective and economical. Mercury Control Center recommended that he stay with this control system. After about 20 minutes the malfunctioning thruster mysteriously began working again, and with the exception of a few weak responses it seemed to be working well by the time Glenn was over Texas. After only about a minute of automated flight, however, the opposing yaw-right thruster ceased to function. When similar trials and waiting did not restore the yaw-right jet, Glenn realized that he would have to live with the problem and become a full-time pilot responsible for his own well-being.⁴¹

To the operations team at the Cape and to the crews at the tracking sites, Glenn appeared to be coping with his attitude control problem well, even though he had to omit many of his observational assignments. But a still more serious problem bothered the Cape monitors as Friendship 7 moved over them. An engineer at the telemetry control console, William Saunders, noted that "segment 51," an instrument providing data on the spacecraft landing system, was presenting a strange reading. According to the signal, the spacecraft heatshield and the compressed landing bag were no longer locked in position. If this was really the case, the all-important heatshield was being held on the capsule only by the straps of the retropackage. Almost immediately the Mercury Control Center ordered all tracking sites to monitor the instrumentation segment closely and, in their conversations with the pilot, to mention that the landing-bag deploy switch should be in the "off" position. Although Glenn was not immediately aware of his potential danger, he became suspicious when site after site consecutively asked him to make sure that the deploy switch was off. Meanwhile the operations team had to decide how to get the capsule and the astronaut back through the atmosphere with a loose heatshield. After huddling for several minutes, they decided that after retrofire the spent retropackage should be retained to keep the shield secure during reentry. William M. Bland, Jr., in the control center, hurriedly telephoned Maxime A. Faget, the chief designer of the Mercury spacecraft, in Houston, to ask if there were any special considerations they needed to know or to watch. Faget replied that everything should be all right, providing all the retrorockets fired. If they did not, the retropack would have to be jettisoned, because any unburned solid propellant would ignite during reentry. The operations team concluded that retaining the retropack was the only possible way of holding the shield in place and protecting Glenn during the early portion of his return to the dense atmosphere. The men in Mercury Control realized that the metallic retropack would burn away, but they felt that by the time it did, aerodynamic pressures would be strong enough to keep the shield in place. The decision once made, the members of the operations team fought off a gnawing uneasiness throughout the rest of the flight.⁴² This uneasiness was transmitted to the TV and radio audience before actual retrofire.

Meanwhile Friendship 7 was vaulting the Atlantic on its second orbital pass, and Glenn was busy keeping his capsule's attitude correct and trying to accomplish as many of the flight plan tasks as possible. He had advised Virgil Grissom at Bermuda that the oculogyric test, involving visually following a light spot, had just been completed. Near the Canary Islands the sun, streaming through his window, made Glenn a little warm, but he refused to adjust the water coolant control on his suit circuit. This time around he observed that evidently the "fireflies" outside the spacecraft had no connection with the gas from the reaction control jets. Glenn skillfully positioned his ship to take some photographs of the cloud masses and Earth spinning past beneath him. As he mused over a small bolt floating around inside the capsule, the Kano and Zanzibar sites monitoring the capsule suddenly noted a 12 percent drop in the secondary oxygen supply.⁴³

Meanwhile the Indian Ocean tracking ship was preparing for the second pass observation experiment. Battened down for heavy weather, the Mercury support crew decided that releasing balloons for Glenn to try to see was out of the question and instead they fired star-shell parachute flares. Glenn, however, was able to observe only lightning flashes in the storm clouds below.

Over the Indian Ocean, Glenn finally decided to adjust the water coolant flow in the suit circuit to improve on a condition he described as "comfortably warm." By the time he was over Woomera, Australia, the light signal warning of excess cabin water told him that the humidity level was rising. From then on throughout the rest of the flight he had to balance his suit cooling carefully against the cabin humidity, but the temperature inside his suit was never more than moderately uncomfortable. Another warning light appeared over Australia, indicating that the hydrogen peroxide fuel supply for the automatic system was down to 62 percent. Mercury Control Center recommended letting the capsule drift in orbit to conserve fuel. Glenn also complained that the roll horizon scanner did not seem to be working too well on the nightside of Earth and that it was difficult for him to obtain a visual reference to check the situation. To get a better view of Earth's horizon he pitched the spacecraft slightly downward, which helped some.

For the remainder of the second orbit and while going on into the third pass, Friendship 7 encountered no new troubles. Glenn continued to control his attitude without allowing too much drift, and consequently consumed considerably more fuel than the automatic system would have used had the control system been working normally. He had used six pounds from the automatic tank and 11.8 pounds from the manual on the second orbit, or almost 30 percent of his total supply. While he had to pay close attention to the control system to hold the fuel expenditure as low as possible, he still had opportunities for making observations, photographing the constellation Orion, and executing a third 180-degree yaw maneuver.

On the last orbital circuit of Friendship 7, the Indian Ocean tracking ship gave up on the release of objects for pilot observation; cloud coverage was still too thick. There was still time enough for a little joking between Cooper, at Muchea, and Glenn. The pilot quite formally requested the "down under" communicator to tell General David Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps, that three orbits should suffice for his minimal monthly requirement of four hours' flying time. Glenn asked that he be certified as eligible for his regular flight pay increment.

Now that Friendship 7 was halfway through its last orbit, Williams and Kraft decided to try once more to find out all they could about the heatshield before Glenn and his ship plunged through the searing reentry zone. At Kraft's order, the Hawaiian tracking site told Glenn to place the landing bag deploy switch in the automatic position. Then, if a light came on, he should enter with the retropack in place. Coupling this with past queries about this switch, Glenn thoroughly deduced his situation. He ran the test, reported that no light appeared, and added that he could hear no loose bumping noises when the spacecraft's attitude changed. The ground crew leaders differed regarding the best possible procedure to follow: Capsule systems monitors in the Control Center thought that the retropack should be jettisoned, while the data reduction crew urged that it be retained. This left the final decision up to Kraft and Williams. They weighed the information they had received and decided it would be safer to keep the retropack. Walter Schirra, the California communicator, passed the order to Glenn to retain the retropack until he was over the Texas tracking station.⁴⁴

Meanwhile Glenn was preparing for reentry. Keeping the retrorocket package on meant that he had to retract the periscope manually and activate the .05-g sequence by pushing the override switch. Then, while nearing the California coastline, a little more than four hours and 33 minutes after launch, the spacecraft assumed its critical retrofire attitude alignment and the first retrorocket fired. "Boy, feels like I'm going halfway back to Hawaii," Glenn reported. Seconds later, in orderly succession, the two remaining rockets executed the braking process. The attitude controls maintained spacecraft position exactly throughout the retrofire sequence; about six minutes after the first retrorocket fired, Glenn carefully pitched the conical end of the spacecraft up to the correct, 14-degree negative pitch attitude for its downward plunge through the atmosphere.

Now came one of the most dramatic and critical moments in all of Project Mercury. In the Mercury Control Center, at the tracking stations, and on the recovery ships ringing the globe, engineers, technicians, physicians, recovery personnel, and fellow astronauts stood nervously, stared at their consoles, and listened to the communications circuits. Was the segment 51 reading on the landing bag and heatshield correct? If so, would the straps on the retropack keep the heatshield in place long enough during reentry? And even if they did, was the thermal protection designed and developed into the Mercury spacecraft truly adequate? Would this, America's first manned orbital flight, end in the incineration of the astronaut? The whole Mercury team felt itself on trial and awaited its verdict.

Glenn and Friendship 7 slowed down during their long reentry glide over the continental United States toward the hoped-for splashdown in the Atlantic. The Corpus Christi station told Glenn to retain the retropack until the g meter before him read 1.5. Busily involved with his control problems, Glenn reported over the Cape that he had been handling the capsule manually and would use the fly-by-wire control mode as a backup. Mercury Control then gave him the .05-g mark, and the pilot punched the override button, saying later that he seemed to be in the fringes of the g field before he pushed. Almost immediately Glenn heard noises that sounded like "small things brushing against the capsule." "That's a real fireball outside," he radioed the Cape, with a trace of anxiety perhaps evident in his tone. Then a strap from the retropackage swung around and fluttered over the window, and he saw smoke as the whole apparatus was consumed. Although his control system seemed to be holding well, his manual fuel supply was down to 15 percent, with the deceleration peak still to come. So he switched to fly-by-wire and the automatic tank supply.⁴⁵

Friendship 7 came now to the most fearful and fateful point of its voyage. The terrific frictional heat of reentry enveloped the capsule, and Glenn experienced his worst emotional stress of the flight. "I thought the retropack had jettisoned and saw chunks coming off and flying by the window," he said later. He feared that the chunks were pieces of his ablation protection, that the heatshield might be disintegrating, but he knew there was nothing to gain from stopping work.⁴⁶

Shortly after passing the peak g region, the spacecraft began oscillating so severely that Glenn could not control the ship manually. Friendship 7 swung far past the "tolerable" 10 degrees on both sides of the zero-degree point. "I felt like a falling leaf," Glenn would recall. So he cut in the auxiliary damping system, which helped to stabilize the large yaw and roll rates to a more comfortable level. Fuel in the automatic tanks, however, was getting low. Obviously the heatshield had stayed in place; Glenn was still alive. But now he wondered whether his capsule would remain stable down to an altitude at which the drogue parachute could be deployed safely.

The pilot's fears proved real when both fuel supplies ran dry. Automatic fuel gave out at 111 seconds, and manual fuel depleted at 51 seconds, before the drogue deployment. The oscillations rapidly resumed, and at about 35,000 feet Glenn decided he had better try to deploy the drogue manually lest the spacecraft flip over into an antenna-downward instead of a heatshield-downward position. But just as he lifted his hand toward the switch, the drogue automatically shot out at 28,000 feet instead of the nominal 21,000. Suddenly the spacecraft straightened out and, as Glenn reported, "everything was in good shape."⁴⁷

All systems in Friendship 7 worked with precision for the remainder of the flight. At about 17,000 feet the periscope opened again for the pilot's use. Glenn, instead, glanced out the window, but it was coated with so much smoke and film that he could see very little. The spacecraft stabilized in its descent; the antenna section jettisoned; and Glenn, with immense relief, watched the main chute stream out, reef, and blossom. The Florida control center reminded Glenn to deploy the landing bag. He flipped the switch, saw the green light confirmation, and felt a comforting "clunk" as the shield and impact bag dropped into position four feet below the capsule. Glenn watched the ocean coming up to meet him and braced as the gap closed. Jolted by an impact that was more reassuring than stunning, he bobbed in the water, checked his watertight integrity, and relayed his elation that a successful MA-6 mission seemed assured.⁴⁸

Friendship 7 had splashed into the Atlantic about 40 miles short of the predicted area, as retrofire calculations had not taken into account the spacecraft's weight loss in consumables. The Noa, a destroyer code-named Steelhead, had spotted the spacecraft during its descent. From a distance of about six miles the destroyer radioed Glenn that it could reach him shortly. Seventeen minutes later, the Noa cruised alongside; a sailor smartly cleared the spacecraft antenna; and Boatswain's Mate David Bell deftly attached a davit line for pickup. During the hoist upward the spacecraft bumped solidly against the side of the destroyer. Once Friendship 7 was lowered to the mattress pallet, Glenn began removing paneling, intending to leave the capsule through the upper hatch. But it was too hot, and the operation was too slow for the already long day. So he told the ship's crew to stand clear, carefully removed the hatch detonator, and hit the plunger with the back of his hand. The plunger recoiled, cutting Glenn's knuckles slightly through his glove and giving him the only injury he received during the whole mission. A loud report indicated that the hatch was off. Eager hands pulled out the smiling astronaut, whose first words were "It was hot in there."

Lieutenant Commander Robert Mulin of the Navy and Captain Gene McIver of the Army, physicians assigned to the Mercury recovery team, described Glenn as being hot, sweating profusely, and fatigued. He was lucid but not loquacious, thirsty but not hungry. After drinking a glass of water and showering, he became more talkative. Asked if he felt any "stomach uneasiness" either during the flight or while he lolled the 17 minutes in the floating spacecraft waiting for pickup, Glenn admitted only to some "stomach awareness," beginning after he was down on the water. But there was no nausea, and the examining physicians assured themselves that Glenn's condition was caused by heat, humidity, and some dehydration. He had lost five pounds, five ounces from his preflight weight of 171 pounds, seven ounces. He had consumed the equivalent of only 94 cubic centimeters of water, in the form of applesauce puree, during the flight, while his urine output was 800 cubic centimeters. He also had perspired profusely while awaiting pickup.

Glenn's temperature an hour after landing was 99.2 degrees, or only a degree higher than his preflight reading, and by midnight he recorded a normal temperature. His blood pressure registered only a fraction higher than the preflight readings. The condition of his heart and lungs was normal before and after the mission, and there was nothing unusual about his skin except the superficial abrasions on the knuckles, caused by opening the hatch. By the time President Kennedy called his personal congratulations by radio telephone to Glenn aboard the Noa, the "wonderful trip-almost unbelievable" was over, Glenn was safe and sound, and 100 million American television viewers had happily ceased their vigil.

After recording on tape a "self-debriefing" aboard the Noa, Glenn was transferred to the carrier Randolph, where his chest was x-rayed, an electrocardiogram was made, and the initial phase of the technical debriefing was started. From there the astronaut was transported to Grand Turk Island, where a much more thorough physical began about 9:30 p.m., under the direction of Carmault B. Jackson, assistant to Flight Surgeon Douglas. February 20, 1962, proved to be "a long day at the office" for Glenn. After exhaustive tests and observations the attending physicians could find no adverse effects from Glenn's threefold circumnavigation in space. Technical debriefings continued for two days on the island and then moved to the Cape for another day's session.

The postflight analysis of Glenn's use of the three-axis handcontroller during reentry showed that about half of the thrust pulses he initiated opposed the direction of spacecraft motion, as they were supposed to. But the other half of the handcontroller movements either reinforced oscillating motions or had no net damping effect. The issue of "pilot-induced error" was picked up by some newsmen and reported as a controversy rather than a problem.

Now that the primary objectives of Project Mercury had been achieved at last in grand style, the drive for perfection in performance, so indispensable to manned space flight, still did not slow down.⁴⁹

The Hero

The American reaction to this country's first manned orbital flight was a mixture of relief, pride, and exaltation. From the Rose Garden at the White House, President Kennedy echoed the sentiments of the Nation:⁵⁰

I know that I express the great happiness and thanksgiving of all of us that Colonel Glenn has completed his trip, and I know that this is particularly felt by Mrs. Glenn and his two children.

I also want to say a word for all of those who participated with Colonel Glenn at Canaveral. They faced many disappointments and delays - the burdens upon them were great - but they kept their heads and they made a judgment, and I think their judgment has been vindicated.

We have a long way to go in this space race. But this is the new ocean, and I believe the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none.

Not only Americans but friendly foreigners hastened to add their praises for Glenn and Project Mercury. India's news media gave the flight top billing over an important national election. Most of the South American press viewed the space gap as already closed or being closed, while a sense of relief that a more favorable balance of power existed was evident in the African newspapers. Western Europeans were pleased with the openness of the undertaking, with the fact, frequently mentioned, that the United States had not used this momentous event to intimidate either opponent or neutral, and that the astronaut had kept his inflight remarks strictly apolitical. Numerous expressions of hope were voiced, as Khrushchev suggested and Kennedy repeated that Russians and Americans could enter into some sort of cooperative space program.⁵¹

The men of NASA, the Defense Department, and the aerospace industry viewed the feat more prosaically. They realized something of its impact on mankind, but most of their pride stemmed from the smooth-working demonstration of their space hardware and the recovery forces in action. And their interest quickly returned to the tasks of full exploitation of men and machines for Mercury.

Those who in the past had been the targets of technical kibitzing, domestic skepticism, and political pressure now were lauded by the American press for having "stuck by their guns." Periodicals praised Hugh L. Dryden, Robert R. Gilruth, Williams, Faget, Kraft, George M. Low, and Hartley A. Soulé, the "leaders of this technical team who did their work on civil service pay and sold no serial rights to national magazines… ."⁵²

The MA-6 honors and celebrations consumed several days. Glenn, his family, Vice-President Johnson, and the Mercury entourage passed in review on February 26 before an estimated 250,000 people lining rainy streets in Washington, after which the astronaut gave a 20-minute informal report to a joint session of Congress. New York City proclaimed March 1 "John Glenn Day," and Mayor Robert Wagner presented medals to Glenn and Gilruth. The next day there was an informal reception in honor of the orbiting American at United Nations Headquarters. Glenn then journeyed to his home town, New Concord (population 2,300), Ohio, where about 75,000 greeted him on March 3.

While everyone else feted Glenn, Mercury and contractor engineers at the Cape subjected his spaceship to a minute examination. Except for the usual discoloration, the interior and exterior of the capsule were in excellent condition. In several places where there were separations between the shingles, deposits of aluminum alloy had accumulated from the disintegration of the retrorocket package during reentry. A brownish film of undetermined origin covered the exterior surface of the window. Heatshield slices and cores showed about the same minor char depth found after the MA-4 and MA-5 missions; the center plug was sticking out about half an inch. There was also a wedge-shaped darker area on the shield, striated by several radial marks about four inches long, which the inspectors theorized was caused by the slipping retropack. The investigation team also found that the rotary switch that was to be actuated by the heatshield deployment had a loose stem, causing the electrical contact to break when the stem was moved up and down. This, they believed, accounted for the false deploy signal that worried everyone so much during the flight. Although there were several tears in the landing bag, caused either by impact or retrieval handling, for the first time no cables or straps in the landing system were broken. And while the lower pressure bulkhead again was slightly damaged, the equipment there escaped harm.⁵³

After this thorough postflight analysis, Glenn's spacecraft, McDonnell capsule No. 13, went on a global tour, popularly known as the "fourth orbit of Friendship 7." Literally millions of people stood patiently in line to look inside the spacecraft as it was exhibited in 17 countries and Hawaii. By August 1962 Friendship 7 had reached the "Century 21 Exposition" at Seattle. There, thousands more viewed the craft that had carried man on an orbital journey through space. Finally, on the first anniversary of its voyage, Friendship 7 came officially to rest near the Wright Brothers' original airplane and Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis in the Smithsonian Institution.⁵⁴

Friendship 7
Aftermath

Program Growth

The dramatic series of events surrounding the MA-6 mission tended to obscure what was happening elsewhere in the national space program. While Project Mercury finally was fulfilling its prime objective, NASA picked the launch vehicle for its Apollo program. Headquarters announced on January 9, 1962, that a "Super Saturn" (also known as "Advanced Saturn" and "Saturn C-5") would be the Moon program rocket. The Saturn was then described as being as tall as a 27-story building generating 7.5 million pounds of thrust in its first stage, which would make it about 20 times more powerful than the Atlas. On January 25, the Marshall Space Flight Center received orders from NASA Headquarters to develop this booster that could support manned circumlunar flights and manned lunar landings. The Saturn was to place 120 tons in low-Earth orbit or send 45 tons of spacecraft toward the Moon. At the same time, the public got its first view of drawings of the Apollo and Gemini spacecraft.⁵⁵

When the House Committee on Science and Astronautics opened its annual budget hearings on February 27, 1962, among the first witnesses to testify were John Glenn, Alan Shepard, and Virgil Grissom. Representative George P. Miller of California, chairman of the committee, introduced the three as "men who have been closest to the angels and still remain on Earth." All committee members expressed their satisfaction with the management of Project Mercury, and they reminded NASA that the agency was the committee's protege. Every tax dollar required to make Project Mercury and the rest of the civilian space program a success so far had resulted from the committee's study, approval, and authorization.⁵⁶

After the astronauts had made brief statements and answered some questions posed by the committee members, Administrator James E. Webb outlined the NASA budget request for fiscal year 1963. The total NASA request was for $3,787,276,000, of which $2.26 billion was earmarked for developing Gemini and Apollo and for further exploration with Mercury in manned space flight. Robert Gilruth testified about the Mercury portion of NASA's undertaking. By August 1962, when Congress passed the authorization bill, the NASA appropriation had been pruned to $3,644,115,000. This reduction included $90 million from research, development, and operational requests, and about $52.8 million asked for construction of new facilities. But the total NASA money bill, coupled with almost $1 billion that the Department of Defense received for its space projects, meant that the Nation was going to spend almost $5 billion annually on its space efforts.⁵⁷ The second phase of the Space Age seemed about to commence.

Meanwhile the Manned Spacecraft Center had been undergoing rapid changes, even though it was still located at the Langley Research Center pending the move to Houston. On January 15, 1962, the Mercury Project Office was established, reporting directly to Gilruth, together with the Gemini and Apollo management offices. Kenneth S. Kleinknecht, a former leader in NASA's X-15 project and technical assistant on Gilruth's staff since January 11, 1960, was picked to manage the completion of Mercury's program. Under its charter, the Mercury Project Office was "responsible for the technical direction of the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and other industrial contractors assigned work on the Mercury Project."⁵⁸

Project Office staffing and division of duties had been completed by the end of January. Kleinknecht chose William Bland, who had been associated with numerous engineering phases of the manned satellite enterprise since its inception, as his deputy. The internal labor divisions of the Office were: Project Engineering Office, Project Engineering Field Office (Cape), Engineering Operations Office, and Engineering and Data Measurements Office. At the outset, 42 people worked in the Project Office primarily on scheduling, procurement, and technical monitoring tasks. The similar management organizations set up for the Gemini and Apollo programs had James A. Chamberlin (manager of Mercury until the inception of Project Gemini) and Charles W. Frick as their managers, respectively.⁵⁹

Moving MSC from tidewater Virginia to the Gulf Coast of Texas could have had adverse effects on its staffing. Quite a number of the employees had long years of service with NACA and its successor NASA, and had established deep personal roots at Langley and around Hampton, Virginia. Now they would be uprooted and transplanted some 1500 miles away in Texas. Many would face inconvenience and monetary and personal losses resulting from the transfer. Stuart H. Clarke, chief of the Personnel Office of MSC, polled the staff to determine how many favored the move. Of 1152 employees, only 84 indicated that they would not go.⁶⁰ Gilruth and Williams decided that while people, records, and equipment were being transferred, the operational and Mercury Project Office activities should remain at Langley to prevent the disruption of Project Mercury's flight planning. This meant that management in Mercury would be directed from Langley at least through Mercury-Atlas 7.⁶¹

The Slayton Case

Donald K. Slayton and Walter M. Schirra, pilot and backup, respectively, for Mercury-Atlas 7, had been in training side by side with Glenn and Carpenter since the team announcements were made after the MA-5 flight. On March 15, 1962, NASA announced that Slayton, because of an "erratic heart rate," had been replaced by Carpenter as the pilot for MA-7. The suddenness of this announcement surprised almost everyone, especially journalists who had begun turning out "human interest" copy about Slayton. The obvious question was: How could an astronaut, supposedly a perfect physical specimen, develop, of all things, a heart condition? The truth was that Slayton had been under close medical surveillance for over two years, and he and his fellow astronauts each knew how precarious a thing is perfect health.

The astronauts' physician, William Douglas, recognized that Slayton had a condition medically termed as idiopathic atrial fibrillation - occasional irregularity of a muscle at the top of the heart, caused by unknown factors - when the astronauts first rode the centrifuge in August 1959 at Johnsville. Douglas noted Slayton was performing his tasks in magnificent fashion, but he still thought it best to consult with the chief of cardiology service at the Philadelphia Navy Hospital. The consultant assured Slayton and Douglas that the condition was of no consequence and should not influence Slayton's eventual choice as a flight astronaut. The astronaut's physician did not accept this appraisal as a final diagnostic decision. He and Slayton visited the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, Texas, where a member of the internal medicine staff voiced the same opinion. Sometime later Douglas learned that this individual wrote to Administrator James E. Webb, making a recommendation that Slayton should not be assigned a flight.

After sojourns at various medical centers, Douglas informed Mercury Director Gilruth of Slayton's condition during the fall of 1959. Gilruth, in turn, briefed NASA Headquarters in Washington. Douglas also relayed the information to the Air Force Surgeon General's office and was advised to take no action. For some time thereafter the "Slayton file" lay dormant. The astronaut was selected as a pilot in November 1961 and began training for his flight.

Shortly after the beginning of the new year, NASA Administrator Webb, remembering the dissenting vote he had received from an Air Force physician, and, mindful of the fact that Slayton was an Air Force officer on loan, directed a complete reevaluation of the case. In response Douglas called together Stanley White, William S. Augerson, and James P. Henry, physicians assigned to the Mercury program, to study the matter in detail. Their considered recommendation was that Slayton should continue as the pilot for MA-7. From MSC, Douglas journeyed to Washington to brief Brigadier General Charles H. Roadman and Colonel George M. Knauf, Chief and Deputy Chief of the Office of Space Medicine in NASA Headquarters. These doctors also recommended that Slayton remain on space flight status. The reopening of the case was brought to the attention of the Air Force Surgeon General, who convened a board of eight flight surgeons to review the matter. The MSC physician appeared before that body, presenting it with every facet of the medical file. Slayton also appeared. The board judged Slayton to be "fully qualified as an Air Force pilot and as an astronaut."

Administrator Webb referred the case to a group of three nationally eminent cardiologists - Proctor Harvey, professor of cardiology, Georgetown University; Thomas Mattingly, heart specialist, Washington Hospital Center; and Eugene Braunwall, National Institutes of Health. Their consensus was that they were unable to state conclusively whether Slayton's physiological performance would be jeopardized by his heart condition. Because of this unknown, they felt that if NASA had an available astronaut who did not "fibrillate," then he should be used rather than Slayton. Braunwall added that if there was sufficient time he would like to subject Slayton to some physiological tests.⁶²

Asked several years later if he had known about his heart condition when he was chosen for Project Mercury, Slayton replied:⁶³

No, I didn't, but in the examinations prior to the August 1959 centrifuge program at AMAL the medics discovered that my heart skipped a beat now and then. I went ahead with the centrifuge runs and began to watch myself very closely, noticing that quite often after supper my pulse would be irregular. I would get out and run a mile and everything was normal again. I was terribly concerned over what in my diet might be causing it, but every hypothesis turned up wrong. Concern in STG and even NASA Headquarters got so great in 1960 that I was sent to all kinds of exhaustive examinations under the best heart specialists in the country - in Philadelphia, San Antonio, and New York City. I was examined by different groups of heart specialists who could find nothing wrong. Even Paul Dudley White, Ike's personal physician, gave me a clean bill of health but rendered an operational rather than a diagnostic decision, recommending that the unknown factor in my heart murmur not be added to all the other unknowns for manned space flight.

The Slayton decision was irrevocable, even though Gilruth and William Douglas disagreed with the high-level medical verdict. Slayton, they felt, had withstood greater stresses in the training program than he would have experienced had he been rocketed into orbit. On the other hand, Administrator Webb, because of the unknown elements, concurred with the cardiologists that it was neither safe nor politic to subject an individual who had a heart condition, however slight, to the stresses of orbital flight when there were other flight- trained astronauts available.

Shortly after the replacement, Douglas, having completed a three-year tour of detached duty with NASA, returned to his career service, the Air Force. Some newsmen were quick to conclude that this action suggested bitterness. They had not known that Douglas had been invited to the medical hearings but had known that Douglas had been outspoken in his opposition to Slayton's removal from flight status. Stanley White denied the charge in a news conference, maintaining that Douglas' return to the Air Force had been arranged for "better than six months."⁶⁴ Of the original team of astronauts, Slayton had been considered the professional test pilot par excellence, largely because of his overwhelming experience and flight time. He soon became the coordinator of astronaut activities. He never abandoned hope that he still might make a space flight. As late as December 1964, more than a year and a half after Project Mercury had completed its last flight and when Project Gemini was nearing its first manned flight, the unlucky astronaut remarked, "I've never been grounded and I'm not now. I still hope to get my chance to go beyond the atmosphere."

MA-7 Preparations

One would have expected, in keeping with the "backup" concept, that Schirra, the MA-7 alternate pilot, now would step in as prime astronaut. But in view of the numerous delays and consequent lengthy training preparations for MA-6, Williams, as the operations team leader, recommended to Gilruth that Carpenter, Glenn's backup pilot, was most primed for the upcoming mission. Carpenter had logged 79 1/2 hours of preflight checkout and training time in Glenn's Friendship 7, more than twice the 31½ hours he would spend in his own Aurora 7 for the same purposes.⁶⁵

Although Glenn's mission had been highly successful, the Mercury operations team was still in the learning process. Experience with a component in the Mercury capsule or a flight procedure during the MA-6 orbital flight served to guide MA-7 mission planning. Glenn had shown that man definitely could be more than just a passenger, so the MSC planners adjusted the MA-7 flight plan to allow more pilot control of the mission. Combined yaw-roll maneuvers were scheduled to permit observation of the sunrise, as well as maneuvers to determine the use of day and night horizons, landmarks, and stars as navigation references. One of the more interesting planned innovations for Carpenter's voyage involved a period of inverted flight (head toward Earth) to determine the effect of Earth-up and sky-down on pilot orientation. Flight planners recognized the need for perceptual reorientation in space flight as well as for the motor skills that had been demonstrated so well by Glenn. The next Mercury mission ought to be as much of a scientific experiment as possible, not only to corroborate MA-6 but also to explore new possibilities with the manned Mercury spacecraft.⁶⁶

Since Glenn had been able to respond to many of the scientific astronomical observation requests, Homer Newell, who had been Director of NASA's Office of Space Sciences since November 1, 1961, decided that the direction of the scientific portion of the manned space flight program should now become the responsibility of a formal committee. Jocelyn Gill again was chosen to serve as chairman of a group called the Ad Hoc Committee on Scientific Tasks and Training for Man-in-Space. Two days after receiving the mandate, Dr. Gill called a meeting of members, consisting of representatives from the various scientific disciplines, on March 16, 1962, to outline objectives, review past activities in this respect, present a preliminary analysis of the scientific debriefing of Glenn, and outline tasks and goals for the next meeting. One of the aims of the new committee was to devise a curriculum that would provide the astronauts with the best informational sources available about the spatial phenomena they might see. In addition to this, they proceeded to suggest several experiments to the Manned Spacecraft Center.⁶⁷

So without jeopardizing either pilot safety or mission success, the MA-7 flight would be designed to yield as much scientific, as opposed to engineering, information as possible. Kleinknecht, head of the MSC Mercury Project Office, named Lewis R. Fisher chairman of the Mercury Scientific Experiments Panel, as a parallel to the NASA Headquarters unit, to manage and arrange for the experiments being suggested. Fisher and his associates were charged with reviewing all proposed experiments from an engineering feasibility standpoint in terms of their scientific value, relative priority, and suitability for orbital flight.⁶⁸

The Fisher panel first met at Cape Canaveral on April 24, 1962, and decided to emphasize five suggested experiments: releasing a multi-colored balloon that would remain tethered to the capsule, observing the behavior of liquid in a weightless state inside a closed glass bottle, using a special light meter to determine the visibility of a ground flare, making weather photographs with hand-held cameras, and studying the airglow layer - for which Carpenter would receive special training. The tethered balloon was a 30-inch mylar inflatable sphere, which was folded, packaged, and housed with its gas expansion bottle in the antenna canister. The whole balloon package weighed two pounds. Divided into five sections of different colors - uncolored aluminum, yellow, orange, white, and a phosphorescent coating that appeared white by day and blue by night - the balloon was to be cast off near perigee after the first orbital pass to float freely at the end of a 100-foot nylon line. The purposes of the balloon experiment were to study the effects of space on the reflection properties of colored surfaces through visual observation and photographic studies and to obtain aerodynamic drag measurements by use of a strain gauge.⁶⁹

Some experimentation on the effects of reduced gravity on liquids previously had been conducted at Holloman Air Force Base, at the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, and at the Lewis Research Center. But the duration of these experiments, involving parabolic airplane flights and drop-tower tests, had been necessarily short. Results of an extended study would have both immediate and long-range implications in manned space flight operations. Already the problem of gas or fuel vapor ullage in space vehicles and in storage tanks was causing some difficulties, and later there would be related problems in orbital rendezvous fuel transfer. Before fuel tanks and pumps for extended use in space could be designed, the behavior of surface tension and capillary action of liquids in the weightless state had to be determined. For this experiment the Lewis Center provided a small glass sphere containing a capillary tube with tiny semicircular holes at the bottom of the open tube. The sphere, only 20 percent filled, contained 60 milliliters of a mixture of distilled water, green dye, aerosol solution, and silicone. The liquid had a surface tension of 32 dynes per centimeter on Earth.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology requested photographs of the daylight horizon through blue and red filters to define more precisely the Earth-horizon limb as seen from above the atmosphere. These findings would be particularly valuable for navigation studies in the Apollo program. The Weather Bureau wanted information on the best wavelengths for meteorological satellite photography. John A. O'Keefe and Jocelyn Gill at the Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA Headquarters, respectively, wanted a distance measurement of the airglow layer above the horizon, its angular width, and a description of its characteristics, and for this experiment Carpenter was provided with a photometer and trained to use it. Paul D. Lowman, also of Goddard, requested special photography of the North American and African land masses. Lowman's interest was based on his studies of planetary surfaces, particularly regarding meteoroid impact features.⁷⁰

A number of technical changes based on MA-6 mission results were made for MA-7, mostly involving deletions of certain equipment from the spacecraft to reduce weight. Kleinknecht's office eliminated the sofar bombs and radar chaff recovery aids, which seemed unnecessary in view of the effectiveness that had been demonstrated by the sarah beacon and dye markers. Other deletions included the knee and chest straps on the couch, which had bothered Grissom; the red filter in the window; the moderately heavy Earth-path indicator; and the instrument panel camera, which had already gathered sufficient data.

Modifications made to improve spacecraft, network, and astronaut performance included a radio frequency change in the telemetry system to eradicate transmission interference like that experienced on Glenn's flight. The two landing-bag switches were rewired so that both had to be closed to activate the deploy signal. To correct temporarily the control problem experienced by Glenn, Karl F. Greil of the Mercury Project Office studied masses of data and concluded that the problem lay in the fuel line filters. So the dutch-weave filters in the fuel lines were replaced with platinum screens, and a stainless-steel fuel line was substituted. This was intended as an "interim fix," but it became permanent in the Mercury project for the later flights. Even the astronaut's attire underwent some modifications. Pockets were added on the upper sleeves and on the lower legs of the pressure suit for pencils, a handkerchief, and other small accessories. And the waterwing life vest, first carried by Glenn, was installed on the chest beneath the parabolic mirror. To add to Carpenter's comfort while he was waiting in his capsule on the launch pad, a new and more resilient liner was fitted in the couch.⁷¹

The three principal components of the MA-7 mission - spacecraft, launch rocket, and astronaut - were in preparation for several months. Spacecraft No. 18 was the first of these to reach the Cape, arriving on November 15, 1961. During its long checkout period by G. Merritt Preston's crew, this vehicle was reworked twice to incorporate lessons learned during MA-5 and MA-6. Some equipment and systems in the capsule had to be exchanged because what it had carried to Florida simply did not work properly. The original periscope, for example, failed to latch in the retracted position. Glenn's drogue parachute mortar supposedly had fired before the pilot triggered its button; the McDonnell engineers decided that a barostat in the recovery arming circuit should prevent another premature action. Since there still were questions concerning the temperature at different places on the capsule while it was in orbit, a device known as a "low-level commutator" was added, and temperature pickups were strategically located at 28 points on the spacecraft to record temperature data on a tape recorder carried on board.⁷²

When in March he learned that he would fly spacecraft No. 18, Scott Carpenter named his capsule Aurora 7. He chose this name deliberately, "Because I think of Project Mercury and the open manner in which we are conducting it for the benefit of all as a light in the sky. Aurora also means dawn - in this case the dawn of a new age. The 7, of course, stands for the original seven astronauts." Coincidentally, the astronaut as a boy had lived at the corner of Aurora and Seventh Avenues in Boulder, Colorado.

The Atlas, the astronaut, and the ground support personnel entered into their final preparatory phase in March 1962. On March 8, six days after the Air Force accepted it at the rollout inspection at the Convair factory in San Diego, Atlas 107-D arrived at the Cape and was erected on the pad. Since the previous Atlas had performed well in boosting Glenn into orbit and since the MA-7 launch requirements were to duplicate those of MA-6, few changes were necessary for 107-D. One alteration was a slight reduction in the staging time, from 131.3 to 130.1 seconds after liftoff, to improve the launch vehicle's ability to reach the precise center of the insertion "window."⁷³ Intensive training for the astronaut, his backup, and the tracking teams on the MA-7 mission began on March 16. Mission simulations, flight controller training, and an exercise of the Defense Department recovery forces proceeded much as they had for MA-6. The Atlantic tracking ship, however, was not on station for MA-7 because she was at a Baltimore shipyard, being converted into a command ship to support the longer duration Mercury missions.⁷⁴

At the time of Glenn's flight, the launch of MA-7 had been scheduled for the second week in April, but the installation of new components, such as the temperature survey instrumentation and the barostat in the drogue parachute circuit, as well as other work, delayed the launching until May. Also contributing to the postponement was an Atlantic Fleet tactical exercise that required participation by the recovery ships and aircraft for several weeks. The week beginning May 20 looked the most feasible for sending a second American into orbit.⁷⁵

Flight of Aurora 7

At 1:15 a.m., May 24, 1962, Scott Carpenter was awakened in his quarters in Hangar S at Cape Canaveral. He ate a breakfast of filet mignon, poached eggs, strained orange juice, toast, and coffee, prepared by his dietitian. During the next hour, starting about 2:15 a.m., he had a physical examination and stood patiently in his underwear as the sensors were attached at various spots on his lean body, and by 3:25 he had donned his silver suit and had it checked. Everything had gone so smoothly that Carpenter had time to relax in a contour chair while waiting to board the van.

At 3:45, Carpenter and his retinue, including Joe Schmitt and John Glenn, marched from the hangar and climbed aboard the vehicle for a slow ride to Pad 14, where Aurora 7 sat atop the Atlas. Again there was a pause, during which a Weather Bureau representative presented a briefing to the astronaut-of-the-day, predicting a dispersal of the ground fog then hovering around the launch site. Finally, at 4:35, Carpenter received word from Mercury Control to ascend the gantry. Just before he boarded the elevator he stopped to swap greetings with and to thank the flight support crewmen. After the final checks in the gantry white room, the astronaut crawled into the capsule and got settled with only minor difficulties, and soon the capsule crew was bolting the hatch. This time all 70 bolts were aligned properly.⁷⁶

Meanwhile the booster countdown was racing along. Christopher Kraft recalled that the countdown was "as near perfect as could be hoped for." The only thing complicating the prelaunch sequence was the persistent ground fog and broken cloudiness at dawn. Strapped in the contour couch, and finding the new couch liner comfortable, Carpenter was busy verifying his preflight checklist. Just 11 minutes before the scheduled launch time, the operations team decided that adequate camera coverage was not yet possible, and three consecutive 15-minute holds were called. Although Carpenter felt that he could continue in a hold status indefinitely, he was thirsty and drank some cold tea from his squeeze bottle supply. During the holds he talked with his wife Rene and their four children at the Cape, assuring them that all was well.⁷⁷

The rising sun rapidly dispelled the ground fog. Then at 7:45 a.m., after the smoothest countdown of an American manned space mission to date, Mercury-Atlas 7, bearing Aurora 7, rose majestically off the pad while some 40 million people watched by television.⁷⁸

Kraft, the flight director, described the powered phase of the flight as so "excellent" that the decision to "go-for-mission" was almost routine. Seventy-three seconds from launch, the booster's radio inertial guidance system locked on and directed the flight from staging until T plus 5:38 minutes. Actually this amounted to some 28 seconds after the Atlas sustainer engine had died, but no guidance inputs were possible after engine shutdown. Carpenter tried using the parabolic mirror on his chest to watch the booster's programming, but he could see only a reflection of the pitch attitude. At about 35,000 feet he noticed out his window a contrail, and then an airplane producing another contrail. The sky began to darken; it was not yet black, but it was no longer a light blue.

The booster performed much more quietly than Carpenter had expected from all its awesome power. Vibration had been slight at liftoff. Booster engine cutoff was smooth and gentle, but a few seconds later the noise accompanying maximum aerodynamic stress began to build up. A wisp of smoke that appeared out the window gave Carpenter the impression that the escape tower had jettisoned, but a glance showed that it was still there. Shortly thereafter, when the tower did separate from the capsule, Carpenter "felt a bigger jolt than at staging." He watched the tower cartwheel lazily toward the horizon, smoke trailing from its three rocket nozzles.⁷⁹

Sustainer engine cutoff came only as a gentle drop in acceleration. Two bangs were cues that the clamp-ring explosive bolts had fired and that the posigrade rockets had propelled the spacecraft clear of the booster. Now Aurora 7 was on its own and in space. Becoming immediately aware that he was weightless, Carpenter elatedly reported that zero g was pleasant. Just as the capsule and booster separated, the astronaut had noticed that the capillary tube in his liquid-test apparatus seemed to fill. Then he averted his gaze; it was time to turn the spacecraft around to its normal backward flying orbital attitude. Since Glenn had left this maneuver to the automatic control system and the cost in fuel had been high, Carpenter used fly-by-wire. The spacecraft came smartly around at an expense of only 1.6 pounds of fuel, compared with over 5 pounds used on Glenn's MA-6 maneuver.⁸⁰

As the capsule swung around from antenna-canister-forward to heatshield-forward, Carpenter was impressed by the fact that he felt absolutely no angular motion; his instruments provided the only evidence that the turnaround maneuver was being executed. Like Glenn, he was amazed that he felt no sensation of speed, although he knew he was traveling at orbital velocity (actually 17,549 miles per hour). Soon he had his first awe-inspiring view of the horizon - "an arresting sight," as he described it. Quickly checking his control systems, he found everything in order. Unknown to him, however, the horizon scanner optically sensing his spacecraft's pitch attitude was off by about 20 degrees. It was some time before he deduced this system was in error.

As Glenn had done, Carpenter peered out the window to track the spent Atlas sustainer engine. The tankage appeared to fall downward, as the engineers had predicted, and was tumbling away slowly. A trail of ice crystals two or three times longer than the launch vehicle streamed from its nozzle. Over the Canary Islands, Carpenter still could see the sustainer tagging along below the spacecraft. Meanwhile the astronaut continued to check the capsule systems and report his findings to the tracking sites. Over Kano, in mid-Nigeria, he said that he was getting behind in his flight plan because of difficulty in loading his camera with the special film to photograph the Earth-horizon limb. Before he moved beyond radio range of Kano, however, he managed to snap a few photographs. Although it was now almost dusk on his first "45-minute day," Carpenter was becoming increasingly warm and began adjusting his suit-temperature knob.⁸¹

Over the Indian Ocean on his first pass, Carpenter glanced down for a view through the periscope, which he found to be quite ineffective on the dark side of Earth. Concluding that the periscope seemed to be useless at night, he returned to the window for visual references. Even when the gyros were caged and he was not exactly sure of his attitude position, he felt absolutely no sensation of disorientation; it was a simple matter in the daylight to roll the spacecraft over and watch for a landmark to pop into view. Carpenter mentioned many recognizable landmarks, such as Lake Chad, Africa, the rain forests of that continent, and Madagascar. But he was a little surprised to find out that most of Earth when seen from orbit is covered by clouds the greater part of the time.⁸²

While over the Indian Ocean, Carpenter discovered that his celestial observations were hampered by glare from light seepage around the satellite clock inside the capsule. The light from the rim of the clock, which should presumably have been screened, made it hard for him to adjust his eyes to night vision. To Slayton at the Muchea station, Carpenter reported that he could see no more stars from his vantage point in space than he could have seen on Earth. Also he said that the stars were not particularly useful in gaining heading information.⁸³

Like his orbital predecessor, Carpenter failed to see the star- shell flares fired in an observation experiment. This time the flares shot up from the Great Victoria Desert near Woomera, Australia, rather than from the Indian Ocean ship. According to the plan, four flares of one-million candlepower were to be launched for Carpenter's benefit on his first orbit, and three more each on his second and third passes. On the first try the flares, each having a burning time of 1½ minutes, were ignited at 60-second intervals. At this time most of the Woomera area was covered by clouds that hid the illumination of the flares; the astronaut consequently saw nothing and the experiment was discontinued on the succeeding two passes, as weather conditions did not improve.⁸⁴

Out over the Pacific on its first circuit, Aurora 7 performed nicely. The Canton Island station received the telemetered body temperature reading of 102 degrees and asked Carpenter if he was uncomfortable at that temperature. "No, I don't believe that's correct," Carpenter replied. "I can't imagine I'm that hot. I'm quite comfortable, but sweating some." The medical monitors accepted Carpenter's self-assessment and concluded that the feverish temperature reading resulted from an error in the equipment. For the rest of the journey, however, the elevated temperatures persisted, causing the various communicators to ask frequently about Carpenter's physical status.⁸⁵

The food Carpenter carried on his voyage was different from Glenn's which was of the squeeze-tube, baby-food variety. For Carpenter the Pillsbury Company had prepared three kinds of snacks, composed of chocolate, figs, and dates with high-protein cereals; and the Nestlé Company had provided some "bonbons," composed of orange peel with almonds, high-protein cereals with almonds, and cereals with raisins. These foods were processed into particles about three-fourths of an inch square. Coated with an edible glaze, each piece was packaged separately and stored in an opaque plastic bag. As he passed over Canton he reported that he had eaten one bite of the inflight food, which was crumbling badly. Weightless crumbs drifting around in the cabin were not only bothersome but also potentially dangerous to his breathing. Though he had been able to eat one piece, his gloved hands made it awkward to get the food to his mouth around the helmet microphones.⁸⁶ Once in his mouth, however, the food was tasty enough and easy enough to eat.

During the second orbit, as he had on the first, Carpenter made frequent capsule maneuvers with the fly-by-wire and manual-proportional modes of attitude control. He slewed his ship around to make photographs; he pitched the capsule down 80 degrees in case the ground flares were fired over Woomera; he yawed around to observe and photograph the airglow phenomenon; and he rolled the capsule until Earth was "up" for the inverted flight experiment. Carpenter even stood the capsule on its antenna canister and found that the view was exhilarating. Although the manual control system worked well, the MA-7 pilot had some difficulty caging the attitude gyros to zero before inverting the spacecraft. On two occasions he had to recycle the caging operation after the gyros tumbled beyond their responsive limits.

Working under his crowded experiment schedule and the heavy manual maneuver program, on six occasions Carpenter accidentally actuated the sensitive-to-the-touch, high-thrust attitude control jets, which brought about "double authority control," or the redundant operation of both the automatic and the manual systems. So by the end of the first two orbits Carpenter's control fuel supply had dipped to about 42 percent in the manual tanks and 45 percent in the automatic tanks. During his second orbit, ground capsule communicators at various tracking sites repeatedly reminded him to conserve his fuel.

Although his fuel usage was high during the second circumnavigation, Carpenter still managed to continue the experiments. Just as he passed over the Cape, for example, an hour and 38 minutes from launch, Carpenter deployed the multicolored balloon. For a few seconds he saw the confetti spray, signaling deployment. Then, as the line lazily played out, he realized that the balloon had not inflated properly; only two of the five colors - orange and dull aluminum - were visible, the orange clearly the more brilliant. Two small, earlike appendages about six to eight inches each, described as "sausages," emerged on the sides of the partially inflated sphere. The movement of the half-inflated balloon was erratic and unpredictable, but Carpenter managed to obtain a few drag resistance measurements. A little more than a half hour after the balloon was launched, Carpenter began some spacecraft maneuvers and the tether line twined to some extent about the capsule's antenna canister. Carpenter wanted to get rid of the balloon and attempted to release it going into the third orbit over the Cape, but the partially successful experimental device stayed doggedly near the spacecraft.⁸⁷

Flight of Aurora 7
May 24, 1962

As Carpenter entered the last orbit, both his automatic and manual control fuel tanks were less than half full. So Aurora 7 began a long period of drifting flight. Short recess periods to conserve fuel had occurred earlier in the flight, but now Carpenter and his ship were to drift in orbit almost around the world. Although his rapidly depleting fuel supply had made the drift a necessity, this vehicle control relaxation maneuver, if successful, would be a valuable engineering experiment. The results would be most useful in planning the rest and sleep periods for an astronaut on a longer Mercury mission. Carpenter enjoyed his floating orbit, observing that it was a simple matter to start a roll rate of perhaps one degree per second and let the capsule slowly revolve as long as desired. Aurora 7 drifted gracefully through space for more than an hour, or almost until retrofire time.

While in his drifting flight, Carpenter used the Moon to check his capsule's attitude. John Glenn had reported some difficulty in obtaining and holding an absolute zero-degree heading. Carpenter, noting that the Moon appeared almost in the center of his window, oriented the spacecraft so that it held the Moon on the exact center mark and maintained the position with ease.⁸⁸

During the third orbital pass, Carpenter caught on film the phenomenon of the flattened Sun at sunset. John O'Keefe and his fellow scientists at Goddard had taught Carpenter that the color layers at sunset might provide information on light transfusion characteristics of the upper atmosphere. Carpenter furnished a vivid description of the sunset to the capsule communicator on the Indian Ocean ship:

The sunsets are most spectacular. The earth is black after the sun has set… . The first band close to the earth is red, the next is yellow, the next is blue, the next is green, and the next is sort of a - sort of a purple. It's almost like a very brilliant rainbow. These layers extend from at least 90 degrees either side of the sun at sunset. This bright horizon band extended at least 90 degrees north and south of the position at sunset.

He took some 19 pictures of the flattened Sun.⁸⁹

As Carpenter drifted over oceans and land masses, he observed and reported on the haze layer, or airglow phenomenon, about which Glenn had marveled. Carpenter's brief moments of airglow study during the second orbit failed to match the expectations he had derived from Glenn's reports and the Goddard scientists' predictions on the phenomenon. Having more leisure on his third circuit, Carpenter described the airglow layer in detail to Slayton at the Muchea tracking site:

… the haze layer is very bright. I would say about 8 to 10 degrees above the real horizon. And I would say that the haze layer is about twice as high above the horizon as the bright blue band at sunset is; it's twice as thick. A star - stars are occluded as we pass through this haze layer. I have a good set of stars to watch going through at this time. I'll try to get some photometer readings… . It is not twice as thick. It's thinner, but it is located at a distance about twice as far away as the top of the band at sunset. It's very narrow, and as bright as the horizon of the earth itself.

The single star, not stars, that Carpenter tracked was Phecda Ursae Majoris, in the Big Dipper or Great Bear constellation, with a magnitude of 2.5.⁹⁰

With each sunrise, Carpenter also saw the "fireflies," or "Glenn effect," as the Russians were calling it. To him the particles looked more like snowflakes than fireflies, and they did not seem to be truly luminous, as Glenn had said. The particles varied in size, brightness, and color. Some were gray, some were white, and one in particular, said Carpenter, looked like a helical shaving from a lathe. Although they seemed to travel at different speeds, they did not move out and away from the spacecraft as the confetti had in the balloon experiment.

At dawn on the third pass Carpenter reached for a device known as a densitometer, that measured light intensity. Accidentally his gloved hand bumped against the capsule hatch, and suddenly a cloud of particles flew past the window. He yawed right to investigate, noting that the particles traveled across the front of the window from right to left. Another tap of the hand on the hatch sent off a second shower; a tap on the wall produced another. Since the exterior of the spacecraft evidently was covered with frost, Glenn's "fireflies" became Carpenter's "frostflies."⁹¹

Until Aurora 7 reached the communication range of the Hawaiian station on the third pass, Christopher Kraft, directing the flight from the Florida control center, considered this mission the most successful to date; everything had gone perfectly except for some overexpenditure of hydrogen peroxide fuel. Carpenter had exercised his manual controls with ease in a number of spacecraft maneuvers and had made numerous and valuable observations in the interest of space science. Even though the control fuel usage had been excessive in the first two orbits, by the time he drifted near Hawaii on the third pass Carpenter had successfully maintained more than 40 percent of his fuel in both the automatic and the manual tanks. According to the mission rules, this ought to be quite enough hydrogen peroxide, reckoned Kraft, to thrust the capsule into the retrofire attitude, hold it, and then to reenter the atmosphere using either the automatic or the manual control system.⁹²

The tracking site at Hawaii instructed Carpenter to start his preretrofire countdown and to shift from manual control to the automatic stabilization and control system. He explained to the ground station over which he was passing at five miles per second that he had gotten somewhat behind on the preretro checkoff list while verifying his hypothesis about the snowflake-like particles outside his window. Then as Carpenter began aligning the spacecraft and shifting control to the automatic mode, he suddenly found himself to be in trouble. The automatic stabilization system would not hold the 34- degree pitch and zero-degree yaw attitude. As he tried to determine what was wrong, he fell behind in his check of other items. When he hurriedly switched to the fly-by-wire control mode, he forgot to switch off the manual system. For about 10 minutes fuel from both systems was being used redundantly.⁹³

Finally, Carpenter felt that he had managed to align the spacecraft for the retrofire sequence. The Hawaiian communicator urged him to complete as much of the checklist as possible before he passed out of that site's communications range. Now Alan Shepard's voice from the Arguello, California, station came in loud and clear, asking whether the Aurora 7 pilot had bypassed the automatic retroattitude switch. Carpenter quickly acted on this timely reminder. Then the countdown for retrofire began. Because the automatic system was misbehaving, Carpenter was to push the button to ignite the solid-fuel retrorockets strapped to the heatshield. About three seconds after Shepard's call of "Mark! Fire One," the first rocket ignited and blew. Then the second and the third followed in reassuring succession. Carpenter saw wisps of smoke inside his cabin as the rockets braked him out of orbit.⁹⁴

Carpenter's attitude error was more than he estimated when he reported his attitude nearly correct. Actually Aurora 7 was canted at retrofire about 25 degrees to the right, and thus the reverse thrust vector was not in line with the flight path vector. This misalignment alone would have caused the spacecraft to overshoot the planned impact point by about 175 miles. But the retrorockets began firing three seconds late, adding another 15 miles or so to the trajectory error. Later analyses also revealed a thrust decrement in the retrorockets that was about three percent below nominal, contributing 60 more miles to the overshoot. If Carpenter had not bypassed the automatic retroattitude switch and manually ignited the retrorockets he could have overshot his pickup point in the Atlantic by an even greater distance.⁹⁵

Unlike Glenn, Carpenter had no illusion that he was being driven back to Hawaii at retrofire. Instead he had the feeling that Aurora 7 had simply stopped and that if he looked toward Earth he would see it coming straight up. One glance out the window, however, and the "impression was washed away."⁹⁶ The completion of retrofire produced no changes the pilot could feel until his reentry began in earnest about 10 minutes later.

After the retrorockets had fired, Carpenter realized that the manual control system was still on. Quickly he turned off the fly-by-wire system, intending to check the manual controls.Although the manual fuel gauge read six percent left, there was, in fact, no fuel and consequently no manual control. So Carpenter switched back to fly-by-wire. At that time the automatic system supply read 15 percent, but the astronaut wondered how much really remained. Could it be only about 10 percent? With this gnawing doubt and realizing that it was still 10 minutes before .05-g time, Carpenter kept hands strictly off for most of his drifting glide. Whatever fuel there was left must be saved for the critical tumble. This 10-minute interval seemed like eternity to the pilot. The attitude indicators appeared to be useless, and there was little fuel to control attitude anyway. The only thing he trusted for reference was the view out of the window; using fly-by-wire sparingly he tried to keep the horizon in view. Although concerned about the fuel conservation problem, Carpenter gained some momentary relief from the fascinating vistas below: "I can make out very, very small - farm land, pasture land below. I see individual fields, rivers, lakes, roads, I think. I'll get back to reentry attitude."⁹⁷

Finally, Aurora 7 reached the .05-g acceleration point about 500 miles off the coast of Florida. As he began to feel his weight once again, Carpenter noted that the automatic fuel needle still read 15 percent. Within seconds the capsule began to oscillate badly. A quick switch to the auxiliary damping mode steadied the spacecraft. Grissom, the Cape communicator, reminded him to close his faceplate.⁹⁸

Aurora 7 was now in the midst of its blazing return to Earth. Carpenter heard the hissing sounds reported by Glenn, the cues that his ship was running into aerodynamic resistance. Immediately the capsule began to roll slowly, as programmed, to minimize the landing point dispersion. Carpenter looked out the window for the bright orange glow, the "fireball," as Glenn had described it, but there was only a moderate increase in light intensity. Rather than an orange glow, Carpenter saw a light-green glow apparently surrounding the cylindrical section. Was this radiant portion of the spacecraft ablating? Was the trim angle correct? The evenness of the oscillations argued to Carpenter that the trim angle was good. All the way through this zone Carpenter kept talking. Gradually it became difficult to squeeze the words out; the heaviest deceleration load was coming. The peak g period lasted longer than he had expected, and it took forceful breath control to utter anything.⁹⁹

The automatic fuel tank on Aurora 7 was emptied between 80,000 and 70,000 feet. As the plasma sheath of ionized air enveloped his spacecraft, communication efforts with Carpenter became useless, but the telemetered signals received by the radar stations at the Cape and on San Salvador predicted a successful reentry. The oscillations were increasing as the capsule approached the 50,000-foot level. Aurora 7 was swinging beyond the 10-degree "tolerable" limits. Carpenter strained upward to arm the drogue at 45,000 feet, but he forced himself to ride out still more severe oscillations before he fired the drogue parachute mortar at 25,000 feet. The chute pulsed out and vibrated like thin, quivering sheets of metal. At 15,000 feet Carpenter armed the main parachute switch, and at 9,500 feet he deployed the chute manually. The fabric quivered, but the giant umbrella streamed, reefed, and unfurled as it should. The rate of descent was 30 feet per second, the exact design specification. The spacecraft landing bag deploy was on automatic. Carpenter listened for the "clunk," heard the heatshield fall into position, and waited to hit the water. Aurora 7 seemed to be ready for the landing, and the recovery forces knew within a few miles the location of the spacecraft as radar tracking after retrofire had given and confirmed the landing point.¹⁰⁰

Splashdown was noisy but less of a jolt than the spaceman had expected. The capsule, however, did not right itself within a minute as it was supposed to do. Carpenter, noticing some drops of water on his tape recorder, wondered if Aurora 7 was about to meet the fate of Liberty Bell 7, and then sighed in relief when he could find no evidence of a leak. He waited a little longer for the spacecraft to straighten up, but it continued to list to his left. Grissom's last transmission from Mercury Control had told Carpenter that it would take the pararescue men about an hour to reach him, and the astronaut realized that he had evidently overshot the planned landing zone. When he failed to raise a response on his radio, he decided to get out of the cramped capsule. Then he saw that the capsule was floating rather deeply, which meant that it might be dangerous to remove the hatch. Sweating profusely in the 101-degree temperature of the cabin, he pulled off his helmet and began the job of egress as it had been originally planned. Carpenter wormed his way upward through the throat of the spacecraft, a hard, hot job made bearable by his leaving the suit circuit hose attached and not unrolling the neck dam. He struggled with the camera, packaged life raft, survival kit, and kinky hose before he finally got his head outside.

Half out of the top hatch, Carpenter rested on his elbows momentarily, released the suit hose but failed to deploy the neck dam and lock the hose inlet, and surveyed the sea. Lazy swells, some as high as six feet, did not look too forbidding. So he carefully laid his hand camera on top of the recovery compartment, squeezed out of the top, and carefully lowered himself into the water, tipping the listing spacecraft slightly in the process. Holding onto the capsule, he was able to easily inflate the life raft - upside down. By this time, feeling some water in his boots, he secured the hose inlet to the suit. He then held on to the spacecraft's side and managed to flip the raft upright. After crawling onto the yellow raft, he retrieved the camera, unrolled the suit neck dam, and prepared to wait for as long as it took the recovery searchers to find him. The recovery beacon was operating and the green dye pervaded the sea all around him.¹⁰¹

The status of Carpenter and Aurora 7 was unknown to the public. Everyone following the flight by radio or television knew that the spacecraft must be down. But was the pilot safe? What the public did not know was that one P2V airplane had received the spacecraft's beacon signal from a distance of only 50 miles, while another plane had picked up the signal from 250 miles. Aurora 7's position was well known to the recovery forces in the area. About eight minutes before the spacecraft landed, an SA-16 seaplane of the Air Force Air Rescue Service had taken off from Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico, for the radar-predicted landing point. Three ships - a Coast Guard cutter at St. Thomas Island, a merchantman 31 miles from the plotted point, and the destroyer Farragut about 75 miles away to the southwest - were in the vicinity of the impact point. But it would certainly take longer than an hour for any recovery unit to reach the site. Since Carpenter's raft had no radio, the drama was heightened. What exactly had happened to Carpenter after his landing was known only to the astronaut and perhaps to a few sea gulls and sea bass.¹⁰²

Carpenter settled down on his raft and waited patiently for his rescuers. He mused over some seaweed floating nearby and "a black fish that was just as friendly as he could be - right down by the raft." In time, 36 minutes after splashdown, he saw two aircraft, a P2V and, unexpectedly, a Piper Apache. The astronaut watched the planes circle, saw that the Apache pilot was photographing the area, and knew that he had been found. Twenty minutes later several SC-54 aircraft arrived, and one dropped two frogmen, but Carpenter, watching other planes, did not see them bail out.¹⁰³

Airman First Class John F. Heitsch, dropping from the SC-54 transport about an hour and seven minutes after Carpenter had first hit the water, missed the life raft by a considerable distance. Releasing his chute harness, he dove under the waves and swam the distance to the side of Carpenter's raft. "Hey!" called the frogman to the spaceman. Carpenter turned and with complete surprise asked, "How did you get here?" Shortly thereafter a second pararescue man, Sergeant Ray McClure, swam alongside and clutched the astronaut's raft. The two frogmen quickly inflated two other rafts and locked them to the spacecraft. McClure and Heitsch later described the astronaut as smiling, happy, and not at all tired. The pilot broke out his survival rations and offered some to the two Air Force swimmers, who declined the space food but drank some space water.¹⁰⁴

The three men, still without radio contact, perched on the three rafts and watched the planes circling above. One plane dropped the spacecraft flotation collar, which hit the water with a loud bang, breaking one of its compressed-air bottles. The swimmers retrieved and attached the flotation collar with only its top loop inflated and then crawled back onto their rafts. Shortly a parachute with a box at the end came floating lazily down some distance from the spacecraft. The men on the rafts supposed this was the needed radio, and one of the frogmen swam a considerable distance to get it. He returned with the container, opened it, and found that there was no radio inside, only a battery. Later Carpenter laughingly declined to repeat the swimmer's heated remarks.¹⁰⁵

The Air Force SA-16 seaplane from Roosevelt Roads arrived at the scene about an hour and a half after the spacecraft landed in the Atlantic. To the SA-16 pilot the sea seemed calm enough to set his craft down upon and pick up the astronaut, but the Mercury Control Center directed the seaplane not to land. As later depicted by the news media and thoroughly discussed in Congress, this delay grew out of traditional rivalry between the Air Force and the Navy. Brigadier General Thomas J. Dubose, a former commander of the Air Rescue Service, wrote to Florida's United States Senator Spessard L. Holland, charging that Carpenter floated in the raft an hour and20 minutes longer than was necessary. D. Brainerd Holmes, a NASA official, testified at the hearings that Admiral John L. Chew, commander of the Project Mercury recovery forces, feared the seaplane might break apart if it landed on the choppy waters. Because of this, according to Holmes, the decision had been made to proceed with helicopter and ship pickup as originally planned.¹⁰⁶

After three hours of sitting on the sea in his raft, Carpenter was picked up by an HSS-2 helicopter, but either the rotorcraft settled as a swell arose or the winch operator accidentally lowered away, and the astronaut was dunked. Up went his arm and the hand holding the camera to keep the precious film dry. With nothing else amiss, Carpenter was hoisted aboard the helicopter, a drenched but happy astronaut. Richard A. Rink, a physician aboard, described Carpenter as exhilarated. The astronaut draped one leg out of the helicopter and, by cutting a hole in his sock, drained most of the water from his pressure suit. He then stood up and proceeded to pace around, sometimes settling in a seat, and intermittently talking about his flight. Carpenter arrived aboard the carrier Intrepid some four hours and 15 minutes after his return to Earth. The medical examinations began immediately but were interrupted when the astronaut was called to the phone to receive what was by now President Kennedy's traditional congratulatory call. The President expressed his relief that Carpenter was safe and well, while Carpenter gave his "apologies for not having aimed a little better on reentry." From the Intrepid the astronaut was flown to Grand Turk Island, where, as Howard A. Minners, an Air Force physician assigned to Mercury, described it, Carpenter wanted to stay up late and talk.¹⁰⁷

Aurora 7 Aftermath

Aurora 7, picked up by the destroyer Pierce, was returned to Cape Canaveral the next day. When retrieved, the spacecraft was listing about 45 degrees compared to the normal 15 to 20 degrees, and it contained about 65 gallons of sea water, which would hamper the inspection and postflight analyses. Carpenter recalled two occasions on which the spacecraft had shipped small amounts of water, but he was unable to explain the larger amount found by the pickup crew. The exterior of the spacecraft showed the usual bluish and orange tinges on the shingles, several of which were slightly dented and scratched as after previous missions. Since there was no evidence of inflight damage, these slight scars presumably were the result of postflight handling. The spacecraft heatshield and main pressure bulkhead were in good condition except for a missing shield center plug, which had definitely been in place during reentry. Some of the honeycomb was crushed, resulting in minor deformation of the small tubing in that area. Heitsch and McClure, the pararescue men, had reported the landing bag in good condition, but when it was hauled out of the water most of the straps were broken, probably by wave action. All in all, Aurora 7 was in good shape and had performed well for Project Mercury's second manned orbital flight.¹⁰⁸

The postflight celebrations and honors followed the precedents and patterns established by Glenn's flight. Administrator Webb presented to Carpenter and Williams NASA Distinguished Service Medals in a ceremony at the Cape. Carpenter also learned of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's cabled congratulations. Then the astronaut's hometown, Boulder, Colorado, gave him a hero's welcome. After being awarded a degree by the University of Colorado, where he had lacked a credit in a heat-transfer course, the astronaut facetiously commented that the blazing MA-7 reentry surely qualified him as a master in the field of thermodynamics. Memorial Day found the pilot in Denver, where a crowd of 300,000 people cheered and honored him. The next day he returned to work at Langley, where exhaustive technical debriefings were held to glean all the knowledge possible from MA-7.¹⁰⁹

In these postflight sessions the astronaut insisted that he knew what he wanted to do at all times, but that every task took a little longer than the time allotted by the flight plan. Some of the equipment, he said, was not easy to handle, particularly the special films that he had to load into a camera. As a consequence he had been unable to get all the pictures the Weather Bureau had requested for its satellite photography program. Moreover, the flight plan that had been available during training was only a tentative one, and the final plan had been completed only a short while before he suited up for the launch. Carpenter felt that the completed plan should be in the astronaut's hands at least two months before a scheduled flight and that the flight agenda should allow more time for the pilot to observe, evaluate, and record. When asked about fuel consumption by the high thrusters, Carpenter replied that the 24-pounders were unnecessary for the orbital phase of a flight.

The astronaut recommended that some method be devised for closing off the high thrusters while the automatic control system was in operation. He granted that on the fly-by-wire, low-thruster operation, the spacecraft changed its attitude slowly, as was shown by the needle movement, and that the pilot would have to wait momentarily to pick up the desired attitude change rate. For tracking tasks, however, the manual- proportional mode served well; attitude changes could be made with only a gentle touch of the handcontroller. Talking with newsmen after the flight, Carpenter assumed full responsibility for his high fuel consumption. He pointed out, however, that what he had learned would be valuable for longer Mercury missions.¹¹⁰

As mid-year 1962 approached, Project Mercury faced yet another crossroad. Had enough been learned during the two three-orbit flights to justify going on to longer missions? Joe W. Dodson, a Manned Spacecraft Center engineer, speaking before the Exchange Club of Hampton, Virginia, indicated that the MSC designers and planners and the operations team were well pleased with the lessons derived from Glenn, from Carpenter, and from their spacecraft. They were pleased especially at how well the combination of man and machine had worked.

Shortly thereafter, the press began to speculate that NASA might try a one-day orbital flight before 1963. Administrator Webb, however, sought to scotch any premature guesswork until Gilruth and his MSC team could made a firm decision. He stated that there might well be another three-orbit mission, but added that consideration was being given to a flight of as many as six orbits with recovery in the Pacific. Robert C. Seamans, Jr., NASA's "general manager," told congressional leaders that if a decision had to be made on the day on which he was speaking, it would probably be for another flight such as Glenn and Carpenter had made. But many members of Congress wanted to drop a third triple-orbit mission in favor of a flight that would come closer to or even surpass Gherman Titov's 17-orbit experience.

On June 27, 1962, NASA Headquarters ended the speculation by announcing that Walter Schirra would pilot the next mission for as many as six orbits, possibly by the coming September, with L. Gordon Cooper as alternate pilot.¹¹¹ The original Mercury objectives had been met and passed; now it was time to proceed to new objectives - longer missions, different in quality as well as quantity of orbits. Project Mercury had twice accomplished the mission for which it was designed, but in so doing its end had become the means for further ends.