From Design into Development

(January - June 1959)

FROM dreams into definitions and from design into development, the idea for a manned satellite was growing toward fruition. During the first half of 1959, the Space Task Group (STG) guided the translation of its conceptual designs into detailed developmental plans for the molding of hardware. Creating an engineering program, planning precisely the flight missions, organizing men, money, and material to fulfill those missions, and establishing technical policy and managerial responsibility were the prime necessities of the moment. But this year began with the realization of a Russian "dream," Mechta.

On January 2, 1959, the Soviets announced they had successfully launched a rocket toward the Moon, the final stage of which weighed 3,245 pounds, including almost 800 pounds of payload instrumentation inside its spherical shell. The Soviet Mechta, also popularly called Lunik I, was the first man-made object to attain the 25,000-mile-per-hour speed needed to break away from Earth's gravitational field. By comparison the United States Moon probe Pioneer III, launched by a four-stage Jupiter called Juno II on December 6, 1958, had weighed 13 pounds and attained a velocity of 24,000 miles per hour. And though it missed its target, Lunik I flashed past Earth's natural satellite to become the first successful "deep space" (i.e., translunar) probe and the first man-made artifact to become a solar satellite.¹

While Mechta presumably went into solar orbit, and even while many incredulous Americans refused to accept this impressive claim, NASA mobilized for the national effort to catch up with the Soviets in propulsion and guidance, and in progress toward manned space flight. The project named Mercury embodied the latter half of those hopes.

Robert R. Gilruth and his STG associates at Langley, together with Abe Silverstein and others in Washington, plunged knowingly into one of the greatest engineering adventures of all time. Somewhat self-conscious in the role of men of action setting out to do what had never been done before, they tried to match means to their ends without too much introspection and by avoiding useless worries over comparative scores in the space race. Like all good engineers, they were also professors of efficiency. They committed themselves to do their unique task as effectively, economically, and quickly as possible. But the inexorable conflict between the novelty of the experiment and the experience with novelty that alone can lead to efficiency they had to accept as an occupational hazard. Two of their ideals - to perform orbital flight safely and to perform it with economy - were embodied in preliminary designs for Project Mercury long before those same ideals became obligations during the development of the program. Their third ideal - timeliness - gradually became crushed between performance and cost considerations.

In the hectic three months of planning and procurement from September 1958 to January 1959, the original "objectives and basic plan" for Project Mercury gradually clarified by abbreviation to an itemized list. Continued reiteration throughout preliminary development (January through June 1959) finally reduced the aims, attitudes, and means of the Space Task Group to a set of nominative formulas used again and again as "Slide No. 1" in briefings:

• Objectives
  1. Orbital flight and recovery
  2. Man's capabilities in environment
• Basic Principles
  1. Simplest and most reliable approach
  2. Minimum of new developments
  3. Progressive build-up of tests
• Method
  1. Drag vehicle
  2. ICBM booster
  3. Retrorocket
  4. Parachute descent
  5. Escape system

Reduced to this form by July 1959, the basic doctrine for Project Mercury remained essentially unchanged throughout the entire life of the program. Although the managers of Mercury found this a source of considerable pride, they were forced to make certain departures from their basic principles and to refine their methods continually.² The techniques and technology for landing, for example, were not specified this early. The efforts to ensure a safe touchdown, on water instead of land, became a critical concern over a year later.

Brickbat Priority

From the beginning STG had sought to obtain the Nation's highest priority for the manned satellite program. But the White House, Congress, and NASA Headquarters at first regarded as equally important the development of a "10⁶," or one-million-pound-thrust, booster engine, and the elaboration of space sciences through the continuation of instrumented satellite programs similar to Vanguard. Hugh L. Dryden initiated a request to the Department of Defense as early as November 14, 1958, to put the "manned satellite and the one-million-pound-thrust engine" in the DOD Master Urgency List alongside the Minuteman and Polaris weapon systems. But the National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC) had deferred this request on December 3, pending a scheduled meeting the next week of the Civilian-Military Liaison Committee (CMLC). The Space Council did recommend that NASA assign its highest in-house priority to Project Mercury. When it met, the Liaison Committee recommended the "DX," or highest industrial procurement priority, for the manned satellite. They assumed that the Vanguard and Jupiter-C projects would be dropped from that category and that the mullion-pound-thrust engine would be assigned the next lower, or a "DO," priority.³

New additions to the DX list required the approval of the National Security Council, but earlier that body had delegated authority to the Secretary of Defense to decide on top priorities for satellite systems. Secretary Neil H. McElroy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff received the Liaison Committee's recommendations for a new Master Urgency List on December 17. NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan protested to William M. Holaday, the Pentagon's Director of Guided Missiles and chairman of the Liaison Committee, that not only Mercury but the big new booster, to become known in February as the Saturn, should have top priority. McElroy therefore directed Holaday to review the entire DX category before deciding what to do about the dual NASA requests for the so-called "brickbat," or highest, priority rating.⁴ Here matters stood at the end of the year.

For these reasons, financial allowances for extensive (and expensive) overtime work and the authorization for preferential acquisition of scarce materials were delayed well into 1959. Maxime A. Faget's optimistic belief before the program started that a man might possibly be placed in orbit within 18 months, or during the second quarter of the calendar year 1960, depended upon the immediate assignment of the Nation's highest priority to Mercury - and an enormous amount of the best possible luck! One of the first official estimates of the launch schedule for STG, made by Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., in early December for the Air Force Missile Test Center at Cape Canaveral predicted concurrent development, qualification, and manned orbital flights from April through September in 1960.⁵ This "guesstimate" was likewise predicated on an immediate Defense Department order to allow Project Mercury to compete "on a non-interference basis" with the military missile programs in obtaining critical "off-the-shelf" components, particularly electronic and guidance items.

By the first of the new year, it was fairly clear that the large Saturn booster would be continued by the Army's Wernher von Braun team and that the Defense Department was not about to release von Braun and his associates to NASA. Glennan, Dryden, and Silverstein had given Project Mercury the highest priority within NASA itself, but among industrial suppliers and the Defense Department it ranked second to several more urgent and competing demands. By March 1959, definite evidence of equipment and material supply shortages accumulated. The new prime contractor warned of delivery schedule slippages resulting from Mercury's DO rating. Holaday's reports were favorable toward Mercury, and Glennan compromised on the "10⁶-engines." For the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) had directed the Army Ordnance Missile Command and the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division, respectively, to start independent development of both a clustered first-stage booster (the Saturn) and a single-chamber rocket engine (the F-1) able to generate about 1,500,000 pounds of thrust.⁶

So NASA finally presented a united front with the Defense Department to the President and Congressional committees. On April 27, 1959, Eisenhower himself approved the request for the "brickbat" procurement rating for Mercury. The prime contract and most of the major subcontracts for the space capsule had been let well before May 4, when Mercury was officially listed in the topmost category on the Master Urgency List.⁷ But the attendant privilege of not having to seek the lowest bidder on every major item bought was probably less important to the development of the program than the added prestige and support the DX rating brought to Mercury within the aerospace industry and among the military services.

During the first quarter of 1959, confusion reigned in Washington aerospace circles as too many missile czars, too many space projects, and too many agencies clamored for more funds and support. But journalists, scientists, and humanitarians applauded the successes of the Navy-NASA Vanguard II, a tiny weather satellite; of the Air Force's Discoverer I, first satellite in polar orbit; and of the Army-NASA Pioneer IV, which managed to duplicate Mechta's escape velocity. As a deep-space probe and the first U.S. solar satellite, Pioneer IV, launched March 3, was magnificently instrumental in expanding man's knowledge of the plurality of the Van Allen radiation belts and of the "solar winds," or radiation storms, that permeate interplanetary space. Glennan had resolved to identify all NASA booster rockets with the name "United States" only, but other rocket agencies within the government were unlikely to follow suit. In the midst of all this, Project Mercury seemed still an obscure conception to the public. Roy W. Johnson of ARPA called it "very screwball" when first proposed; by the end of March he said, "It looks a little less screwball now."⁸

Meanwhile, within STG itself, the most urgent task in getting on with the program had already been accomplished by the end of 1958. On December 29 the Task Group had completed its technical assessments of the industrial proposals for manufacturing the capsule and its subsystems. Eleven complete proposals had been received. The narrowing of the field of possible manufacturers was facilitated by the fact that so many alternate configurations were submitted. Faget had invited the bidders "to submit alternate capsule and configuration designs if you so desire, provided that you incorporate the retrorocket principle, the non-lifting principle and the non-ablating heat sink principle. You are not limited to this particular approach only."⁹ But some of the bidders had taken him altogether too literally in this statement.

Awarding the Prime Contract

During the first week in January, another group of men, led by Carl Schreiber at NASA Headquarters, evaluated the procurement aspects of the competitive proposals. This Management, Cost, and Production Assessment Committee was required to rank only eight companies, because four had been disqualified on purely technical grounds. By January 6, four companies were reported to the Source Selection Board as having outstanding management capabilities for the prime contract. But in the final analysis Abe Silverstein and the six members of his board had to decide between only two firms with substantially equal technical and managerial excellence: Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation and McDonnell Aircraft Corporation. The NASA Administrator himself eventually explained the principal reason for the final choice:

The reason for choosing McDonnell over Grumman was the fact that Grumman was heavily loaded with Navy projects in the conceptual stage. It did not appear wise to select Grumman in view of its relatively tight manpower situation at the time, particularly since that situation might be reflected in a slow start on the capsule project regardless of priority. Moreover, serious disruption in scheduling Navy work might occur if the higher priority capsule project were awarded to Grumman.¹⁰

NASA informed McDonnell on January 12 that it had been chosen the prime contractor for the Mercury spacecraft. Contract negotiations began immediately; after three more weeks of working out the legal and technical details, the stickiest of which was the fee, the corporation's founder and president, James S. McDonnell, Jr., signed on February 5, 1959, three originals of a contract.¹¹ This document provided for an estimated cost of $18,300,000 and a fee of $1,150,000. At the time, it was a small part of McDonnell's business and a modest outlay of government funds, but it officially set in motion what eventually became one of the largest technical mobilizations in American peacetime history. Some 4,000 suppliers, including 596 direct subcontractors from 25 states and over 1500 second-tier subcontractors, soon came in to assist in the supply of parts for the capsule alone.¹²

The prime contract was incompletely entitled "Research and Development Contract for Designing and Furnishing Manned Satellite Capsule." The omission of an article before the word "manned" and the lack of the plural form for the word "capsule" prefigured what was to happen within the next five months. The original contract began evolving with the program, so that instead of 12 capsules of identical design, as first specified, 20 spacecraft, each individually designed for a specific mission and each only superficially like the others, were produced by McDonnell. Contract change proposals, or "CCPs," as they were known, quickly grew into supplemental agreements that were to overshadow the prime contract itself.¹³

The relative roles of STG and McDonnell engineers in pushing the state of the art from design into construction are difficult to assess. Cross-fertilization of ideas and, after the contract was awarded, almost organically close teamwork in implementing them characterized the STG-McDonnell relationship. For a year before the company's selection as prime contractor, original design studies had been carried on with company funds. From a group of 12 engineers led by Raymond A. Pepping, Albert Utsch, Lawrence M. Weeks, and John F. Yardley in January 1958, the Advanced Design section at McDonnell grew to about 40 people by the time the company submitted its proposal to NASA. The proposal itself stated that the company already had invested 32 man-years of effort in the design for a manned satellite, and the elaborate three-volume prospectus amply substantiated the claim.¹⁴

In STG's 50-page set of final "Specifications for a Manned Space Capsule," drawn up in November, Faget and associates had described in remarkable detail their expectations of what the capsule and some 15 subsystems should be like. Now the McDonnell production engineers set about expanding the preliminary specifications, filling gaps in the basic design, preparing blueprints and specification control drawings, and retooling their factory for the translation of ideas into tangible hardware. Specification S-6 had enjoined the contractor to provide at his plant as soon as possible a mockup, or full-scale model made of plywood and cardboard, of the capsule system. With high expectations the Task Group awaited March 17, the date by which McDonnell had promised to have ready their detailed specifications and a dummy Mercury capsule and escape tower.¹⁵ But the debut was not to be achieved easily.

Before the company could finish building the mockup, at least two technical questions affecting the configuration had to be resolved: one was the type of heatshield to be used; the other was the exact design for the escape system. A third detail, the shape of the antenna canister and drogue chute housing atop the cylindrical afterbody, was also tentative when STG and McDonnell engineers began to work together officially on January 12, 1959.¹⁶

Heatshield Resolution

To begin with, all capsule proposals had been evaluated on the basis of a beryllium heat sink, but the search for an ablating heatshield continued concurrently. George M. Low reported the tentative resolution of this conflict in late January:

At a meeting held at Langley Field on January 16 (attended by Drs. Dryden and Silverstein), it was decided to negotiate with McDonnell to design the capsule so that it can be fitted with either a beryllium heat sink or an ablation heat shield. It was further decided that McDonnell should supply a specified number (of the order of eight) ablation shields and a specified number (of the order of six) beryllium heat sinks. It is anticipated that flights with both types of heat protection will be made … . In case of a recovery on land, the capsule with a beryllium heat sink will require cooling; this is accomplished by circulating air either between the heat sink and the pressure vessel, or by ventilating the pressure vessel after impact.¹⁷

Regarding the escape system, McDonnell's proposal had carefully weighed the relative merits of STG's pylon, or tower, type of tractor rocket with the alternative idea, which used three sets of dual-pod pusher rockets, similar to JATO bottles, along either side of three fins at the base of the capsule. McDonnell chose the latter system for its design proposal, but the STG idea prevailed through the contract negotiations, because the Redstone was calculated to become aerodynamically unstable with the pod-type escape system, and the Atlas would likely be damaged by jettisoning the pod fins.¹⁸ The escape system for an aborted launch was intimately interrelated with the problems of the heatshield and of the normal, or nominal, landing plans. By mid-March Robert F. Thompson's detailed proposals for a water landing helped clarify the nature of the test programs to be conducted.

While McDonnell agreed to design the capsule so that it could be fitted alternatively with either a beryllium heat sink or an ablation heatshield, the prime contractor farmed the fabrication of these elements to three subcontractors: Brush Beryllium Company of Cleveland was to forge six heat-sink heatshields; General Electric Company and Cincinnati Testing and Research Laboratory (CTL) were to fabricate 12 ablation shields. The Space Task Group relied on Andre J. Meyer, Jr., to monitor this critical and sensitive problem, the solution to which would constitute the foremost technological secret in the specifications for the manned capsule.

Meyer, one of the original STG members from Lewis in Cleveland, had been commuting to Langley for 10 months. He soon discovered a bottleneck in the industrial availability of beryllium. Only two suppliers were found in this country; only one of these, Brush, had as yet successfully forged ingots of acceptable purity. But ablation technology was equally primitive, so plans had to be made on dual tracks. Meyer had had much experience with laminated plastics for aircraft structures. He had previously learned, in consultations with the Cincinnati Testing Laboratory, how to design a "shingle layup" for fabrication of an ablation heatshield. While collecting all available information on both the ablative plastic and the beryllium industries, Meyer listened to the Big Joe project engineers, Aleck C. Bond and Edison M. Fields. They argued for ablation, specifically for a fiber glass-phenolic material, as the primary heat protection for the astronaut. Before moving to Virginia in February, Meyer consulted on weekends with Brush Beryllium in Cleveland, watching its pioneering progress in forging ever larger spherical sections of the exotic metal, which is closely akin to the precious gem emerald. But Meyer, along with Bond and Fields, grew more skeptical of the elegant theoretical deductions that supported the case for beryllium. Mercury would have a shallow angle of entry and consequently a long heat duration and high total heat; they worried about the possibility that any heat sink might "pressure cook" the occupant of the capsule. So Meyer, using CTL's shingle concept, perfected his designs for an ablative shield.¹⁹

There was something basically appealing about the less tidy ablation principle, something related to a basic principle in physics, where the heat necessary to change the state (from solid to liquid to gas) of a material is vastly greater than the heat absorbed by that material in raising its temperature by degrees. Meyer became convinced by March that beryllium would be twice as expensive and only half as safe. Consequently, Meyer and Fields concentrated their efforts on proving their well-grounded intuition that ablation technology could be brought to a workable state before the Big Joe shot in early summer.²⁰

While lively technical discussions over ablation versus heat sink continued through the spring, the fact that Mercury officials had committed Big Joe to the proof-testing of an ablative shield also rather effectively squelched any further attempts at scientific comparisons. Whereas in January Paul E. Purser recorded that "we will procure both ablation and beryllium shields … and neither will be 'backup,' they will be 'alternates,' " by the end of April technological difficulties in manufacturing the prototype ablation shields became so acute as to monopolize the attention of cognizant STG engineers.²¹

Glennan and Silverstein in Headquarters therefore directed continuation of the heat sink development as insurance, while STG gradually consigned the alternative beryllium shield to the role of substitute even before the fiber glass phenolic shield had proved its worth. By mid-year of 1959, apparently only the Brush Beryllium Company still felt confident that the metallic heat sponge was a viable alternative to the glass heat vaporizer in protecting the man in space from the fate of a meteor. The complicated glass-cloth fabricating and curing problems for the ablation shield were mostly conquered by July. John H. Winter, the heatshield project coordinator at the Cincinnati Testing Laboratory, delivered his first ablation shield to NASA in Cleveland on June 22 under heavy guard.²²

The critical question of whether to jettison the heatshield was active early in 1959. If the shield were a heat sink, it would be so hot by the time it reached the lower atmosphere that to retain it after the main parachute had deployed would be hazardous to the pilot. Also in case of a dry landing such a hot sponge could easily start a prairie or forest fire. On the other hand, a detachable shield would add complexity to the system and increase the risk of its loss before performing its reentry job. In one of the early airdrops a jettisoned shield actually went into "a falling leaf pattern after detachment. It glided back and collided with the capsule, presenting an obvious potential hazard for the pilot in his vehicle late in the reentry cycle."²³ This incident prompted the decision that the heatshield would be retained, although it might very well be lowered in the final moments of the flight if it could help attenuate impact. The memory of this early collision after jettisoning continued to haunt STG engineers until they rejected the beryllium heat-sink shield altogether.

Although the heatshield problem was highly debatable at the inception of the project, there was consolation in the fact that at least two major development areas were virtually complete. The two items considered frozen at the end of January 1959 were the external configuration of the capsule, except for the antenna section, and the form-fitting couch in which the astronaut would be able to endure a force of 20 g or more, if it should come to that.²⁴ The Space Task Group was pleased to have something as accomplished fact when so many other areas were still full of uncertainties.

To George Low's ninth weekly status report for Administrator Glennan on STG's progress and plans for Project Mercury was appended a tabular flight test schedule that summarized the program and mission planning as envisioned in mid-March 1959. Five Little Joe flights, eight Redstone, two Jupiter, ten Atlas flights, and two balloon ascents were scheduled, the categories overlapping each other from July 1959 through January 1961. The first manned ballistic suborbital flight was designated Mercury-Redstone flight No. 3, or simply "MR-3," to be launched about April 26, 1960. And the first manned orbital flight, designated Mercury-Atlas No. 7, or "MA-7," was targeted for September 1, 1960. After that, STG hoped to fly several more, progressively longer orbital missions, leading finally to 18 orbits or a full day for man in space. Although merely a possible flight test plan, this schedule set a superhuman pace and formed the basis for NASA's earliest expectations.²⁵

Applied Research

By March 1, Langley Research Center was formally supporting the Task Group in conducting five major programs of experimentation. The first was an airdrop study, begun the previous summer, to determine the aerodynamic behavior of the capsule in free fall and under restraint by various kinds of parachute suspension. By early January more than a hundred drops of drums filled with concrete and of model capsules had produced a sizable amount of evidence regarding spacecraft motion in free falls, spiraling and tumbling downward, with and without canopied brakes, to impacts on both sea and land.²⁶ But what specific kind of a parachute system to employ for the final letdown remained a separate and debatable question.

A second group of experiments sought to prove the workability of the escape system designs in shots at Wallops Island. On March 11 the first "pad abort," a full-scale escape-rocket test, ended in a disappointing failure. After a promising liftoff the Recruit tractor-rocket, jerking the boilerplate spacecraft skyward, suddenly nosed over, made two complete loops, and plunged into the surf.

So disappointing was this test that for several weeks the fin-stabilized pod rocket escape system was almost reinstituted.²⁷ Three Langley engineers, chagrined by this threat to their work, conducted a full postmortem following the recovery of the capsule. They blamed the erratic behavior on a graphite liner that had blown out of one of the three exhaust nozzles. Willard S. Blanchard, Jr., Sherwood Hoffman, and James R. Raper, working frantically for a month, were able to perfect and prove out their design of the escape rocket nozzles by mid-April. At the same time they improved the pitch-rate of the system by deliberately misaligning the pylon about one inch off the capsule's centerline.²⁸

The third applied research program was a series of exhaustive wind-tunnel investigations at Langley and at the Ames Research Center to fill in data on previously unknown values in blunt-body stability at various speeds, altitudes, and angles of attack. Model Mercury capsules of all sizes, including some smaller than .22 rifle bullets, were tested for static-stability lift, drag, and pitch in tunnels. Larger models were put into free flight to determine dynamic-stability characteristics. Vibration and flutter tests were conducted also in tunnels. The variable location of the center of gravity was of critical interest here, as was also the shifting meta-center of buoyancy.²⁹

Using the thunderous forced-draft wind tunnels at Langley and Ames, aeronautical research engineers pored over schlieren photographs of shock waves, windstreams, boundary layers, and vortexes. Most of the NASA tunnel scientists had long been airplane men, committed to "streamlined" thinking. Now that H. Julian Allen's blunt-body concept was to be used to bring a man back from 100 miles up and travelling about five miles per second, both thought and facilities had to be redirected toward making Mercury safe and stable.

Albin O. Pearson was one such airplane-tunnel investigator who was forced to change his way of thinking and his tools by the ever higher mach number research program for Mercury. Pearson worked at Langley coordinating all aerodynamic stability tests for Mercury with blunt models at trans-, super-, and hypersonic speeds. While exhausting the local facilities for his transonic static stability studies, Pearson arranged for Dennis F. Hasson, Steve Brown, Kenneth C. Weston, and other Langley, STG, and McDonnell aerodynamicists to use various Air Force tunnels at the Arnold Engineering Development Center, in Tullahoma, Tennessee. Beginning on April 9, 1959, a number of Mercury models and escape configurations were tested in the 16-foot propulsion wind tunnel and 40-inch (mach 22 capability) "Hot Shot" facility at Tullahoma. During the next 16 months a total of 103 investigations utilizing 28 different test facilities were made in the wind-tunnel program.³⁰

A fourth experiment program concerned specifically the problem of landing impact. Ideally touchdown should occur at a speed of no more than 30 feet per second, but how to ensure this and how to guard against impacts in directions other than vertical were exasperating problems. Landing-loads tests in hydrodynamics laboratories for the alternative water landing had only begun. The anticipated possibility of a ground impact, which would be far more serious, demanded shock absorbers far better than any yet devised. Although there was still no assurance that the astronaut inside a floating capsule could crawl out through the throat without its capsizing, this egress problem was less demanding at the moment than the need for some sort of crushable material to absorb the brunt of a landing on land.

Through April and May, McDonnell engineers fitted a series of four Yorkshire pigs into contour couches for impact landing tests of the crushable aluminum honeycomb energy-absorption system. These supine swine sustained acceleration peaks from 38 to 58 g before minor internal injuries were noted. The "pig drop" tests were quite impressive, both to McDonnell employees who left their desks and lathes to watch them and to STG engineers who studied the documentary movies. But, still more significant, seeing the pigs get up and walk away from their forced fall and stunning impact vastly increased the confidence of the newly chosen astronauts that they could do the same. The McDonnell report on these experiments concluded, "Since neither the acceleration rates nor shock pulse amplitudes applied to the specimens resulted in permanent or disabling damage, the honeycomb energy absorption system of these experiments is considered suitable for controlling the landing shock applied to the Mercury capsule pilot."³¹

Fifth, and finally, other parachute experiments for spacecraft descent were of major concern in the spring of 1959, because neither the drogue chute for stabilization nor the main landing parachute was yet qualified for its task in Project Mercury. Curiously, little research had been done on parachute behavior at extremely high altitudes. Around 70,000 feet, where the drogue chute was at first designed to open, and down to about 10,000 feet, where the main landing chute should deploy, tests had to be carried out to measure "snatch" forces, shock forces, and stability parameters. Some peculiar phenomena - called "squidding," "breathing," and "rebound" in the trade - were soon discovered about parachute behavior at high altitude and speed. In March, one bad failure of an extended-skirt cargo chute to open fully prompted a thorough review of the parachute development program. Specialists from the Air Force, Langley, McDonnell, and Radioplane, a division of the Northrop Corporation, met together in April and decided to abandon the extended-skirt chute in favor of a newly proved, yet so far highly reliable, 63-foot-diameter ringsail canopy. The size, deployment, and reliability of the drogue chute remained highly debatable while STG sought outside help to acquire other parachute test facilities.³² The status of most other major capsule systems was still flexible enough to accommodate knowledge and experience gained through ongoing tests.

Two other major problems on which Langley also worked with STG, while NASA Headquarters planned the role and functions of the new center in Beltsville, concerned the formulation of final landing and recovery procedures and the establishment of a worldwide tracking network. Mercury planners had assumed from the beginning that the Navy could play a primary role in locating and retrieving the capsule and its occupant after touchdown. But a parallel assumption that existing military and International Geophysical Year tracking and communications facilities could be utilized with relatively slight modifications had to be overhauled in the light of a more thorough analysis of Mercury requirements.

The Navy's experience with search and rescue operations at sea could be trusted to apply directly without much modification to retrieval of the Mercury capsule. But a multitude of safeguards had to be incorporated in the capsule to ensure its safety during and immediately after impact and to reduce the time required for recovery to a bare minimum. William C. Muhly, STG's shop planner and scheduler, was most worried about these recovery aids for the Big Joe tests.³³

The most serious technical decision affecting the landing and recovery procedures concerned the feasibility of using an impact bag to cushion the sudden stop at the surface of Earth. Gilruth liked the idea of using a crushable honeycomb of metal foil between the shield and the pressure vessel to act as the primary shock absorber. But a pneumatic bag, perhaps a large inner tube or a torus made of fabric and extending below the capsule, either with or without the heatshield as its base, was still appealing. Associated with the recovery problem were innumerable other factors related to recovery operations. The seaworthiness of the capsule, its stability in a rough sea, the kinds of beacons and signaling devices to be used, and the provisions for the possibility of a dry landing were foremost among these worries.³⁴

The second major area of uncertainty revealed in January 1959 came as something of a surprise to Task Group people. They had assumed that the world was fairly well covered with commercial, military, and scientific telecommunications networks that could be a basis for the Mercury tracking and communications grid. The Minitrack network established roughly north and south along the 75th meridian in the Western Hemisphere for Project Vanguard turned out to be practically inapplicable. On the other hand, the "Moonwatch" program and the optical tracking teams using Baker-Nunn cameras developed by the Smithsonian Institution Astrophysical Laboratory supplied invaluable data during 1958. Tracking of artificial satellites showed that all previous estimates of atmospheric density were on the low side.³⁵

Trajectory studies for equatorial orbits showed a remarkable lack of radio and cable installations along the projected track. Much depended upon the precise trajectory selections and orbital calculations for a Mercury-Atlas combination. New Atlas guidance equations that would convert the ballistic missile into an orbital launch vehicle had been assigned to the mathematicians of Space Technology Laboratories (STL) in Los Angeles. But whatever these turned out to be, it was becoming apparent that the world was far less well-wired around the middle and underside than had been thought. Furthermore the medical teams were insisting on continuous voice contact with the pilot. So by the end of February, Charles W. Mathews had convinced Abe Silverstein that STG should be relieved of the monumental tracking job, and NASA Headquarters drafted another contingent of Langley men to set up a brand-new communications girdle around the world.³⁶

A large part of the Instrument Research Division at Langley, under the directorship of Hartley A. Soulé, provided the manpower. Soulé had previou laid out a timetable of 18 months for completion of a tracking network. Now he and the Langley Procurement Officer, Sherwood L. Butler, undertook to manage the design and procurement of material for its construction.³⁷ Ray W. Hooker accepted the supervision of the mechanical and architectural engineering, and G. Barry Graves began to direct the electronics engineering. By mid-March the problem of providing a tracking network for Mercury was on the shoulders of a special task unit that came to be known as the Tracking and Ground Instrumentation Unit, or by the barbarous acronym "TAGIU." Although by this time most of the other divisions at Langley were also acting partially in support of Mercury, the Tracking Unit held a special position in direct support of the Space Task Group. Indirectly it provided NASA with its first equatorial tracking web for all artificial satellites. Some 35 people in the unit went to work immediately on their biggest problem, described by Graves as "simply to decide what all had to be done."³⁸ By the end of April, Soulé had seen the imperative need for a high orde of political as well as technical statesmanship to accomplish his task on time. A detailed report to Silverstein outlined his operational plans.³⁹

On March 17 and 18, 1959, at the McDonnell plant in St. Louis, the manufacturers presented to the Space Task Group for its review, inspection, and approval the first full-scale mockup of the complete Project Mercury manned satellite capsule. This "Mockup Review Inspection" represented a rough dividing line between the design and development phases for the project. The "Detail Specifications," 80 pages in length, provided a program for the customers. Another McDonnell document provided a written description of the "crew station" procedures and capabilities. And the mockup itself showed the configuration "exploded" into seven component parts: adapter ring, retrorocket package, heatshield bottom, pressure bulkhead, airframe, antenna canister, and escape rocket pylon.⁴⁰

The chief designers, constructors, and managers of the program gathered around the capsule to watch demonstrations of pilot entry, pilot mobility, accessibility of controls, pylon removal, adapter separation, and pilot escape. The board of inspection, chaired by Charles H. Zimmerman, then Chief of the Engineering and Contract Administration Division of STG, included Gilruth, Mathews, Faget, Low, Walter C. Williams, who was then still Chief of NASA's High Speed Flight Station, and E. M. Flesh, the engineering manager of Project Mercury for McDonnell. In addition, eight official advisers of the board and 16 observers from various other interested groups attended the meeting. The president of the corporation himself introduced his chief lieutenants: Logan T. MacMillan, company-wide project manager; John Yardley, chief project engineer; and Flesh. In consultation during the two days with some 40 McDonnell engineers, the Task Group recommended a total of 34 items for alteration or study. Of these recommendations 25 were approved immediately by the board, and the rest were assigned to study groups.⁴¹

Among the significant changes approved at this meeting were the addition of a side escape hatch, window shades, steps or reinforced surfaces to be used as steps in climbing out of the throat of the capsule, and a camera for photographing the astronaut. Robert A. Champine, a Langley test pilot who had ridden the centrifuge with Carter C. Collins and R. Flanagan Gray the previous summer to help prove the feasibility of the Faget couch concept, suggested more than 20 minor changes in instrumentation displays and the placement of switches, fuses, and other controls. Also attending this mockup review were Brigadier General Don D. Flickinger; W. Randolph Lovelace II; Gordon Vaeth, the new representative of the Advanced Research Projects Agency; John P. Stapp, the Air Force physician who had proved that man could take deceleration impacts of up to 40 g; and a relatively obscure Marine test pilot from the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics by the name of John H. Glenn, Jr.

When they returned to Langley Field, Task Group officials were aware as never before of the magnitude of their tasks. Conversations with more than 50 McDonnell engineering group leaders had convinced them that more formal contract-monitoring arrangements were needed. Working committees and study groups had proliferated to such an extent that a capsule-coordination panel was needed. Gilruth appointed John H. Disher in mid-March to head the coordination temporarily. But by mid-June the panel was upgraded to an "office" and Disher was recalled to Washington by Silverstein to work with Low and Warren J. North.⁴²

From a nucleus of 35 people assigned to STG in October 1958, the Group had grown to 150 by the end of January 1959. Six months later, in July, about 350 people were working in or with the Task Group, although some were still nominally attached to the research centers at Lewis or Langley.⁴³

The rapid growth of STG, fully endorsed by Washington, was only one of the problems facing its management in the spring of 1959. Perhaps the most difficult lesson to learn in the first year of Project Mercury was the psychological reorientation required to meet new economic realities. Aeronautical research engineers who became administrators under NACA were still essentially group leaders of research teams. But when NACA became NASA and embarked on several large-scale development programs, those in development, and in STG in particular, became not primarily sellers of services but rather buyers of both services and products. To manage a development program required talents different from those required to manage a research program, if only because Government procurement policies and procedures are so complex as to necessitate corps of experts in supply and logistics. Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, one of the knowledgeable observers watching the transition at this time, remarked, "The big difference between NACA and NASA is that NASA is a contracting agency."⁴⁴

Costs and Cancellations

Trying to estimate what it should cost to develop hardware from their designs for a manned satellite, STG at first envisioned an expenditure of about $16 million to manufacture the program's spacecraft. But well before the contractor had been selected, Gilruth received a revised estimate based on new specifications, allowances for overtime, the fixed fee plus the estimated construction costs, and comparing capsule cost per pound with that of the X-15 and Dyna-Soar programs. George F. MacDougall, Jr., the aeronautical research scientist who signed this revised estimate, advised that the capsule costs should be raised to $22 million. Neither an economist nor a cost accountant, he did foresee the possibility "that the current estimated costs of $22,000,000 may be optimistically low."⁴⁵

The contract negotiated with McDonnell had compromised between the company's bid of $17,583,717, which was far from the lowest, and the more liberal STG estimate, to settle on a price of $18,300,000 for manufacturing 12 capsules. In view of this compromise upward, NASA officials were unprepared for the sudden acceleration of costs that the contractor claimed was necessary for spare parts, ground support, and checkout equipment. Before the ink was dry on the prime contract, the scope of research and development work was found to have mushroomed. In March, when McDonnell advised NASA that spares and test equipment would more than double the total contract costs, Abe Silverstein applied counterpressure, saying indignantly, "I will not tolerate increases such as those above in the contract for any reasons - utterly unreasonable to increase an $18,000,000 contract to $41,000,000 by these devices."⁴⁶

Meanwhile STG and McDonnell representatives held a meeting at the working level to consolidate and condense the requirements for spare parts and equipment. Savings effected here were eventually greatly overridden by costs arising elsewhere. No one could yet foresee that the basic contract for 12 spacecraft would have an evolutionary history of its own.⁴⁷ Cost accounting for a development program was recognized as a hazardous occupation, but just how hazardous and where to look for particular pitfalls took time to learn.

Whereas cynics might expect that the private-enterprise contractor for the capsule might have underbid to gain the contract, the civil servants in STG were more surprised to learn that the public enterprise of furnishing the Nation's ballistic missile defense systems should also have underestimated costs by approximately one third. Informed by the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in January that each Atlas booster would cost $3.3 million instead of $2.5 million, George Low tried for two months to get a satisfactory explanation of this sudden inflation.⁴⁸

When in May, however, the STG learned of an increase by $8 million in the amount the Army Ballistic Missile Agency proposed to charge for the Redstones and Jupiters, the time had come for a thoroughgoing review of cost effectiveness and program requirements. Gilruth and Purser learned by investigation that the Ballistic Missile Agency was billing NASA a "burden" surcharge for the benefit of laboratory overhead costs at Huntsville. Purser's considered reaction to this was to threaten cancellation of the Jupiter program. If NASA must pay for research and development at the Redstone Arsenal, he said, then NASA, and STG in particular, must be more frugal in the estimation of their needs.

The Jupiter rocket had been selected to boost a full-scale capsule to about 16,000 feet per second, a velocity midway between the capacities of Little Joe and Redstone (6000 feet per second), and of Atlas (25,000 feet per second). But rather than insist on this step, Purser argued that the Atlas should be harnessed to duplicate the mission of the Jupiter flights. Since "the cost now equals or exceeds the cost of an Atlas for the same mission" and the Jupiter system would not be a "true duplicate of the Mercury capsule system," Purser recommended that the two Jupiter shots be canceled.⁴⁹

After further consideration and more negotiations, Purser's recommendation was adopted by NASA Headquarters; the Jupiter series was eliminated from the Mercury program. In the aftermath of this episode, Glennan made an official complaint to the Secretary of Defense about the necessity to curtail proposed launchings to control costs, describing the situation with some chagrin:

Members of the staff who have visited Redstone Arsenal report that exceptionally high overhead rates apparently result from the necessity of supporting a large technical staff with a limited approved work program. The net result to us has been the increased costs of a Jupiter launching to more than that of an Atlas, whereas a Redstone launching is about $200,000 less than that of an Atlas. The prices being 2.7 and 2.9 million respectively.⁵⁰

At the same time Mercury engineers who were looking for an alternative to the balloon flight program discovered that the altitude wind tunnel, the biggest physical installation at Lewis Research Center, could be used to simulate environmental conditions up to 80,000 feet. Therefore the balloon flight test program, primarily designed to "soak" the capsule at comparable altitudes, was in effect canceled by May. DeMarquis D. Wyatt and other NASA Headquarters staffers preparing the budget requests for fiscal year 1960 now had evidence of STG's cost consciousness. The cancellations of the Jupiter series and the balloon program greatly simplified the program buildup toward manned space flight. STG engineers were pleased by the resulting concentration of effort.⁵¹

One reason STG shed no tears over cancellation of Jupiter and the balloon tests was that the Little Joe program was making good progress. Blueprint work for the Little Joe airframe had begun early in 1959. North American had assigned A. L. Lawbaugh as project engineer; Langley Research Center had appointed Carl A. Sandahl as its representative for support of this test booster program; and William M. Bland, Jr., was managing Little Joe for the Space Task Group. Throughout the year 1959 these three men were primarily responsible for Little Joe.

Two significant design changes for Little Joe early in 1959 undoubtedly delayed the program slightly but contributed greatly to its eventual success. The first change, decided upon by Gilruth and Faget in January, required a switch from straight to canted nozzles on all the forward-thrusting rocket motors. Little Joe had no guidance system, and such a redesign would minimize any upset from unsymmetrical thrust conditions. The other departure from the original design was the addition of a so-called "booster destruct system." In the interest of range safety there should be some provision to terminate by command the thrust of the main motor units. Therefore Charles H. McFall and Samuel Sokol of Langley devised a booster blowout system, which North American and Thiokol Chemical Corporation, the manufacturers of the rocket motor components, added to the forward end of each rocket combustion chamber.⁵²

By mid-February it was apparent that a development program for rocket hardware, even of such limited scope and relative simplicity as the Little Joe booster, demanded a far more sophisticated management organization than either Langley or the Task Group had envisioned. Although informal arrangements had sufficed to get the program started, funding allocations, personnel expansion, and contract monitoring problems began to weigh heavily. Carl Sandahl lamented in one weekly progress report that the transfer of Caldwell C. Johnson from Langley to the Space Task Group could "just about break up the Little Joe Project." Langley's loss was STG's gain in this respect, however, and cooperation continued to be encouraging. Indeed, in May, Bland reported that the delivery of the first Little Joe booster airframe could be expected approximately two weeks earlier than scheduled.⁵³

Parallel to the development of the Little Joe test booster, STG and Langley engineers continued work on what now was called the Scout, the multistage, solid-propellant research rocket being designed since the previous year for sounding, probe, or small satellite missions. Langley had maintained its responsibility for designing the Scout for the Air Force after NACA became NASA; and early in 1959, Robert O. Piland and Joseph G. Thibodeaux came to work with William E. Stoney on the staging principles for the long, slim rocket. Although the Scout, as a Langley project, was not an integral part of STG's activities in Project Mercury, the Task Group held open the possibility of using this simple and relatively inexpensive rocket to launch scale models of the Mercury configuration and to probe for further critical data on heat transfer and stability. Thus the Scout's capability could fill research gaps that might arise in the manned satellite project.⁵⁴

Since January, when it had become apparent that the Army would not soon relinquish to NASA its rocket development team at Huntsville, NASA Headquarters had encouraged the Space Task Group to proceed full speed on personnel recruitment. The exact status of the organization and authority of STG was left unspecified, while Headquarters felt its way toward the establishment of the "space projects center" at Beltsville, just outside Washington. Although NASA had a "hunting license" as a result of its enabling legislation, STG's managers could not, without full support from President Eisenhower or Administrator Glennan, know how far or how hard to push the Space Task Group toward a permanent semi-autonomous establishment.⁵⁵

STG's need for acquiring competent people without raiding established NASA research centers was met in large degree by a fortuitous accident that dramatized Anglo-European complaints about the "brain drain" of their scientific-technological manpower to the United States. A group of over 100 Canadian and British aeronautical engineers, who had been employed on a fighter-plane project for the British A. V. Roe (AVRO) Company near Toronto, Canada, were out of work. AVRO tried to find new jobs for them when the CF-105 Arrow project was canceled as a result of the Commonwealth's decision that the Bomarc missile made the Arrow obsolescent. Twenty-five of these engineers, led by James A. Chamberlin, a Canadian, were recruited by STG and immigrated to work at NASA's Virginia colony in mid-April. They were assigned jobs as individuals with the existing teams wherever each could be most useful, and they quickly proved themselves invaluable additions to making Mercury move.⁵⁶

At the same time, the chief business administrator of the new NASA center at Beltsville, Michael J. Vaccaro, was planning to accommodate a complement of 425 people for fiscal year 1960 should Gilruth and his manned satellite team move to Maryland. On the first day of May 1959 the "space projects center," growing out of Naval Research Laboratory's Vanguard team, was renamed the Goddard Space Flight Center, and Gilruth's second hat, as the Center's Assistant Director for Manned Satellites, was reaffirmed. The Mercury program was specified as one of the six divisional offices at Goddard.⁵⁷

While many questions of personnel, network management, and contract procedures for the capsule were still pending, Glennan made his first visit to the Space Task Group at Langley on May 18, 1959. He was impressed by the enormity of Project Mercury, by its working-level complexities, and by the extraordinarily fine morale in STG. Glennan returned to Washington resolved not to tamper with the esprit of STG. But he was also determined that NASA as a whole should not become a "space cadet" organization.⁵⁸ The Administrator's resolution that NASA must not be overwhelmed by the complexities of manned space flight led to a Headquarters policy of minimal interference with the Task Group. During the next year, however, the weight of pressure from the public press and the scope of intragovernmental coordination related to Mercury was to strain this policy.

Supporting Agencies and Industries

One of these complexities had been pointed up in the course of planning operational procedures for launching. Back in November 1958 the Air Force Missile Test Center had accepted Melvin N. Gough as director of NASA tests, but it was May 1959 before the Center made any allowance for the functioning of NASA's skeleton staff for the manned satellite program. When Herbert F. York, the Pentagon's Director of Defense Research and Engineering, testified before Congress early in June, he alluded to the coordination problem between the Department of Defense and NASA and admitted, "We haven't worked out exactly how to do that yet." B. Porter Brown, the first STG man to take up residence at the Cape, told his superior, Charles Mathews, that the administration of the launch complexes at the Atlantic Missile Range was as intricate as the technical equipment there.⁵⁹

On May 1, 1959, when NASA set up its own liaison office at Canaveral, Brown and the STG were still trying to understand all the interrelationships existing between the Air Force (whose proprietorship stemmed from the establishment in 1950 of the Long Range Proving Ground), the Navy, and the Army. The Air Force Missile Test Center (AFMTC) was the steward operating the Atlantic Missile Range (AMR) for the Department of Defense. The Army had established its subsidiary Missile Firing Laboratory on the Cape as an integral part of its Ballistic Missile Agency. By the end of January 1959, Kurt H. Debus, director of the firing lab, had appointed a project engineer and coordinator for the Mercury-Redstone program, but the conversion of launch pads Nos. 5 and 6 into "Launch Complex No. 56" to meet the requirements for Mercury-Redstone launchings was less imperative than the need to prepare for the Fourth of July launch of Mercury's Big Joe by an Air Force Atlas.⁶⁰

The palmetto-covered dunes at Canaveral had several dozen different kinds of launch pads, but they were still in short supply and under heavy demands. There were almost as many different military service and civilian contract organizations vying for them as there were pads. Proprietary interests were strongly vested, security restrictions were rigorous, and the newly constituted space agency was not yet accepted in the elite flight operations society there. Hangar S, in the industrial area of the Cape, had been tentatively assigned as "NASA space," but the former Naval Research Laboratory team that had built Hangar S and was still active with the Vanguard project was there first. Although now incorporated with NASA, the Vanguard team hoped to carry on with a new booster development program named Vega. Another group of half-NASA developers, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working with von Braun's people, were likewise seeking more room to convert Juno I (Jupiter-C) into Juno II (Jupiter IRBM) launch facilities for more Explorer satellite missions.⁶¹

With space for space (as opposed to defense) activities at such a premium, Porter Brown and his two advance-guard colleagues for STG at the Cape, Philip R. Maloney and Elmer H. Buller, pressed for a higher priority in Hangar S. But room was still scarce in early June when Scott H. Simpkinson with about 35 of his test operations engineers from Lewis Research Center arrived to set up a preflight checkout laboratory for Big Joe. They found a corner fourth of Hangar S roped off for their use, and instructions not to overstep these bounds.⁶²

Another problem arose over the scheduled allocation of launch pad No. 14, which was one of only five available for Atlas launchings. Pad 14 was scheduled to be used for the Air Force MIDAS (Missile Defense Alarm Satellite) launchings throughout the same time period that the Mercury qualification flights were expected to be ready. Although admitting that firing schedules for both the Mercury-Redstone and the Mercury-Atlas programs were tentative, STG argued that the same pad assigned for the Big Joe shot should be continuously available for preparing all subsequent Mercury-Atlas launches.

The commander of the Air Force Missile Test Center disagreed. In the cause of maximum utilization of Cape facilities, Major General Donald N. Yates ordered switching of Mercury launches to various available launch stands. These initial conflicts of interests reached an impasse on June 24, when representatives of NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense met to decide whose shots to postpone. NASA was unable to obtain a concession: the urgency of ICBM and MIDAS development took precedence.⁶³

The complexity of organizational problems at the Cape might have led space agency leaders to despair but for an auspicious space flight on May 28. On that date in 1959 an Army Jupiter intermediate range ballistic missile launched a nose cone carrying two primate passengers - Able, an American-born rhesus monkey, and Baker, a South American squirrel monkey - to a 300-mile altitude. At the end of 15 minutes and a 1500-mile trajectory, along which the cone reached a speed of about 10,000 miles an hour, the Navy recovered Able and Baker alive and healthy. The medical experiments were conducted by the Army Medical Service and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency with the cooperation of the Navy and Air Force Schools of Aviation Medicine. Not only was the flight a triumph for space medicine; it also demonstrated an organizational symbiosis of significant proportions for all of the services and branches involved.⁶⁴

But the "interface" problems within NASA, and between NASA and other agencies, continued to exist, particularly at lower echelons in the planning of operational procedures for flight control. Mathews and his staff in the Flight Operations Division of STG were required to plan and replan mission profiles, schedules, countdown procedures, and mission directives while accommodating the procedures of other divisions and organizations contributing to the operation. By mid-spring these working relationships had become so involved that flight schedules had to undergo radical revision. It gradually became clear that the original schedules aimed at achieving a manned orbital flight early in April 1960 could not possibly be met.

On top of that, the production of spacecraft hardware and flight equipment began falling behind schedule. Only one month after the Mockup Review, it became evident that capsule and systems production slippages were going to become endemic. On April 17, 1959, Gilruth, speaking before the World Congress of Flight meeting at Las Vegas, announced casually, "The first manned orbital flight will not take place within the next two years." The first successful pad abort using the tower-rocket escape system had just been completed on April 12 - two years to the day before Gagarin's orbital flight - but Gilruth cautiously refrained from pronouncing even the escape sequence firm. And he alluded to other areas of uncertainty:

Although the Mercury concept is the simplest possible approach to manned flight in space, involving a minimum of new developments, as you can see, a great deal of research and development remains to be done. For flight within the atmosphere, the capsule must be stable over the widest speed range yet encountered by any vehicle-from satellite velocity to a very low impact speed. And in orbital flight, all of the systems must function properly in a weightless state. It must be compatible with the launch rocket and must be at home on the sea while awaiting recovery.⁶⁵

In May 1959 the Mercury managers drew up a new functional organization chart dividing the supervisory activities of STG into five categories: capsules, boosters and launch, "R and D" support, range, and recovery operations. The design period for each of these areas having now evolved into developmental work, each area could more plainly be seen in terms of the contracts to be monitored by STG personnel. Capsules were divided into three categories, the first of which was the boilerplate models being built by Langley for the Little Joe program. For Big Joe, alias the Atlas ablation test, another boilerplate capsule was under construction jointly, with the STG at Langley responsible for the upper section and the STG at Lewis for the lower pressure-vessel section of the capsule. This meant that Langley in conjunction with Radioplane would perfect the recovery gear and parachute canister, while Lewis people would handle the automatic control system, the heatshield, sensors, and telemetry.⁶⁶

For the production model capsule under McDonnell's aegis, a number of major subcontractors had long since been selected. Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company was developing the automatic stabilization and control system; the reaction control system was being built by Bell Aerospace Corporation; some electronics and most radio gear were to be provided by Collins Radio Company; and the environmental control system, the periscope, and the horizon scanner were to be supplied by AiResearch, Perkin-Elmer Company, and Barnes Instrument Company, respectively. The alternative heatshields, as previously noted, were being provided by several different subcontractors; and the solid rockets for escape by Grand Central Rocket Company and for the retrothrust package by Thiokol Chemical Corporation.

With regard to boosters and launching, STG could rely on the extensive experience of the Ballistic Missile Division/Space Technology Laboratory/Convair complex for the Atlas, and on the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the von Braun/Debus team for the Redstones. Only the Little Joe shots from Wallops Island would require extensive attention to launch problems because only Little Joe was exclusively a NASA booster. North American, the prime contractor, would provide whatever Langley could not for Little Joe.

Under the miscellaneous category "R and D support," however, Project Mercury would not only require the help of all the other NASA research centers - Langley, Ames, Lewis, and now Goddard - but also of the NASA stations for high-speed flight research at Edwards, California, and for pilotless aircraft research at Wallops Island, Virginia. At least 10 separate commands under the Air Force would be closely involved, and various facilities of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, especially the human centrifuge at Johnsville, Pennsylvania, would likewise be extensively used.

The range and tracking network requirements being supervised by the alter ego to STG, namely the Tracking Unit (TAGIU) or the Mercury network group at Langley, gradually became clear as contractors began to report on their feasibility and programming studies. The Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Aeronutronics Division of the Ford Motor Company, Space Electronics Corporation, and the RCA Service Company held four study contracts to help Soulé decide on ground equipment, radar coverage, control center arrangements, and the exact specifications for various contracts. Although a preliminary bidders' briefing on the tracking, telemetry, and telecommunications plans for Project Mercury took place at Langley on April 1, the basic design document, "Specifications for Tracking and Ground Instrumentation System for Project Mercury," did not appear until May 21. Consequently NASA did not select the prime contractor for the tracking network until midsummer.⁶⁷

Finally, regarding recovery operations, a NASA and Department of Defense working group decided on May 11 to make use of the investment already made by Grumman Aircraft Corporation in operations research for its spacecraft bid proposal on recovery requirements. Concurrently arrangements were being made with the Chief of Naval Operations, the Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, the Strategic Air Command, the Atlantic Missile Range, the Marines, and the Coast Guard for the specific help each could render when the time should come for search and retrieval.

Although these relations appeared to have grown exceedingly complex, they had only just begun to multiply. Gilruth, however, was confident that by careful coordination and through the largely personal and informal working methods of STG, he and his men could handle the problems arising in the Mercury development program. As an encouraging example, the booster and launch coordination panels, established separately for the Atlas and the Redstone, had by mid-May already achieved impressive understandings on what had to be done. In the case of the Atlas, the coordination panel worked out the division of labor between NASA, McDonnell, the Ballistic Missile Division, Convair, and STG. Panel members simply discussed until they had resolved such key problems on their agenda as general launch operations procedures, trajectories and flight plans for the first two scheduled launches, general approach to an abort sensing system and procedures, range and pad safety procedures,general mechanical and electrical mating, blockhouse space requirements, general countdown and checkout procedures, and velocity cutoff in the event of overshooting the orbit insertion point. Six Redstone booster and launch panels, established at an important coordination meeting on February 11 with STG and McDonnell at Redstone Arsenal, likewise resolved in monthly meetings many such items.⁶⁸ For both boosters, many details remained outstanding, of course, but the fact that pending problems were being identified early and systematically in May 1959 gave the STG confidence that no further schedule slippages could be charged to the lack of intelligent planning.⁶⁹

Astronaut Selection

Now that the men had been chosen to serve as the focal points for all this effort, new spirits animated the Space Task Group. Indeed, the Nation as a whole began to participate vicariously in Project Mercury when, on April 9, 1959, at a press conference in Washington, Glennan introduced to the public the seven men chosen to be this Nation's nominees for the first human voyagers into space.⁷⁰

They were to be called "astronauts," as the pioneers of ballooning had been called "aeronauts," and the legendary Greeks in search of the Golden Fleece were called "Argonauts," for they were to sail into a new, uncharted ocean. These personable pilots were introduced in civilian dress; many people in their audience forgot that they were volunteer test subjects and military officers. Their public comments did not class them with any elite intelligentsia. Rather they were a contingent of mature Americans, average in build and visage, family men all, college-educated as engineers, possessing excellent health, and professionally committed to flying advanced aircraft.

Compared with the average, white, middle-class American male, they enjoyed better health, both physically and psychologically, and they had far more experience among and above the clouds. Slightly short of average in stature, they were above average in seriousness of purpose. Otherwise these seven seemed almost random samples of average American manhood. Yet the names of Carpenter, Cooper, Glenn, Grissom, Schirra, Shepard, and Slayton were perhaps to become as familiar in American history as those of any actor, soldier, or athlete.

Despite the wishes of NASA Headquarters, and particularly of Dryden, Silverstein, and Gilruth, the fame of the astronauts quickly grew beyond all proportion to their current activities and their preflight mission assignments. Perhaps it was inevitable that the "crew-pool" members of STG were destined for premature adulation, what with the enormous public curiosity about them, the risk they would take in space flight, and their exotic training activities. But the power of commercial competition for publicity and the pressure for political prestige in the space race also whetted an insatiable public appetite for this new kind of celebrity. Walter T. Bonney, long a public information officer for NACA and now Glennan's adviser on these matters, foresaw the public and press attention, asked for an enlarged staff, and laid the guidelines for public affairs policy in close accord with that of other Government agencies.⁷¹

The astronauts were first and foremost test pilots, men accustomed to flying alone in the newest, most advanced, and most powerful vehicles this civilization had produced. They were talented specialists who loved to fly high-performance aircraft and who had survived the natural selection process in their profession. The demand for excellence in piloting skills, in physical health, and psychological adaptability becomes ever more stringent as one ascends the ladder toward the elite among military aviators, those senior test pilots with upwards of 1,500 hours' total flying time.⁷²

Eisenhower's decision that the military services could provide the pilots greatly simplified the astronaut selection procedure. From a total of 508 service records screened in January 1959 by Stanley C. White, Robert B. Voas, and William S. Augerson at the military personnel bureaus in Washington, 110 men were found to meet the minimum standards specified earlier. This list of names included five Marines, 47 Navy men, and 58 Air Force pilots. Several Army pilots' records had been screened earlier, but none was a graduate of a test pilot school. The selection process began while the possibility of manned Redstone flights late in 1959 still existed on paper.⁷³

The evaluation committee at Headquarters, headed by the Assistant Director of STG, Charles J. Donlan, decided to divide the list of 110 arbitrarily into three groups and to issue invitations for the first group of 35 to come to Washington at the beginning of February for briefings and interviews. Donlan was pleased to learn from his staff, White, Voas, and Augerson, that 24 of the first group interviewed were happy with the prospects of participating in the Mercury program. Every one of the first 10 men interrogated on February 2 agreed to continue through the elimination process. The next week another group of possible pilot-candidates arrived in Washington. The high rate of volunteering made it unnecessary to extend the invitations to the third group. Justifying this action, George Low reported:

During the briefings and interviews it became apparent that the final number of pilots should be smaller than the twelve originally planned for. The high rate of interest in the project indicates that few, if any, of the men will drop out during the training program. It would, therefore, not be fair to the men to carry along some who would not be able to participate in the flight program. Consequently, a recommendation has been made to name only six finalists.⁷⁴

Sixty-nine men had reported to Washington in two groups by the middle of February. Of these, six were found to have grown too tall. Fifty-six test pilots took the initial battery of written tests, technical interviews, psychiatric interviews, and medical history reviews. Those who declined or were eliminated reduced the total at the beginning of March to 36 men. They were invited to undergo the extraordinary physical examinations planned for them at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque. Thirty-two accepted and became candidates, knowing also that they were scheduled to pass through extreme mental and physical environmental tests at the Wright Air Development Center, in Dayton, Ohio, after being certified as physically qualified by the Lovelace Clinic. The 32 candidates were assured that the data derived from these special examinations in New Mexico and Ohio would not jeopardize their military careers, since none of the findings was to go into their service records.

Although the psychophysiological criteria for the selection of the best possible pilots for manned space flight had been under discussion for several years, the actual arrangement of the selection procedures for Mercury was directed by a NASA selection committee consisting of a senior management engineer, Donlan; a test pilot engineer, North; two flight surgeons, White and Augerson; two psychologists, Allen O. Gamble and Voas; and two psychiatrists, George E. Ruff and Edwin Z. Levy. These seven men had done the screening of records and the interviews and testing in Washington, constituting phases one and two of the selection program, before remanding their pool of 32 candidates to the medical examiners at the Lovelace Foundation.⁷⁵

Individually each candidate arrived at Albuquerque to undergo approximately a week of medical evaluations under each of five different schedules. In this third phase of the program, over 30 different laboratory tests collected chemical, encephalographic, and cardiographic data. X-ray examinations thoroughly mapped each man's body. The ophthalmology section and the otolaryngology sections likewise learned almost everything about each candidate's eyes, and his ears, nose, and throat. Special physiological examinations included bicycle ergometer tests, a total-body radiation count, total-body water determination, and the specific gravity of the whole body. Heart specialists made complete cardiological examinations, and other clinicians worked out more complete medical histories on these men than probably had ever before been attempted on human beings. Nevertheless the selectees were so healthy that only one of the 32 was found to have a medical problem potentially serious enough to eliminate him from the subsequent tests at the Wright Aeromedical Laboratory.⁷⁶

Phase four of the selection program was an amazingly elaborate set of environmental studies, physical endurance tests, anthropometric measurements, and psychiatric studies conducted at the Aeromedical Laboratory of the Wright Air Development Center. During March each of the 31 subjects spent another week experiencing a wide range of stressful conditions. Voas explained phases three and four: "While the purpose of the medical examinations at Lovelace Clinic had been to determine the general health status of the candidates, the purpose of the testing program at Wright Field was to determine the physical and psychological capability of the individual to respond effectively and appropriately to the various types of stresses associated with space missions."⁷⁷ In addition to pressure suit tests, acceleration tests, vibration tests, heat tests, and loud noise tests, each candidate had to prove his physical endurance on treadmills, tilt tables, with his feet in ice water, and by blowing up balloons until exhausted. Continuous psychiatric interviews, the necessity of living with two psychologists throughout the week, an extensive self-examination through a battery of 13 psychological tests for personality and motivation, and another dozen different tests on intellectual functions and special aptitudes - these were all part of the week of truth at Dayton.⁷⁸

Two of the more interesting personality and motivation studies seemed like parlor games at first, until it became evident how profound an exercise in Socratic introspection was implied by conscientious answers to the test questions "Who am I?" and "Whom would you assign to the mission if you could not go yourself?" In the first case, by requiring the subject to write down 20 definitional identifications of himself, ranked in order of significance, and interpreted projectively, the psychologists elicited information on identity and perception of social roles. In the peer ratings, each candidate was asked which of the other members of the group of five accompanying him through this phase of the program he liked best, which one he would like to accompany him on a two-man mission, and whom he would substitute for himself. Candidates who had proceeded this far in the selection process all agreed with one who complained, "Nothing is sacred any more."⁷⁹

Back at STG headquarters at Langley, late in March 1959, phase five began. The final evaluation of data was made by correlating clinical and statistical information from New Mexico and Ohio. Eighteen of the 31 candidates came recommended without medical reservations for final consideration by Donlan and North. According to Donlan, although the physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and physiologists had done their best to establish gradations, the attrition rate was too low. So the final criteria for selecting the candidates reverted to the technical qualifications of the men and the technical requirements of the program, as judged by Donlan, North, White, and finally Gilruth. "We looked for real men and valuable experience," said Donlan. The selection tests, as it turned out, were largely tests of tests, "conducted as much for the research value in trying to formulate the characteristics of astronauts as for determining any deficiencies of the group being examined." The verbal responses at the interviews, before and after the psychophysiological testing, therefore, seem to have been as important final determinants as the candidates' test scores.⁸⁰

Sitting in judgment over 18 finalists, Donlan, White, and North pared down the final pool of selectees, choosing each to complement the rest of the group. The going was so difficult that they could not reach the magic number six, so Gilruth decided to recommend seven. Donlan then telephoned each of the seven individually to ask whether he was still willing to accept a position as a Mercury astronaut. Each one gladly volunteered again. The 24 who were passed over were notified and asked to reapply for reconsideration in some future program. Gilruth's endorsement of the final list was passed upward to Silverstein and Glennan for final review, and by mid-April the faces of America's original seven spacemen were shown to the world.

As the astronauts lost their private lives, Project Mercury found its first great public notice. An eighth military officer and pilot came aboard STG about the same time to manage the public information and press relations that were already threatening to intrude on the time and talent of STG. The eighth personality was an experienced Air Force pilot who had flown extensively in World War II, on the Berlin Airlift, and in Korea, and who also had proven himself as a public information officer after 1954, when he was charged with ameliorating public fears and complaints over jet noises, sonic booms, and the ballistic missile programs.⁸¹ Lieutenant Colonel John A. Powers, USAF, came on board the STG staff in early April 1959. Thereafter the mellifluous voice and impish grin of "Shorty" Powers made his reputation as the primary buffer for STG in its relations with the press and the public. Throughout the Mercury program, he stood before the news media and the people of the world as the one living symbol of all the anonymous human effort behind the astronaut of the moment.

Powers propagated some oversimplified images in many instances, as it was his job to do, but no one man then or now could completely understand or communicate the complexity of the myriad research, development, and operations activities that lay behind a launch. Then, too, the caliber of the questions determined the quality of his answers, and all too often the questions asked were simple. What was an astronaut really like? What did he eat for breakfast? Which ones had been Boy Scouts? How did their wives take their commitment? Such questions provoked many to abandon asking how these seven came to be chosen and for what purpose they were entering training.

From the United States Marine Corps, Lieutenant Colonel John Herschel Glenn, Jr., received orders to report to the Space Task Group at Langley Field, on the first of May. He then found himself the senior astropilot in age and date of rank. From the Navy, Walter Marty Schirra, Jr., and Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr., both lieutenant commanders, and Lieutenant Malcolm Scott Carpenter reported aboard STG. And the Air Force assigned three captains, Donald Kent Slayton, Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr., and Virgil I. Grissom, to duty with NASA as test pilots, alias Mercury astronauts.

On May 28, 1959, the astronauts were brought before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics in executive session. They were asked to reassure the Congressmen that they were content with the orderliness, safety, and seriousness of Project Mercury. This they did vigorously, together and separately, before Schirra mentioned the "seven-sided coin" of competition over which one should get the first flight.⁸²

The first seven American astronauts were an admirable group of individuals chosen to sit at the apex of a pyramid of human effort. In training to transcend gravity they became a team of personalities as well as a crew of pilots. They were lionized by laymen and adored by youth as heroes before their courage was truly tested. In volunteering to entrust their lives to Mercury's spirit and Atlas' strength to blaze a trail for man into the empyrean, they chose to lead by following the opportunity that chance, circumstance, technology, and history had prepared for them. Influential 20th-century philosophers as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Teilhard de Chardin, and Walter Kaufmann tell us that man's profoundest aspiration is to know himself and his universe and that life's deepest passion is a desire to become godlike. All men must balance their hubris with their humility, but, as one of those aspiring astronauts said, "How could anyone turn down a chance to be a part of something like this?"⁸³

Shortly after the astronauts were introduced to the public, a literate layman asked directions of Mercury for mankind in general: