Chapter 9
From Development into Qualification: Flight Tests
(July - December 1960)
In mid-1960, NASA and its Space Task Group hoped soon to begin launching a major qualification flight test for Project Mercury every six weeks. If all went well, these tests of the operational vehicles should permit a man to ride into space before the end of the year. But if Mercury's developmental experience to date was any guide, troubles could be expected to pyramid and might require more than six months to correct. Since the ultimate goal of Project Mercury was to achieve man-in-orbit rather than merely a sounding-rocket ride by a man into space, the Task Group would be running concurrent flight tests with the Little Joe, the Mercury-Redstone, and the Mercury-Atlas combinations. But attention and impetus were focused on the accomplishment of manned orbital circumnavigation.
NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan sent a memorandum to his Director of Space Flight Programs, Abe Silverstein, on July 11, 1960, prompting him to make every effort to put forward to November the launch of MR-3, long designated the first manned suborbital flight. If that was not possible, Glennan urged Silverstein to hold fast the schedule for the first manned launching before the end of the year. Silverstein replied that the manned event had just been reset for the week of December 5. By mid-August 1960 the most realistic estimate of the earliest possible man- launching changed the program management plans once again and reset the MR-3 launching for mid-January 1961. As late as October 1960, this optimism prevailed while work on capsule No. 7 for MR-3 proceeded "somewhat better than expected."1
Having once called the Army's stillborn Project Adam a "circus stunt" because it proposed little more than shooting a man into space, Hugh L. Dryden, Deputy Administrator of NASA, had himself set a precedent for the criticisms of those influential scientists who came to regard Project Mercury as more of an exhibition than a demonstration. During 1959 few had raised their voices against NASA's plans and STG's development program for a manned satellite. But during this election year of 1960, many citizens scrutinized - and Eisenhower even established a commission to study - all national policies, goals, and ideals. This White House-sanctioned introspection led to some criticism, not entirely constructive, of the civilian space agency, which all too often was equated with Project Mercury.2
Most Americans appeared to approve Mercury as a potentially stupendous adventure, and many Congressmen anxiously hoped that NASA would mobilize the Nation's vaunted technological know-how to put the first man above the atmosphere. Although Dryden, George M. Low, and other NASA officials recently had warned repeatedly that the Russians could and likely would achieve manned space flight first, no one in NASA seemed to wonder whether the Soviets would send men on ballistic suborbital missions before committing a man to orbital flight. Most citizens seemed to confuse their feelings of hurt pride with loss of prestige and were reluctant to accept Eisenhower's difficult rationalization that America should abjure any "space race" with Soviet Russia. But NASA followed Eisenhower's leadership in this matter and reinforced the official attitude by insisting that Mercury was an "R and D" program whose pace could not be forced.3
Glennan in his public statements appeared torn between the pressures of public sentiment expressed through Congress and the news media, on one hand, and the demands of loyalty to the Chief Executive and to technological realism, on the other. Aware of the Nation's late start in rocket propulsion development and yet of its amazingly rapid achievement of a workable ICBM, Glennan knew that the United States still did not have the weight-lifting prowess to join an avowed contest with the U.S.S.R. But Glennan also shared the aerospace community's satisfaction on May 20, 1960, when the Atlas first flew higher than 1,000 miles and over 9014 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral into the Indian Ocean. By this time the Thor and Jupiter intermediate-range missiles were operationally deployed abroad. The Titan ICBM, in spite of some developmental failures, was emerging into a second-generation intercontinental missile.4
Mercury still was only a fractional part of NASA's total space effort, but publicity and public interest had reinforced each other until the manned program clearly had become the most promising hope of "beating" the Russians into space. When the Soviets orbited Korabl Sputnik II on August 19 and the next day recovered two dogs, Strelka and Belka, from it, grounds for complacency among Americans evaporated.5 National phobias, stimulated by partisan criticism of the alleged "missile gap," were further distorted by technological chauvinism with respect to Soviet accomplishments in space. Popular attitudes were exacerbated after the "spirit of Camp David" was destroyed by the U-2 incident and after Khrushchev used the U-2 affair to destroy the summit conference in Paris.
Speculations on high policy and international relations were not the business of the field workers on the Mercury program. But as citizens they could not avoid being aware of some wondrous possibilities for the historic significance of their work. Both landlubbers and space lovers could find many excellent reasons to think that the ICBM and nuclear warheads might possibly become plowshares of peace rather than tools of terror if directed toward the exploration of space. Peaceful coexistence and even international cooperation might be force-fed by the exorbitant economics of the competition to put men into orbit. Whatever one's particular brand of concern, there were motives aplenty to work on Project Mercury.
Toward the end of June 1960, the Space Task Group took another hard look at the status of Project Mercury. Having formalized three separate series of engineering inspections and tests - progressing from development through qualification into reliability phases - STG faced with increased confidence some criticism from technical associates. It felt it could gauge accurately the soft spots in the major systems for Mercury. Of the 17 nominal systems for the capsule, all but five or six by June were reported finished with qualification tests and almost done with reliability testing. The major unfinished items were the reaction control system, pyrotechnics, the retrograde and posigrade rockets, and the satellite clock.
Capsule system tests had revealed that certain pressure regulators, solenoid and relief valves, and thrust chambers for the reaction controls using corrosive hydrogen peroxide were going to be troublesome when operating in a high vacuum. On the other hand, the environmental system was progressing better than expected, with only five components still unqualified: the emergency oxygen bottle, a pressure reducer assembly, the odor and carbon dioxide absorber, a high-pressure oxygen transducer, and a suit-circuit water separator. The abort sensing and implementation system (ASIS) for the Atlas was 95 percent qualified, but its counterpart for the Redstone was not.6
The communications and tracking network faced four outstanding problems: no one had much experience with Atlas guidance and tracking at long ranges and low elevation angles; the reliability of the high-speed data links was unknown; capsule antenna patterns were erratic enough to make radar acquisition problematic; and control procedures and techniques as yet were untried.
Astronaut training, the Task Group believed, was virtually complete for disorientation, tumbling, and familiarization with high levels of carbon dioxide absorption. Adaptation to weightlessness and lectures on space sciences were 90 percent complete, but training in navigation and communications (at reduced pressures and with high heating, noise, and vibration rates) was less than a third finished. The training of ground crews in procedures for preparing, launching, and monitoring an astronaut in flight had only just begun. And NASA's planning for recovery operations in the summer of 1960 was grandiose, asking "virtually for the deployment of the whole Atlantic fleet." This requirement came down abruptly after NASA met with the Navy at the Pentagon and was shown that fleet operations of this scope might cost more than the entire Mercury program.7
The climax of the debate over reliability analyses came in early summer 1960, when NASA Headquarters decided to issue an independent contract with McDonnell for making assurance doubly sure. Associate Administrator Richard E. Horner and his deputy, Nicholas E. Golovin, the mathematical systems analyst who had come to NASA from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, achieved their first point on June 9, 1960, when a separate contract with McDonnell was signed for a reliability study of all Mercury capsule systems. Estimated to cost $52,892 with a fixed fee of $3,323 and planned to be administered by the Bureau of Naval Weapons representatives in St. Louis, this small contract was designed to provide Horner's office with the data it needed to analyze and evaluate the reliability efforts and achievements of McDonnell, of all 10 capsule subcontractors, of some 200 suppliers, and indirectly of STG's reliability monitoring and mission planning.8
Golovin's approach to a reliability prediction program was unusual to both the Space Task Group and to many of his professional colleagues. It reversed the common procedure of beginning with parts analysis and proceeding to the whole system. Golovin had recently explained his theoretical point of view before the American Society for Quality Control, citing other missile program precedents for inverting the crucial problem: "start with a definition of failure for the system, and then work back through subsystems and components to the data on parts failures." Glennan and Horner had approved this approach as an aid to fulfilling their desires for better "confidence coefficients" before accepting the readiness of the capsule for unmanned and manned suborbital and three-orbit missions. This kind of systems analysis used deduction and fully exploited "numbers game" techniques and data processing machines to check on the inductive systems engineering of STG and McDonnell. The experimentalists at the working levels, and many of the engineering managers, including STG's Director, Robert R. Gilruth, believed they saw a worthless expenditure of effort in this innovation.9
NASA Headquarters saw STG dragging its feet on this issue by the end of June. Glennan therefore tried another tack. He wrote directly to James S. McDonnell, shortly after a personal visit and briefing at the factory:
As you know, during the last month there have been a number of discussions between my Office of Reliability and Systems Analysis and various members of your staff on the problem of Mercury capsule system reliability. These talks were the result of my having directed the Office of Reliability and Systems Analysis to prepare for me an objective quantitative evaluation of the anticipated mission and flight safety reliability of the Mercury capsule system. It has now been brought to my attention that discussions have not yet resulted in mutual agreement on getting this job seriously underway.
I would appreciate it if you would give the matter your personal attention and have your staff responsively consider providing, as promptly as possible, the information detailed in the enclosed "Proposed Work Statements for McDonnell on Mercury Capsule System Reliability."
If you foresee any serious problems in this connection, I would appreciate your bringing them directly to my attention, and I will be glad to set up a meeting in Washington to reach a full meeting of minds.10
The work statements enclosed in this letter, prepared by Golovin's assistants Landis S. Gephart, William Wolman, and Catherine D. Hock, called for precisely defined reliability definitions, assumptions, diagrams, equations, and estimates of each subsystem design, together with all available test data from every source. The basic reasons for requesting this information were to allow NASA "to review and evaluate the techniques and the data employed by McDonnell" in its reliability report (No. 7007) issued almost a year earlier, and "to update and upgrade the reliability predictions and probability equations" for mission success in the light of uneven changes of component parts supplied to McDonnell:
With all its subcontractors, McDonnell has established a reliability requirement for each major equipment. This requirement has been expressed either as a mean time between failures for a continuously operating device or as a probability of success for a single shot device, and has been incorporated as a firm contractual requirement in the appropriate McDonnell Specification Control Drawing. McDonnell also recognizes that "a requirement without a test to demonstrate compliance with it is meaningless." Accordingly, McDonnell has specified a variety of tests aimed at demonstration of the reliability requirements imposed on its subcontractors.
Golovin and associates wanted to examine all test plans and test results on every Mercury capsule component from pre-installation acceptance through systems, compatibility, qualification, and life tests. In short, they wanted virtually a whole library of files at McDonnell opened for their inspection promptly, within two weeks if possible. This was not quite possible, but the founder of McDonnell Aircraft did reply personally to Administrator Glennan in mid-July:
I am happy to inform you that our company started work on 9 June 1960, the same day on which Dr. William Wolman made his first specific request, even though this request was only verbal [sic]. Our company is now at work on every one of the programs therein outlined even though we still have no contractual authorization for any of it.
* * *
We are in full accord with providing as fast as humanly possible (without diluting other Project Mercury effort) whatever work is desired by NASA to assist in the reliability evaluations of Project Mercury… .11
A few days later Golovin's group, having requested Silverstein to show STG how invidious was its prejudice against the "numbers game," journeyed down to Langley Field and briefed the Task Group on how Headquarters proposed to raise quality by quantitative methods. Reliability goals for each major capsule system, progressive analyses, and periodic reviews, plus a new order of simulated mission-testing stringency, were proposed and accepted by STG. Since the last major reliability meeting at Headquarters on February 29, 1960, had been so acrimonious, STG was surprised to find how little difference there now appeared to be between Golovin's approach to reliability and its own. On July 21, Paul E. Purser logged this note for Gilruth: "Spent most of the day in the meeting with Dr. Golovin, et al. They sounded fairly reasonable. If we had held such a meeting several months ago, there would have been a lot less misunderstanding."12
Shortly after this rapprochement, Horner resigned from NASA to go to industry, Golovin resigned later to join the President's Science Advisory Committee staff, and Gephart and Hock obtained an expansion of the McDonnell reliability contract to cover the astronaut's task description and performance evaluation. Glennan meanwhile pressured Silverstein, who pressured Gilruth, to do something formal about taking into account contemporary mathematical techniques used in missile programs to enhance managerial confidence in reliability, hence in readiness before a launch. Gilruth in turn gave the job to John C. French, who proceeded to organize a "reliability and quality assurance office" in the Space Task Group. There was special significance in the word "assurance," because STG had by no means capitulated to the statistical approach nor to the mathematicians' belief in the efficacy of reliability prediction.13
Had the qualification flight tests actually started earlier, perhaps much of the debate over what to expect from Mercury launches would have been obviated. But while still standing on the threshold of the major flight test program after almost two years of virtually simultaneous work on detailed design, engineering, and manufacturing, the Mercury spacecraft developers had to talk out some of these difficulties before they could call for a vote. Far more significant than the formal reliability program in the long run were the test philosophy, test programs, and the test work in "space chambers" that could more realistically simulate the hot/cold vacuum of the exospheric environment.14 To move in that direction required a move toward the "spaceport" at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Moving to the Launch Site
The imminent shift from development into the operational phase of Mercury was reflected in several different ways. Military and industrial relations at Cape Canaveral were undergoing rapid change as management and launch facilities were partially modified to accommodate the influx of a new team for manned space flight. Melvin N. Gough, the senior test pilot who had established NASA's basis for operations at the Cape, departed for a job with the Civil Aeronautics Board, and into his shoes stepped G. Merritt Preston for STG and Kurt H. Debus for Marshall's launch operations, now also a part of NASA. The Air Force also added more help for NASA support activities under Colonel Asa B. Gibbs and J. W. Rosenberry. Overcrowded facilities and overlapping checkout and launch schedules were causes for interminable official dickering but not for any program delay. Project Mercury eventually acquired Hangar S and launch complexes 56 for Mercury-Redstone and 14 for Mercury- Atlas.15
Although the rank and file of the Space Task Group were barely aware of the new liaison between NASA Headquarters and McDonnell reliability experts, the quest for quality control at the working level was entering a new phase. In the early summer of 1960, about 50 men from STG established residence in Florida. John F. Yardley, along with about 80 McDonnell technicians, set up shop in mobile-home trailers around Hangar S, in the industrial area within the fences of Cape Canaveral. By the end of the year the number of technicians working on the capsules for preflight checkout at the Cape had grown to more than 400, most of the increase made up by contract personnel.16
At the McDonnell factory in St. Louis, peak employment on Mercury systems had reached 880 in April 1960. After that, there was a gradual decline in Mercury production workers as Yardley's field team increased to 120 by summer's end. Because STG had called for the first four capsules from McDonnell's production line before they were entirely finished, the maximum of 427 workers on the factory floor in May 1960 declined with the buildup of preflight polishing activities at the Cape. Yardley and his crews soon became the center of attention for unofficial helpers and kibitzers from other organizations and contractors, many of whom were glad to provide materials and tools that were urgently needed and in short supply among McDonnell people at the Cape.17
Yardley, his assistants at the Cape - E. F. Peters and Robert L. Foster - and other working engineers knew little about the separate reliability contract between NASA Headquarters and McDonnell. Walter F. Burke, Logan T. MacMillan, and the quality manager, N. E. Covinsky, did know that this extra business was coming to their company through separate channels, but they and their production engineers were so busy trying to make each capsule work properly that they too could see little sense in the "numbers game." Each system and subsystem seemed to have its own personality. But to guard against overemphasizing these individual idiosyncrasies, capsule No. 10 was set aside as the standard test article at McDonnell. As preflight checkouts at the Cape uncovered more and more unique difficulties, the need for still more stringent quality control was made plain.
No one recognized this more than Yardley, who in the summer of 1960 urged his company to institute a new order of reliability tests. He did not insist on statistical performance data, but he did enjoin improvement of environmental-chamber reliability testing of components. Robert L. Seat, McDonnell's senior test engineer, was pressed by Silverstein in Washington, by Lewis R. Fisher of STG, and by Yardley from the Cape, as well as by the burgeoning number of test requests between McDonnell departments, to prepare specifications for an exhaustive environmental reliability testing program. On September 26, 1960, the project to flight-test a man in orbit was supplemented by an authorization to ground-test the capsule in a simulated mission through physical environments in a "space chamber." This simulated orbital test program gradually became known as "Project Orbit."18
The reaction control system on capsule No. 2 was giving Yardley headaches. In general the power and sequential systems on all capsules were full of "glitches," or minute transient voltages from inexplicable origins. Surely more problems could be expected from space operations. So the simulated mission test program, designed specifically to detect unknown anomalies arising from four and a half hours of continuous operation in a vacuum alternately hot and cold, like "day" and "night" for the manned satellite, was welcomed by all hands. Unfortunately it would take six months to build, install, test, and modify the new space chamber test facility at the McDonnell plant. Several smaller, less sophisticated "man-rating" vacuum chambers had already been used but none was capable of simulating the extremes of orbital conditions.
Prelaunch preparations at the launch site began in June 1960 with an understanding between STG and McDonnell that some rework would be performed there in addition to extravagant preflight checkout tests, but the extent of the last-minute work to be performed and the number of discrepancies to be corrected became so great that "preflight checkout" quickly came to be a misnomer. Under Preston at the Cape, John J. Williams eventually came to head the "Preflight Operations" division, instead of being simply "checkout" crew chief. Paul C. Donnelly, Archibald E. Morse, Jr., A. Martin Eiband, Walter J. Kapryan, and Jacob C. Moser gradually became involved with wholesale systems engineering as the thoroughgoing checkouts in Hangar S expanded.
Gilruth laid down the law "for what is perhaps the most important single requirement in our programs: that designs, procedures, and schedules must have the flexibility to absorb a steady stream of change generated by a continually increasing understanding of space problems." This policy of correcting every discovered deficiency and of modifying each spacecraft down to the finish line at launch time was what Gilruth meant by an "R and D" program; it sacrificed cost and schedules if necessary in the interest of quality or reliability as the experimentalists understood it.19
Through August 1960 "space chamber" ground testing for Mercury had consisted primarily of the capsule systems tests for integration and compatibility in a relatively mild vacuum and of the manned environmental control system tests simulating an altitude of 40,000 feet. McDonnell had detected many design deficiencies in these test programs. Now early development failures, arising from unanticipated interactions between parts and components and from errors in estimating the effects of environmental extremes, became most troublesome.
At St. Louis in mid-August, the "Development Engineering Inspection," a milestone meeting comparable to the Mockup Review, brought together for three days all the chief actors and participants in the hardware work on the capsule. Walter C. Williams and Kenneth S. Kleinknecht were eager to institute this old Air Force custom - the "D.E.I.," as they called it - as a basic check on systems integration and configuration control. When on August 18 the 30 members of the NASA inspection team departed, they were well assured that the Mercury capsule on display (No. 7) was safe for manned flight, but only for a suborbital mission. Orbital flight would require a higher order of precautions for reliability. "Project Orbit," taking advantage of recent advances in vacuum technology, promised to pioneer this new dimension in development engineering by bringing the space climate down to Earth. Capsule No. 10 was specifically set aside in September for environmental chamber testing at McDonnell for orbital conditions.20
While the Tenney Engineering Company of Union, New Jersey, was building the new vacuum chamber for man-rated environmental testing of the capsule at the Cape, and while McDonnell engineers were moving in to augment STG's preflight checkout group there, one NASA operations expert transferred back to tidewater Virginia to help Gilruth and French formulate policy and establish STG's competence to judge reliability and flight safety issues. F. John Bailey, Jr., was Gilruth's choice for the man most likely to reconcile the differences between reliability based on experience and on expertise. Bailey believed an engineer needed 15 or 20 years' experience in any specialty to be a proper judge of the state of his art; he also appreciated the value of mathematical models in the redesign stages of technological evolution. But he quickly became convinced, particularly by studying the carefully balanced engineering compromises between efforts to make the boosters perfect and to perfect the escape system, that Mercury dependability could hardly be improved except by flight testing.21
Everyone recognized dangers in the pragmatic experimental approach to pilotless spacecraft research, but each calculated the risks differently. Silverstein and the new Associate Administrator, Robert C. Seamans, Jr., who succeeded Horner at this post on September 1, 1960, were among those at Headquarters who justly feared that overemphasis on the uniqueness of each production capsule and on STG's policy of continuous rework might lead to so many "quick fixes" that a pyramid of unobtrusive changes could cover up the truth about whatever might go wrong.22
Perhaps the most pertinent of these difficulties with systems integration derived from NASA bench tests of the reaction control system. The manufacturer of the RCS, Bell Aerosystems Company, ran its qualification test program from August through October 1960 and reported all phases of the testing satisfactorily completed. Subsequent tests by McDonnell, STG, other NASA engineers, the preflight teams at the Cape, and eventually by the workers on Project Orbit revealed innumerable electrochemical and electromechanical problems in simulated environments that required small changes here and there and eventually everywhere. The thrust chambers, metering orifices, solenoid valves, expulsion bladder, and relief valves each presented developmental flaws that were "solved" more often by improvisations than by scientific redesign. Karl F. Greil, a thermodynamicist who was working for Grand Central Rocket Company in 1960 to perfect the escape pyrotechnology for Mercury, joined STG and its reaction controls test team in 1961 and tried in vain to apply the same perfectionistic standards to this vastly more complicated and inherently less reliable system of moving parts:
This is the irony: the results that counted in Mercury's RCS were due to changes of the screen, heat barrier, and orifices, all of which were made upon simple first thought. On the other hand, the large amount of experimentation on the valve resulted merely in the assurance that nothing needed to be changed so far as valve design was concerned. This irony, that the simple approach did the entire job while the sophisticated approach merely resulted in an "Amen", is indeed worthy of reflection, because it has in store both a risk and a lesson: a lesson because there is so much glamor cast on sophisticated pretense and so much disregard for the profane causes of all kinds of trouble; a risk because the simple remedy which did the job once without ever having become clear just how it really worked, such success without perspiration is likely to remain confined to its own historical case. But having established a precedent, it is bound to seduce us into relying on it, if it is not even bound to become a myth and a dogma.23
Fortunately neither the reaction system nor the environmental control system for the Mercury suborbital flight had to be so nearly perfected as the escape, structural, and landing systems. The development engineering inspection confirmed the faith of most project engineers, in spite of a spate of impatient criticism from outsiders, that capsule sequencing, electrical, communications, stabilization, environment, pyrotechnical, instrumentation, and landing and recovery systems were virtually ready to fly. McDonnell issued a revised set of detail specifications for capsule No. 7 soon afterward. The Aerospace Corporation, spawned from and now replacing Space Technology Laboratories (STL) for Air Force systems engineering activities, published in September its basic planning document, the "General Flight Plan: Atlas Boosters for Project Mercury."24
If Project Mercury were on the verge of technological bankruptcy, as some critics claimed, the problem was that man was still land-locked by inadequate boosters. The Redstone for Mercury was still not man-rated. The first Mercury-Atlas flight on July 29, 1960, not only did not qualify anything, it seemed actually to have disqualified an indispensable part of Mercury. It cast everything into doubt.
Atlas-Mercury One: A Complete Failure
Late in February 1960 the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division (BMD) and Space Technology Laboratories (STL) had been hosts for a meeting in Los Angeles of people from Convair/Astronautics, McDonnell, and the Task Group who were to determine the final details of the ultimate booster- capsule system for Project Mercury. Already STG had decided unilaterally, as was its prerogative, to make the next shot split the difference between the Big Joe development mission and a full qualification flight test of the Mercury-Atlas configuration on a simulated reentry from orbit. To the Task Group, this configuration and mission had long since been known as "MA-1 ," but Air Force and Convair engineers usually transposed the names and spoke of "Atlas-Mercury" No. 1. As in many other particulars, which things should be first still was debatable. Maxime A. Faget recorded his impression of the central technical debate at the Mercury-Atlas meeting on February 26:
STL/CVA representatives made an impassioned plea to use the escape tower on the MA-1 shot. Only with the escape tower on, can the Atlas people determine the structural bending modes on the Atlas and, consequently, the adequacy of their control system to accommodate them. The writer explained that the tower was deleted from this flight only after a great deal of deliberation at the Space Task Group, that much water has gone over the dam since then, and to change now would be very difficult. Although I agreed to take back to the Space Task Group management their desires for further consideration, they were informed that there was virtually no chance that the change would be made.25
As the MA-1 launch date approached, the Langley outfitters of the Big Joe capsule installed inside the shell of McDonnell's capsule No. 4 another instrumentation package, built by Lewis Research Center and STG electronics technicians. Shipped to the Cape in mid-May, loaded with 200 pounds of sensing instruments - including two cameras, two tape recorders, and a 16-channel telemetry system - the MA-1 payload was equipped to measure some 50 temperatures (mostly on the afterbody); pitch, yaw, and roll rates; positive and negative accelerations; cabin and external pressures; and noise and vibration extremes. Besides the missing 1,060- pound escape system, this payload also lacked the environmental control system, the astronaut couch and control panel, and the attitude-control and stabilization-control jets. An inert paste replaced the solid fuel in the retrorockets. For several months before the Atlas 50-D booster arrived at the Cape, Joseph M. Bobik, of the STG Launch Operations Branch, had work abundant as the inspector of the MA-1 capsule. Meanwhile Sigurd A. Sjoberg, John D. Hodge, Richard G. Arbic, John P. Mayer, and Robert E. McKann were hastily revising the mission directive, data acquisition plan, and general information on recovery requirements, landing area predictions, and a summary of calculated preflight trajectory data.26 Robert F. Thompson, Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., and Charles W. Mathews listed in order of importance the test objectives of the MA-1 flight:
- Recover the capsule.
- Determine the structural integrity of the Mercury capsule structure and afterbody shingles under the maximum heating conditions which could be encountered from an orbital launching.
- Determine Mercury capsule afterbody heating rates during reentry (for this purpose 51 thermocouples were installed).
- Determine the flight dynamic characteristics of the Mercury capsule during reentry.
- Determine the adequacy of the Mercury capsule recovery systems.
- Familiarize Project Mercury operating personnel with launch and recovery operations.27
When capsule No. 4 actually arrived at Cape Canaveral on May 23, it was as complete as it was supposed to be except for flight instrumentation, parachutes, and pyrotechnic devices. Following a satisfactory test of the leakage rate of its pressure shell, the capsule's miles of wiring were verified while the instrumentation system was subjected to final bench tests. Minor difficulties with instruments and in using a new weight-and-balance fixture added two weeks to the work period. For integrated systems tests to verify the sequencing and monitoring during the reentry, the capsule was moved into the newly constructed clean room in Hangar S.
When every minor discrepancy had been corrected and the calibration curves for various units had been established, the spacecraft was moved out to launch complex 14 for the first mechanical mating of a Mercury capsule with an Atlas booster. The alignment was good; no rework was required for the umbilicals or for the complex wiring in blockhouse consoles. But mechanical problems with Freon lines and with some electrical contacts in the mating ring caused a delay. Taken back to Hangar S for dismantling to rework certain instrumentation and telemetry packages, the capsule again was transported to the pad and mated to the launch vehicle in preparation for the flight acceptance composite test, known by its acronym, FACT. From July 13 to 18 engineers stood on the bascule of the gantry, working to conclude the FACT satisfactorily.
Meanwhile the Atlas crews were checking out their vehicle. Friendly rivalry between the propulsion and payload people produced many wagers over which system would cause the next postponement, and whether the capsule or the booster would be first to report "all systems go." On July 21, the flight readiness firing, which was a dress-rehearsal static-firing test, tested the three Atlas engines and measured the vibrations and acceleration strains suffered by the capsule. Atlas partisans won a bet at this point; atop this particular capsule the short metal legs of the "stub tower" created some unique antenna and telemetry difficulties with power amplifiers, commutators, and a high voltage standing wave ratio. The purpose of the "stub tower" was to support a thermal fairing over the antenna and parachute canister. Again the spacecraft was returned to the hangar. The tape recorders and cameras were removed, reloaded, and reinstalled. The telemetry was checked. The recovery section equipment was removed, then reassembled with live pyrotechnics. The capsule again was balanced, weighed, and aligned optically before its final union with the booster.28
McDonnell's virgin spacecraft No. 4 moved to the seaside launch pad dressed in a polyethylene raincoat on July 24. This time it nestled nicely on top the Atlas, and the umbilical insertion and pull tests shortly certified readiness to begin the countdown. Wet weather made it difficult to keep the pyrotechnic connections dry, but otherwise preflight checkouts were completed on July 26, 1960. For the benefit of Administrator Glennan, George Low summarized the expectations for Mercury-Atlas 1:29
The primary objective of this test is to determine the integrity of the Mercury capsule structure and afterbody shingles when subjected to the maximum heating conditions which could be encountered in any Mercury mission.
- Maximum velocity: 19,000 feet per second
- Maximum altitude: 98 nautical miles
- Range: 1,300 nautical miles
- Peak deceleration: 16.3 g
- Time of flight: 16 minutes
Heavy rain pelted the Cape early on Friday morning, July 29, 1960, but the cloud ceiling rose high enough to be considered acceptable for a launching. During the final 35 minutes of countdown before launch time (T), 48 minutes were accumulated by delays or "holds" because of bad weather; liquid oxygen tank-topping delays; and telemetry receiver difficulties. In the blockhouse Gilruth and Walter Burke watched Walter Williams direct operations and Aleck C. Bond, the project engineer, sweat away the minutes, while across the Cape at Central Control, other Air Force, Navy, and Convair officers and officials also watched and waited. Before their consoles in the blockhouse sat the Convair test conductors Kurt Johnston and William Williams; Scott H. Simpkinson, the payload test conductor; Harold G. Johnston, the ground instrumentation coordinator; Jacob Moser, the instrumentation engineer; B. Porter Brown, the launch coordinator; Richard Arbic, the range coordinator; and Donald C. Cheatham, the recovery coordinator. At 7:25 the weather looked cooperative in the impact area, where recovery aircraft and ships were reporting a visibility of five miles and a sea state of mild swells. So the gantry was ordered to back away, leaving MA-1 poised alone in the rain, ready for the final count. Intermittent holds for minor status checks left only 7 minutes of count at 9 o'clock.
Finally at 9:13 the man-made thunder clapped as the Rocketdyne engines spewed forth their reaction energy. The noise grew louder for several seconds as the Atlas pushed itself up on its fiery blast by inches, feet, and yards. Out of sight in seconds as it pierced the cloud cover, Atlas 50-D could still be heard roaring off in the distance. The initial phases of the launching appeared to be normal. Then everything went wrong:
About one minute after liftoff all contact with the Atlas was lost. This included telemetry and all beacons and transponders. About one second before telemetry was lost, the pressure difference between the lox and fuel tanks suddenly went to zero. It is not known whether this caused the failure or was an effect of the failure. There was no progression of unusual events leading up to this pressure loss. During the remaining second of telemetry, the Atlas flight path appeared to be steady.
By telephone and teletype data links, Low in Washington pieced together the bad news on MA-1 and continued to dictate an immediate preliminary report for the administrator and his staff:
As you know, the abort sensing system was flown open loop in this test. This system gave two signals to abort, apparently about the same time as the tank pressure differential was lost. These signals were monitoring missile electrical power and thrust; although the tank pressure differential was also monitored, no abort signal was received from this source. In the MA-1 mission, all of these signals were merely monitored, and were not connected to any of the capsule systems.
The current speculation is that the Atlas either exploded, or suffered a catastrophic structural failure. Some observers reported that they heard an explosion, but this is not verified. The failure occurred at the time of maximum dynamic pressure, at an altitude of about 32,000 feet, and a velocity of about 1,400 feet per second.
The capsule separation systems were not to be armed until about three minutes after launch, and therefore the capsule remained attached to the Atlas or to pieces of the Atlas, until impact. Capsule telemetry continued to impact and indicated violent motions after the Atlas telemetry ceased. Temperatures and shingle vibrations flutter were recorded. Since all shingle thermocouples gave readings to splash, it is inferred that none of the shingles tore off. Impact occurred about seven miles off shore in an area where the water depth is roughly 40 feet. At the time of this writing, ships were still searching for debris.30
It was a sad day for Mercury. It was especially frustrating for those nearest to the Atlas-Mercury phase, for they knew only that MA-1, either Atlas 50-D or capsule No. 4, or both, exploded on its way through max q. They did not know precisely what had happened because the weather had been so bad as to prevent visual and photographic coverage. In Washington, at Langley, at the Cape, and in southern California, postmortems were held for two weeks, until a conference on August 11 marshalled the parties most interested in the MA-1 malfunction, along with all the flight records, telemetry, and tape recorder data. Salvage operations had been able to recover only small portions of the capsule, the adapter-ring, and the booster. Presiding at this meeting was Major General Leighton I. Davis, the new commander of the Air Force Missile Test Center, who had relieved Major General Donald N. Yates in June as the Department of Defense single-point-of-contact for support of Project Mercury. On August 22, Warren J North summarized the "quick-look" opinions of NASA and STL but not of Convair/Astronautics:
Both the NASA and STG localized the difficulty within the interface area between the capsule and the booster. A metallurgist from STL explained that it appeared the plumbing to the Atlas lox boiloff valve had failed due to fatigue. One would not ordinarily suspect a fatigue failure after such a short period of time, however, the NASA analysis showed that the lox valve plumbing could have failed if a 30 g oscillation existed at approximately 300 cycles per second. Culbertson (Convair) admitted that the lox valve was poorly supported and that 30 g was a feasible magnitude of acceleration. Vibration measurements show a two and one-half g vibration of the booster airframe, consequently a 12 g amplification factor would have been required at the lox valve.
Jim Chamberlin, STG, has been appointed chairman of a joint committee to resolve the MA-1 incident and provide a fix prior to MA-2. Initial reaction of this committee would cause the establishment of a hardware mockup at McDonnell which would include the pressurized lox tank dome, lox valve, adapter, and capsule. This mockup will be vibrated in order to isolate resonance or amplification factors.31
Two weeks later in San Diego, another committee of nine metallurgical engineers, a majority of whom were not from Convair, examined microscopically the hypothesis that MA-1 was destroyed by metal fatigue of the lox-vent valve elbow. "All conferees agreed finally that the factor at hand was not the primary one."32 The official flight test report issued two months later concluded with these remarks:
The Mercury Atlas No. 1 flight test was abruptly terminated approximately 58.5 seconds after launch by an in- flight failure of an undetermined nature. Solid cloud cover at the time of launch precluded the use of optical records in the investigation of this failure. The following conclusions are drawn regarding this flight test:
- None of the primary capsule test objectives were met.
- The structural integrity of the capsule was maintained throughout the flight until impact with the water. A substantial part of the adapter remained attached to the capsule to impact.
- The capsule onboard instrumentation performed in a highly satisfactory manner throughout the flight.
- The onboard instrumentation showed the presence of shingle vibration of a non-destructive nature.
- All Department of Defense support for the operation was very good.33
In mid-September one of the most important of the regular monthly meetings of the Mercury-Atlas coordination panel took place in the administration building at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida. Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. Brundin, Major Charles L. Gandy, and Captain I. B. Hanson were the BMD representatives, while Philip E. Culbertson and C. J. Holden represented Convair. Bernard A. Hohmann and Ernst R. Letsch were representing Aerospace Corporation, since STL was phasing out of Mercury. John Yardley, R. L. Foster, and J. T. Heard were present for McDonnell.
First and last on the agenda of this meeting were questions concerning better ways of inspecting and solving problems at the interface between the capsule and the booster. Charles Mathews, the chairman, began the meeting by insisting that in spite of the MA-1 failure, the overall Mercury-Atlas schedule could still be maintained. Hohmann suggested that a new seven- man joint capsule-booster interface inspection committee be established. This was done, and members representing all contributing organizations were named. Regarding the unsettled question of MA-1, Mathews briefly described several fruitless fact-finding activities and the need for additional instrumentation to determine the cause of failures like MA-1. No new hypothesis had yet emerged from the several test programs, so the 23 members of this coordination panel reexamined each other's previous answers to the enigma of MA- 1. The 11 members from STG vetoed a proposal by the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division to establish still another "Mercury-Atlas interface panel."34
Although the MA-1 investigation was unsatisfying, the launch operations committee reported that MA-2 was so nearly ready for a November launching that there was little time for looking backward and no time for regret. Then on September 26, 1960, a lunar probe attempt by NASA, using Atlas Able 5-A, also failed severely. This forced a wholesale review of the Atlas as a launch vehicle. Everybody responsible for MA-1 was trying to determine the cause of that failure, but each only discovered that there were too many other bodies, both organic and organizational, partly responsible.
Late in October, before the national elections and before another Mercury flight test had come to pass, Gilruth and Williams held another periodic press conference for the benefit of curious reporters. Inevitably the question was asked, "Are you satisfied that you have pinpointed the reason for the MA-1 failure?" "No," Gilruth answered. "We successfully salvaged the capsule and can account for all parts." His interrogator continued, "Do you believe that parts in the Atlas' upper stage caused the failure?" Gilruth replied, "We have explored this. We have answered all of the questions we have asked ourselves - but have we asked the right questions? We can't be sure. That is one of the reasons we are repeating the test. And on MA-2 the interface area will be heavily instrumented."35
When MA-2 finally became ready for launch, toward the end of February 1961, the managers of Mercury knew that a repetition of a total failure like MA-1 could easily cause abandonment of the project. The entire promise of the American manned space flight program seemed to hang in the balance. The technical aftermath of MA-1, during the politically sensitive period of the Presidential election and the lame-duck session of Congress, made interrelated technical and political considerations more acute than ever. To distinguish between the two soon became virtually impossible.
Election Year Appraisals
The day that Mercury-Atlas 1 failed so badly, NASA Headquarters announced plans to follow Project Mercury with a manned space flight program called "Apollo" - a project conceived to carry three men either in sustained orbital flight or on circumlunar flight. Several days later, the X-15 set two new world records when NASA pilot Joseph A. Walker flew the manned rocket on partial power to a speed of 2196 miles per hour and when Major Robert M. White shot it up to a height of 136,000 feet over Nevada and California.36
In mid-August 1960, the Air Force accomplished two significant "firsts" within eight days when it managed to recover instrumented packages from the thirteenth and fourteenth attempts in its Thor-Agena-launched Discoverer series of satellites. Discoverer XIII dropped its 85-pound capsule into the Pacific off Hawaii on August 11 after 16 orbits; although a mid-air retrieval had failed, frogmen and helicopters from a naval vessel found and returned this, the first man-made object recovered intact from an orbital journey. On August 19, 1960, an Air Force C-119 cargo plane trailing a huge trapeze-like trawl succeeded in being at exactly the right place at the right time to snare in mid-air the descending instruments from Discoverer XIV. That same day, however, the Soviets launched an ark, including the "muttniks" Strelka and Belka, and the next day they recovered the dogs and their live companions (rats, mice, flies, plants, fungi, and seeds) after 18 orbits above Earth's atmosphere. This marked the first successful recovery of living biological specimens from an orbital voyage. Three months later, on November 14, 1960, another C-119 aircraft succeeded in snatching the reentry capsule from Discoverer XVII, which carried human tissue, bacteria, spores, and film emulsions to an orbital apogee of 616 miles. For the moment, though, the Soviet achievement was overwhelming in its portents for manned space flight.37
On August 12, 1960, after an attempt that had failed in May, NASA's Project Echo succeeded in placing into orbit the first passive communications satellite, a 100-foot-diameter aluminized Mylar plastic balloon, which reflected radio signals beyond Earth's curvature. Launched by a Thor-Delta vehicle into an orbit roughly 1,000 miles from Earth and inclined 47 degrees to the equator, Echo I was the first artificial moon that could be seen easily with the naked eye by all mankind. Although stargazing aborigines in neolithic cultures of New Guinea and Mozambique probably could see the Echo balloon with the unaided eye better than sophisticates in the smog and haze of urban-industrial centers from California to Kazakhstan, the new pinpoint of light in the heavens was a visible manifestation of the "space age." President Eisenhower's broadcast message reflected from this sphere circling Earth at 15,000 miles per hour proclaimed:
It is a great personal satisfaction to participate in this first experiment in communications involving the use of a satellite balloon known as Echo. This is one more significant step in the United States program of space research and exploration. The program is being carried forward vigorously by the United States for peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.
The satellite balloon which has reflected these words may be used freely by any nation for similar experiments in its own interests. Information necessary to prepare for such participation was widely distributed some weeks ago.
The United States will continue to make freely available to the world the scientific information acquired from this and other experiments in its program of space exploration.38
While the President was pointing to these and other achievements of the United States in the exploration and use of outer space, the Nation was in the midst of a highly contested presidential campaign and congressional elections. Four years earlier it had seemed sheer whimsy, but now the practical values of space exploration and policy decisions on space, missiles, and the Nation were being not only examined but reexamined. In September, a month after Strelka and Belka were orbited and recovered by the Soviet Union, Premier Khrushchev again came to the United States for some personal diplomacy and figurative sabotage in the United Nations General Assembly. Afterward he told reporters that his people were ready to launch a man into space but had not yet made any such attempt.39 No longer could Khrushchev's brogan braggadocio be ignored.
Meeting at Barcelona, on October 7, 1960, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale adopted the first set of rules to govern the award of official records for manned space flight. To be recognized under the "Code Sportif" that had been setting the rules for aeronautical records since 1905, the first flight into space must top at least 100 kilometers; later attempts to set records must exceed the existing record by at least 10 percent. Four categories of performance were set forth: duration of flight, altitude without orbiting Earth, altitude in orbit, and mass lifted above 100 kilometers. To be valid, all claims for records "must be supported by information on the date, time, place of takeoff and landing, identity of the vehicle commander, and any special apparatus used to assist liftoff, landing, or control."40
When in mid-October Soviet tracking ships deployed to stations in the Pacific, an alert went out to American forces to expect imminent Soviet attempts to fulfill Khrushchev's boast. In mid-August there had been much talk in the American press that the United States had "rejoined" the space race as a result of recent accomplishments. An Associated Press dispatch on August 8 reported that Abe Silverstein was not particularly dismayed by the MA-1 fiasco and believed that Project Mercury was "essentially along the same time schedule as was initially planned." Congressman Overton Brooks, Democrat from Louisiana and chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, waxed much more critical of the speed with which Project Mercury was moving. In September Glennan warned Americans to be prepared for new Soviet announcements of space spectaculars. The Mercury astronauts repeatedly were reported confident that one of them could ride a ballistic trajectory either in December or January.41 In short, the dramatic race to be first to put a man in space made such colorful copy that news editors generally ran stories on the space contest second only to news about the political contest.
The news media both reflected and fostered a widespread restlessness over the apparent failure of American know-how to equal and surpass Soviet rocket technology. Back in October 1959, two years after Sputnik I, Newsweek had featured an article, "How to Lose the Space Race," itemizing blanket criticisms of all American space programs. To ensure that you have the losing ticket, advised Newsweek, simply "start late, downgrade Russian feats, fragment authority, pinch pennies, think small, shirk decisions."42 At the beginning of 1960, Hanson W. Baldwin, the influential military affairs correspondent for the New York Times, had chided the Eisenhower administration for neglecting the power of intangible ideas and had advised the government to seek more advice from political rather than physical scientists: "It is not good enough to say that we have counted more free electrons in the ionosphere than the Russians have … we must achieve the obvious and the spectacular, as well as the erudite and the obscure." And in July 1960 one of the deans of space fiction and fact, Arthur C. Clarke, published a playful, widely viewed article that suggested that the United States had "already suffered a failure of nerve" and forfeited its future by failing to "rocket to the renaissance."43
Project Mercury specifically, as 1960 wore on without much to show for the taxpayers' millions, began to be criticized more minutely. Perhaps the most painful sting felt by the Mercury team came from adverse publicity in Missiles and Rockets, a weekly defense industry trade journal, on August 15, 1960. There, under the heading "Is Mercury Program Headed for Disaster?" writer James Barr excoriated Project Mercury:
NASA's Mercury manned-satellite program appears to be plummeting the United States toward a new humiliating disaster in the East-West space race.
This is the stark conclusion that looms in the minds of a growing number of eminent rocket scientists and engineers as the Mercury program continues to slip backward.
These experts, many of whom are already calling Mercury a latter day Vanguard, contend:
The program today is more than one year behind its original schedule and is expected to slip to two. Therefore, it no longer offers any realistic hope of beating Russia in launching the first man into orbit around the earth - much less serve as an early stepping stone for reaching the moon.
Despite precautions and improvements, Mercury continues to be a technically marginal program that could easily end in flaming tragedy. Mercury, at best, is a technical stop-gap justifiable only as an expedient. It is no substitute for what is needed sooner or later, a maneuverable spacecraft similar to the Air Force's much hampered Dyna-Soar.
Mercury originally had the supposed advantage of being cheap, an attribute that made it particularly attractive to the Administration. However, Mercury has proven to be a trip down a dead-end road that U.S. taxpayers are finding themselves paving in gold. Appropriations have reached a quarter-billion to date. They may double.44
Although Barr's animadversion could have been discounted in an election year as a plug for more encouragement and funding to the Air Force's Dyna-Soar program, the occasions for self- doubt inside Project Mercury indisputably were becoming more numerous. On September 16, 1960, Gilruth issued a memorandum for his staff that showed the effects of barbs like those from Barr on the morale of the Task Group. The subject of the memo was "Favorable Press Comments (for a change)":
As most of you know, there have been some adverse comments in the press and trade publications about the progress, or lack of progress, being made in Project Mercury during recent weeks. A number of members of the Space Task Group have expressed concern about these articles.
In any program as broad and complex and as important to our national stature as Project Mercury, it is inevitable that there will be people around us who either will not agree with us, period, or who tend to disagree in one element or another just to be disagreeable. At the same time, there are a number of people around our country who do understand how much work and how much blood and sweat go into an undertaking of this kind.
* * *
I am personally confident that the work that all of you are doing will bear fruit in the near future. In the interim, I urge all of you to put on your thickest hide, to continue your concerted efforts to make Project Mercury the kind of program it was designed to be, and to reflect with me upon our past accomplishments.45
At NASA Headquarters there was serious concern over how to answer public criticisms. On August 14 Warren North sent the Administrator some arguments filling in the contextual background of Mercury schedules:
Since the negotiation of the capsule contract, McDonnell personnel have averaged 14% overtime for an equivalent 56 hour week. McDonnell has assigned approximately 13,000 people in direct support of Project Mercury. In October 1959, production went on a 7-day week, three shifts per day. Since January 1960 capsule checkout personnel have worked three shifts per day seven days per week. McDonnell is also working three shifts at Cape Canaveral. During the past eighteen months, Space Task Group personnel have been using less than half their annual leave. Many have used essentially no annual leave since February 1959. Space Task Group personnel at Cape Canaveral worked approximately 50 hours a week preparing for flight operations. When the MA-1 capsule was delivered to the Cape on May 23, 1960, this group went on a 60-hour week. During the final month of MA-1 preparations, the launch operations crew was working a seventy-hour week. The forthcoming simultaneous operations with Atlas and Redstone will require a continuation of this type of effort.46
On September 9, 1960, George Low addressed a United Press International editors conference at a hotel in Washington on the subject of the progress made in Project Mercury to date. Low began by arguing against three common misconceptions about the project in the public press: Mercury was not, he said, "merely a stunt," not "designed only to win an important first in the space program," and should not "be terminated if the Soviets achieve manned orbital flight before we do." Firmly convinced that the Soviets now had the capability of achieving manned orbital flight, Low tried to persuade the opinion molders of the "fourth estate" to accept Mercury as an indispensable step toward Project Apollo, one which "must be carried out regardless of Russian achievement." This theme subsequently became official NASA policy. The urgency of Project Mercury was transferred onto the higher level of the urgency of manned space flight in general and for the future. "It has been a major engineering task," said Low, "to design a capsule that is small enough to do the mission, light enough to do the mission, and yet has reliable subsystems to accomplish the mission safely."47
Within the aerospace community of industrialists, technicians, and Government scientists and engineers, the context described by North and Low needed little explication. Experience with federally sponsored "R and D" programs since 1940 helped them understand the difference between a project rating the "DX," or highest industrial procurement priority, and one designated an all-out "crash" program. Mercury was never a "crash" project in the sense that the Atlas ICBM or the Manhattan Project had been, in which duplicative and parallel solutions were developed for its most difficult systems. The DX priority for materials, NASA's own first rating, and STG's high "sense of urgency" were tempered always by the rule of noninterference with priority defense programs. In mid- September NASA and the Defense Department agreed to aid each other to avoid duplication and waste by means of a new Aeronautics and Astronautics Coordinating Board, with Dryden and Herbert F. York as co-chairmen.48
But the citizenry, through the press, saw these problems in simpler terms. "Project Mercury: Race or Pure Science?" was a banner headline in a Norfolk newspaper of September 11. Richard M. Mansfield related therein how the United States "space fever" had fluctuated over the previous three years:
Gilruth gets a little angry when people talk about Mercury lagging behind schedule. Some say it is behind as much as a year. Gilruth says this is pure nonsense, that no one can properly put a specific target date on a research program that explores "new frontiers," and is beset by such "detailed problems."
* * *
Gilruth gave assurance that extra money would not have cut time appreciably. He does not believe that a blank- check crash program would save much time even now.
"I think we've done our optimum," he said. "It's just like having a baby. Maybe (with more money) we could have had a lot more of them, but you wouldn't have cut the time on any one of them."49
Reporter Mansfield went on to summarize the conflicting attitudes of scientists who "are never in a hurry," with Government employees, including scientists, who must respond to the demand of the electorate to "overtake the Soviets." The eagerness of the seven American astronauts to make their suborbital flights was tempered, he reported, by their recognition that the orbital venture into space had already slipped too far. "There is little doubt among them that the Russians will have been there first," said Mansfield.
Late in September members of the military and industrial community engaged in aerospace and defense business watched with interest for indications where best to invest their votes. The editors of Missiles and Rockets addressed an open letter to both the Republican and the Democratic candidates for the Presidency, inviting comments on a "modest proposal for survival." The journal sought specific commitments on the recognition as national policy of the strategic space race with Russia and on the endorsement of a bold long-range program for space projects during the next decade. Candidate John F. Kennedy responded immediately with his concurrence that "we are in a strategic space race with the Russians, and we have been losing… . if a man orbits earth this year his name will be Ivan." To this audience Kennedy also explained one meaning of his campaign slogans on "moving ahead" into the "new frontier": "This is the new age of exploration; space is our great new frontier." Vice-President Richard M. Nixon, seeing the issues of an alleged "missile gap" and of national prestige loom ever larger in the later stages of the campaign, at last replied by vigorously defending the record of the Eisenhower administration.50 The issue of manned space flight was never clearly joined, here or in the television debates preceding the election. But after the first Tuesday in November, even though the popular vote barely showed a preference, it was clear that the next Chief Executive as well as the Congress would be Democratic and that this meant change.
Project Mercury, as one large and unproven part of NASA, could expect to be influenced by "the gathering storm over space" and some sharp changes in the Nation's defense and space programs.51 The most forthright change to be expected with the new administration likely would be an honest and open admission of the competitive aspects of space technology. International negotiations on disarmament had failed to produce any further arms control measures since the 1958 Russian-American agreement to suspend atmospheric nuclear testing. Efforts in the United Nations to exempt space as an arena for international rivalries, following the example of the 1959 Antarctica treaty, had so far failed. It seemed purely sentimental to act as if coexistence would become any less competitive. Besides, recent successes of American missiles reinforced the United States' foreign policy of steadfast resistance to Communist encroachments. An Atlas ICBM had again flown 9,000 miles for a bullseye in the Indian Ocean on September 19, 1960; the Thor was operational, and the Polaris and Titan weapon systems were in active test phases. A "booster gap" there admittedly was, but the "missile gap" appeared closed, at least to discussion, after the election. The new President would probably find it politic to move speedily but cautiously toward a more intensive national (in contrast to a scientific-international) space program. Kennedy was historically minded and could be trusted to see "the present in perspective," but whether he would consider, as one professional historian did, "manned space flight as the main object of Russo-American rivalry" was entirely moot.52
Congressional attitudes before and after the election of 1960 seemed to change less drastically because Congress was already Democratic and had been critical of the Republican "no-race" thesis for three years now. Some of those legislative representatives who felt a need to justify their loyal opposition to Eisenhower and their support for manned space exploration could do so by mailing their constituents a congressional staff report entitled "The Practical Values of Space Exploration." Philip B. Yeager, a staff member of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, wrote this pamphlet "to explain to the taxpayer just why so many of his dollars are going into the American effort to explore space, and to indicate what he can expect in return which is of value to him." Two editions of this report, before and after the election, began with a quotation from a Russian workman who reportedly complained in a letter published on the front page of Pravda for June 12, 1960:
What do Sputniks give to a person like me? … So much money is spent on Sputniks it makes people gasp. If there were no Sputniks the Government could cut the cost of cloth for an overcoat in half and put a few electric flatirons in the stores. Rockets, rockets, rockets. Who needs them now?53
Neither edition of Yeager's staff report spoke explicitly about Project Mercury, but both implicitly illustrated Mercury's motivation. The author delineated in lay language five categories of values served by national space programs. Intangible values came first and included scientific curiosity and the human urge to do as well as to know. National security was second, and included the argument for space rivalry as a substitute for war. Economic benefits, immediate and remote, were described in social terms for the third category. "Values for everyday living" described some of the technological and medical "fallout" or "spin-off" from space-related research. And finally this pamphlet pointed to long-range values and to possible interrelationships with the population explosion, water shortages, soil erosion, new leisure time, and the scientific and spiritual aspirations of humanity. In conclusion Yeager chose to quote a paragraph, from an editorial in the magazine Industrial Research, which "sober study indicates … may not be too 'far out' after all":
Space technology is probably the fastest moving, typically free enterprise and democratic industry yet created. It puts a premium not on salesmanship, but on what it needs most - intellectual production, the research payoff. Unlike any other existing industry, space functions on hope and future possibilities, conquest of real estate unseen, of near vacuum unexplored. At once it obliterates the economic reason for war, the threat of overpopulation, or cultural stagnation; it offers to replace guesswork with the scientific method for archeological, philosophical, and religious themes.54
Technical Sprint for Man in Space
Although election year reexaminations and premonitions of the Soviet Vostoks were disconcerting, these were the least of the conscious worries of the men teamed in the technological harness to get a Mercury astronaut off the ground. They still had a plenitude of more prosaic problems of their own. The inexorable growth of the capsule weight, the marginal performance of the Atlas as a launch vehicle, interface wiring and structural problems, and the worrisome reaction and environmental controls for the capsule were outstanding. On the other hand, some problems, like thermal protection during atmospheric entry and the physiological effects of weightlessness for a short period, were assumed solved for the moment.
Benjamine J. Garland, one of Faget's fellow authors of the seminal 1958 NACA paper for Mercury, prepared a special report for Gilruth on the probability of damage to the capsule by micrometeoroids during an orbital flight. Garland advised that the danger to the capsule during an orbital flight from sporadic meteoroid activity was very small. He calculated probabilities of hits during a major meteoroid shower and found the danger was "still small but … an order of magnitude greater than the danger due to the sporadic background. Since the periods of activity of the major showers are known, it is possible to avoid operations during these periods and would be advisable to do so."55
Because qualification and reliability tests on the retrograde and posigrade rocket systems proved disappointing in their later results, Gilruth's team called for help from the Ames and Lewis Research Centers. Robert R. Nunemaker led a group at Lewis, monitored by John B. Lee of STG, who found some serious difficulties with retrorocket alignment and escape tower separation. Among other things, they found that some igniters were faulty and that the jettisoning of the escape tower under certain conditions might permit a smashing recontact.
But the most serious problem with capsule systems at this time was the outside chance that one or more of the three retrograde braking rockets might fail. There was considerable margin for error in the design of the retropackage, but there was no emergency braking system. STG's mission analysis group under John P. Mayer had thoroughly investigated an inflatable balloon for this purpose, and Gilruth himself proposed an emergency brake-that would have looked like a Chinese dragon kite trailing in the wake of the orbiting capsule. This auxiliary drag device to back up the retrosystem and to bring the capsule down sooner than in the 24 hours theoretically required for a normal decay of Mercury's orbit was independently appraised by Howard K. Larson and others at Ames. Meanwhile John Glenn and the other astronauts asked STG's mission analysts to study the effectiveness of a "fish-tailing" maneuver as a backup reentry mode of last resort. Both ideas were reported feasible, but the former was not pursued past the end of the year, when the reliability of the retrorockets and pyrotechnics began to rise appreciably.56
Among the number of unsolved problems regarding man-machine integration in late 1960, the complex final phase of the mission profile aroused much concern. If an astronaut could survive launch, insertion, orbiting, reentry, and the free-fall, nothing must jeopardize his chances to survive impact, exit from the capsule, and recovery. But as the capsule developed into flight hardware, the differences between its theoretical design and its measurable performance required constant restudy, redesign, and in some cases redevelopment.57 While studying the Mercury capsule's stability in water, for example, Peter J. Armitage and E. N. Harrin of STG found that the deletion of the flotation bags and the addition of the impact skirts had seriously compromised the floating trim if not the seaworthiness of the capsule.58
After summarizing recent investigations by both McDonnell and STG engineers, Armitage and Harrin pointed out a number of unknowns and recommended close scrutiny of any changes to capsule center-of-gravity positions to keep the capsule within acceptable stability limits. While the model-makers at Langley were fabricating and testing 24 new impact skirts, Astronauts Shepard, Grissom, and Schirra practiced getting out of the capsule; it now listed at severe angles and sometimes even capsized.59
During September 1960 all the Mercury astronauts began to train more pointedly for the Mercury-Redstone mission. Early in October they gathered their personalized couches, pressure suits, and accessories for centrifuge runs at the Navy's Aviation Medical Acceleration Laboratory at Johnsville, Pennsylvania.Fitted with a production handcontroller assembly and environmental control system, the gondola of the centrifuge whirled each man as if he were experiencing the calculated acceleration profile of the MR-3 flight. At Johnsville the astronauts gained experience in attitude and rate control, monitored the normal sequencing functions, and learned to cope with emergency conditions like overacceleration and decompression. Alan Shepard, for instance, took 10 training "flights" during the October session.60
On September 8, 1960, Silverstein called to Washington NASA's and McDonnell's chief engineers at work on Mercury to discuss plans for compressing the Mercury-Redstone schedule by expediting the capsule systems tests and checkout procedures for capsules Nos. 5 and 7, to be flown on MR-2 and MR-3, respectively. Once again Silverstein asked that McDonnell assign independent systems engineers to verify all hardware installations. Especially they were to improve the quality of capsule No. 7 before the formal systems testing period. This was done during October and November; for 43 days No. 7 underwent performance trials of all its systems except its reaction controls, automatic stabilization controls, and instrumentation and communications gear. McDonnell, Navy, and STG liaison inspectors tried hard to meet Silverstein's Cape delivery deadline of November 15, but two major discrepancies could not be allowed to pass. One problem had been perennial: overheating DC/AC inverters. Investigations disclosed that as long as the ambient temperature was kept below 165 degrees F they functioned properly. McDonnell attempted to cure this overheating problem by replacing the honeycombed inverter sockets with aluminum shelves that doubled as heat sinks.61
The second problem was new: tiny cracks were noticed in the outer titanium skin of the capsule pressure vessels. Samples of fractured material were sent to the Battelle Memorial Institute, an endowed foundation for applied scientific research, at Columbus, Ohio. Battelle found that the heated zones adjacent to the seam welds contained an excessive amount of precipitated hydrides, compounds of hydrogen and other elements. These impurities lowered the ductility of the skin of the pressure vessel, increased leakage rates, and increased the danger of structural collapse upon impact. But since capsule No. 7 had the best record of all in the capsule systems tests, it passed muster to begin its final factory shakedown tests on November 21, 1960. For later capsules, welding methods, vibration testing, and microscopic inspections were improved, but the long-standing "skin-cracking" problem required that the search be renewed for ways to eliminate hydride formations near the beads of fusion welds.62
On December 1, 1960, Jerome B. Hammack, the MR-3 project engineer for STG, and his assistant, James T. Rose, certified that capsule No. 7 was ready for its manned mission, though some 20 days behind schedule. "The writers would like to stress that the majority of time spent during this period was spent on correction and rework rather than the actual CST and that every effort should be made in the future to achieve manufacturing perfection prior to the capsule entering CST."63
Meanwhile capsule No. 2, being readied for the first Mercury-Redstone flight, was delivered to the Cape at the beginning of August. This flight, MR-1, was then scheduled for launching early in October. Both McDonnell and STG preflight checkout crews in Hangar S worked around the clock to make ready the maze of systems in their capsule. Christopher Kraft talked over Mercury command functions with the Redstone launch team under Debus and with Air Force range safety officer Lieutenant Colonel R. D. Stephens early in September. They then decided to fly the MR-1 mission with the automatic abort system in the open-loop mode to lessen any possibility of a nuisance abort on this qualification flight.
On a trial basis, a smaller Flight Safety Review Board for the spacecraft (tailored after the Atlas boards by the same name), chaired by Walter Williams and consisting of Astronaut Cooper, F. J. Bailey, Jr., Kenneth S. Kleinknecht, and William M. Bland, Jr., was established at the Cape to pass final judgment during the week before the countdown on the readiness of the mission. During the first week in October, final preparations were made to launch MR-1, and on the morning of October 9, 1960, an unbroken countdown proceeded to within 22 minutes of launchtime before the shot was scrubbed because of a malfunction in the capsule reaction control system.64
By the first of November both LJ-5 and MR-1 appeared ready for launching on November 7, 1960. But both launches had to be postponed again (the day before the election) because of inclement weather at Wallops Island and because at the Cape a serious leak developed in the helium tank of capsule No. 2. Without helium to pressurize the hydrogen peroxide thrusters, the payload after posigrade release might not reorient itself properly for reentry. So heavy had the workload at the Cape become that Williams decreed a maximum of 12 hours' work for any one person in any one day.65
The possible political significance of these launches now was seen by the press and by the legislative staffs on Capitol Hill and at NASA Headquarters. George Low's routine report for James P. Gleason, Assistant Administrator for Congressional Relations, carefully explained the technical reasons first for delay and then for speedup on the launch schedules. Regarding Little Joe 5, Gleason informed the staff director of the Senate space committee that NASA Headquarters was keeping close tabs on MR-1 scheduling information because of the need to coordinate interagency activity, but that Little Joe missions "requiring no major coordination with non-NASA organizations" had always been handled on a less formal basis:
You will notice that the launch target date was delayed from October 8, 1960, to November 11, 1960, at the time when it became apparent that the capsule delivery would be delayed until about August 1, 1960. Between August 17 and August 31, a large number of checkout difficulties was encountered in the noise and vibration test program. It was then expected that the capsule would not arrive at Wallops until October 5, and hence the launch date was moved to November 16.
In the early part of September, the rate of progress at Langley picked up, and the capsule was actually shipped to Wallops on September 27th. Nevertheless, the projected launch date was not moved to an earlier date, since simultaneous experience with MR-1 at Cape Canaveral gave every indication that the prelaunch checkout would take longer than planned.
In actual practice, the Wallops Island checkout ran very smoothly. Accordingly, a new target date of November 7 was established late in October. Barring difficulties during the final checkout period, and assuming that the weather will be clear and calm, the launching will take place on that date.
… I feel that our project engineers have done an excellent job at predicting these dates; it is very seldom that actual dates on as complex a research and development program as this one have come out so close to the predicted dates as these have.66
Less out of sensitivity to the political winds than because the facts seemed to warrant it, the apolitical civil servants in the Task Group sent an encouraging status report on Project Mercury to their administrative superiors in Washington at the end of October 1960. There were a couple of negative items: the cause of the MA-1 failure was still unknown, and the checkout time at the Cape for capsule No. 2 for MR-1 was stretching interminably, it seemed. On the plus side, three capsules (Nos. 2, 5, and 6 for MR-1, MR-2, and MA-2, respectively) were on hand, and two more (Nos. 7 and 8 for MR- 3 and MA-3) were expected at the Cape momentarily. The Mercury Control Center, a command-post building trisecting the area between the two blockhouses beside the launching pads and the industrial hangars, was open and almost ready for operations. Four preflight checkout trailers supplied by McDonnell were already in full use. Procedures Trainer No. 2 was being wired to its computer banks, and the ground-test qualification program seemed almost complete.
The tracking and communications network was essentially finished, except for the stations at Kano, Nigeria, and on Zanzibar. The Atlas ASIS was looking good, and with luck the first truly complete Mercury-Atlas configuration, MA-2, still might possibly be flown during the quarter. Cost accounting for the program was still a black art, but according to STG's own estimates the summary of funds required to accomplish the Mercury mission as defined in October 1960 approached $110 million:67
Mercury capsules (20) | $48,720,000 |
Mercury boosters | $25,429,000 |
Mercury network (incl. operations) | $18,953,000 |
Mercury recovery (incl. operations) | $10,573,000 |
Biological and human engineering | $1,922,000 |
Development program | $3,928,000 |
Total | $109,525,000 |
---|
Little Joe 5 Votes No
On Election Day, November 8, 1960, Space Task Group and McDonnell engineers at Wallops Island finally pulled the trigger on capsule No. 3, attached to Little Joe 5. Having planned LJ-5 for over a year as the first qualification flight of a production capsule to sustain abort conditions at maximum dynamic pressure, the hard-working crews were especially chagrined to see the disintegration of all their plans only 16 seconds after liftoff. At that time the escape rocket and the tower jettison rocket both prematurely ignited while the booster was still thrusting. Therefore booster, capsule, and tower stayed mated together throughout their ballistic trajectory until impact shattered them to fragments.
Whether the limit switches at the clamp rings below or above the spacecraft were at fault, or whatever improper rigging, wiring, or voltage regulation was the cause, it was exceedingly hard to rationalize that something was learned from this flight failure. Spacecraft and booster continued on their arc 10 miles high and 13 miles out to sea before being mangled on impact 2 minutes later. Salvage operations in water 72 feet deep recovered 60 percent of the booster but only 40 percent of the capsule.68 Extensive tests on the clamp-ring problem were conducted on rocket sleds at the Naval Ordnance Test Station at Inyokern, California.
For well over a year Holloman Air Force Base personnel, led by Major John D. Mosely, of the Aeromedical Field Laboratory, had prepared a packaged payload with a medium-sized chimpanzee to ride the LJ-5 qualification flight. As late as mid-July 1960, operational planning still included a first-order test objective to determine the effects of a simulated Atlas abort acceleration on a chimp. The delay in capsule delivery and a large number of checkout difficulties encountered in late August, especially with the booster-capsule clamp rings and pyrotechnics, led William Bland and Rodney G. Rose to persuade Gilruth to rule out the primate on Little Joe 5. Besides that, the second Mercury-Redstone now being groomed for a chimp flight represented a direct conflict in scheduling.
As disappointing as this decision was to aeromedical personnel, including James P. Henry, the physician who supervised the animal program for STG, the managers of the Task Group felt they could not afford to risk further delays. The structural integrity of McDonnell's Mercury capsule and the escape system during that most critical time in the region of highest dynamic pressure had to be demonstrated as soon as possible. By deliberately omitting the environmental control system and its problems, the Task Group had hoped to concentrate on hardware dynamics, taking extraordinary precautions "to minimize premature firing of any of the capsule pyrotechnics on the launching pad."69 Obviously something - no one knew what - had been overlooked.
After the dismal failure of Little Joe 5, these bleak days for Project Mercury became even bleaker with the discovery that the helium leak in the capsule for MR-1 could not be fixed quickly; it would require the replacement of certain valves and the whole hydrogen peroxide tank. Furthermore a change in the MR-1 wiring was dictated by the poor sequence and circuitry design on Little Joe 5. NASA had one more Little Joe test booster on hand. One more airframe, the last one in existence, had recently been ordered as a backup to the next shot. On November 10, NASA Headquarters was reassured that a stripped capsule on the backup booster could fulfill the Little Joe 5 mission, "an essential one before manned flight," probably before the end of January. And both Mercury- Redstone 2 and Mercury-Atlas 2 still were considered "not beyond the realm of possibility" for launchings in December.70
There was precious little in Mercury to be thankful for during the Thanksgiving season of 1960, but there was more than enough work to keep everyone in STG preoccupied. Caldwell C. Johnson wrote Faget a summary memo concerning the capsule's weight growth and its effect upon Atlas performance and mission profiles. While McDonnell was conducting extensive tests of the impact skirt situation, Johnson and others were worried about whether it would ever work. In the light of later developments, the ferment over redesign at this time became significant, and Johnson's words grew in significance:
We have been monitoring Mercury weight growth, McDonnell's airplane-weight history and the X-15 weight versus development phase and conclude that Mercury orbit weight by the time of manned flight will exceed 3,000 pounds! Capsule weight during parachute opening mode will be 2,600 pounds; flotation weight is practically as great. These increases have a detrimental effect upon orbital insertion probability, retrograde action, parachute opening loads, and water stability. The only single action that will cure the problem is weight reduction in the capsule but its weight growth is inexorable. It appears that several separate actions are necessary.
J. Mayer calculates that at 3,000 pounds the probability of orbit insertion is less than 96 percent even when based upon certain Atlas performance increases. Furthermore, the possibility of an African landing from an early abort is very real. He says there are some reasons to believe that Atlas weight can be further reduced and greater payload capacity realized but so far this is but speculation, and, in any case, doesn't do much for the African landing situation.
Some time ago increased retrograde capability was proposed but could not be justified at that time. There is little doubt that such a change is justified now - the question is whether posigrade impulse should likewise be increased to aid orbit insertion. It is tempting to combine posigrade and retrograde systems and to utilize the propellant as required by the particular flight situation. But, this is a rather drastic change.71
MR-1: The Four-Inch Flight
November 21, 1960, marked the absolute nadir of morale among all the men at work on Project Mercury. That was the day the MR-1 countdown reached zero, and when "all we did was to launch the escape tower."
Capsule No. 2 had been checked out at Huntsville on July 21 and shipped to the Cape the next day. The final standard trajectory was published on August 1, and the Redstone booster was delivered two days later. From July 23, when the capsule was airlifted to the Cape, until October 7, extensive internal reworking was required. Since this was the first complete capsule to be subjected to preflight checks, it was impossible to know precisely how long the checkout would take. Gleason of NASA Headquarters had explained these scheduling gymnastics to the Senate committee staff on November 3:
Between October 6 and October 31, 1960, the work proceeded exceedingly well. By October 24, for example, first mate had been completed. The rework had been accomplished and the simulated mission and servicing had been carried out. Not only had none of the contingency period been used up, but preparations were actually two days ahead of schedule! It was, therefore, hoped for the first time, that the working level target date might actually be met, assuming that some as yet unresolved electrical troubles would not cause any real delays.
On October 31, the final mating of the capsule and booster was accomplished. Still two days ahead of the target date established on October 7. Therefore, it became clear, upon examination of the remaining work, that the launching might take place on November 7. Accordingly, the Project Mercury operations director requested range clearance for November 7 and also requested support by Naval recovery forces for this date.
Because of the continuing great urgency of Project Mercury, and because each succeeding launching hinges critically on the dates of previous launchings, the selection of November 7 as a launch date for MR-1 was the only possible course of action to take for the operations director. In making this decision, he recognized that he was merely identifying the earliest possible launch date, and that this date might well be delayed if difficulties were to be encountered during the final checkout, or if bad weather was encountered. A later decision, on the other hand, would have been inexcusable for this might have caused unnecessary delays if all went well during the final checkout period.72
MR-1 was on the launch table on November 7, 1960, when the helium pressure dropped from 2,250 pounds per square inch to 500 pounds in the capsule control system, and the mission was scrubbed again. The capsule was removed from its booster and the heat shield was removed from the capsule so that a helium relief valve and the toroidal hydrogen peroxide tank could be replaced. A wiring change was made to avoid a failure of the Little Joe variety, and electrical sequence checks were redone as reassembly proceeded. Then, on November 21, MR-1 was reassembled and the final countdown proceeded normally, with the exception of a one-hour hold to fix another leak in the capsule's hydrogen peroxide system. The Mercury Control Center was manned for the first time. At 9 a.m. Redstone ignition occurred precisely as scheduled.
The expected blast momentarily churned the air around launch complex No. 56. But then the roar stopped as suddenly as it had started. Watching by periscope from the blockhouse, the startled engineers saw the booster wobble slightly on its pedestal and settle back on its fins after, at the very most, a four- or five-inch liftoff. The Rocketdyne A-7 engine shut down, and the escape pylon zipped up 4,000 feet and landed about 400 yards away from the launch site. Three seconds after the escape rocket blew, the drogue package shot upward, and then the main chute spurted out of the top of the capsule followed by the reserve parachute, and both fluttered down alongside the Redstone.
Mercury-Redstone 1 was the most distressing, not to say embarrassing, failure so far in Project Mercury. Critics waxed unrestrained. Even the Redstone experts seemed disconcerted.73 Technically it seemed inexplicable that the normal, instead of the abort ejection, sequence had followed engine shutdown. George Low later that day carried STG's report to the NASA Headquarters staff on what they thought had happened:
Apparently, sufficient thrust had developed to lift the booster at least 3/32 inch, thereby activating all the systems. (This would require more than 85% of nominal thrust.) The booster settled back down on the pad, damaging the tail fins, and perhaps the structure as well (some wrinkles are visible in the shell). The reason for this shutdown is unknown - the only shutdown to the booster could have come from the booster programmer, at the end of the normal flight sequence. Just how this programmer malfunctioned cannot be determined without a detailed inspection.
The capsule sequence … was a normal one for the type of signal it received. A closed-loop abort sensing system would have given an abort signal under the conditions of this launching, carrying the capsule away in a regular off-the-pad abort sequence.
At the time of this writing, the booster destruct system is still armed, and cannot be disarmed until the battery depletion during the morning of November 22. Capsule pyrotechnics (including posigrade and retrograde rocket) are also armed. The problem is further complicated by the fact that the main parachute is still hanging from the capsule; thus the booster could be blown over in a high- wind condition. Weather predictions, however, are good. It is planned to put the gantry around the booster in the morning, under the assumption that the Redstone has not shifted sufficiently to make this impossible. This will be followed by booster and capsule disarming and sequence checks to determine the cause of the failure.
The extent of damage to the capsule has not yet been assessed. Assuming a minimum of damage, it is planned to use the same capsule, together with the MR-3 booster, for the MR- 1 firing. It will probably take a month before this launching can take place.74
The day after the MR-1 attempt, Walter Burke of McDonnell volunteered to lead a squad of men to disarm the pyrotechnics and umbilical cable still hanging fire. Two days later, after intensive on-the-scene investigations of the puzzle presented by MR-1, Low reported a better consensus of expert opinion:
The MR-1 failure is now believed to have been caused by a booster tail plug which is pulled out about one inch after liftoff.
It has been determined that this two-prong plug is designed so that one prong disconnects about one-half inch before the second one does. This time interval between disconnect of the first and second prongs for MR-1 was 21 milliseconds.
The booster circuitry is such that if one of these prongs is disconnected prior to the other and while the booster is not grounded, a relay will close giving a normal engine cutoff signal. The time interval between successive disconnects was apparently just sufficient to allow the relay to close.
It is reasoned that Redstone missiles are somewhat lighter than the Mercury Redstone (with its extended tank), thereby giving higher initial acceleration and shorter time intervals between disconnects between the two prongs. This shorter time interval would be sufficient to allow the relay to close, thus having avoided this type of failure in the past.
This relay behavior could not be detected during checkout procedures since it will only occur when the booster is not grounded.
The above theory of failure was advanced by Marshall personnel at Cape Canaveral and has not been confirmed by Marshall-Huntsville. It is planned to continue tests at Huntsville using the Mercury-Redstone No. 2 booster to verify this hypothesis.75
Within a week, MR-1 was rescheduled for December 19, and MR-2 and MR-3 had been postponed until 1961. Low informed Silverstein that "The MR-1 capsule will be used as is, together with the escape tower from Capsule 8, and the antenna fairing from Capsule 10. The MR-3 booster will be used for this shot."76 There was no longer any question that the mating of booster and spacecraft should be done at the Cape.
Physicists observing MR-1 might have expected someone among the 5,000 members of the Marshall Center to have guarded against the relativity of simultaneity where electrical signals were concerned, but McDonnell and Task Group engineers dared not taunt their fellow workers on the Redstone about the cause of the "four-inch flight" of MR-1. They were happy that the sequence system on the capsule performed perfectly, but they too felt responsible for the failure of the MR-1 capsule to abort. Meanwhile Joachim P. Kuettner and Earl Butler at Huntsville, and Kurt Debus and Emil P. Bertram at the Cape, frantically drove the men of their respective Redstone-Mercury Office and Launch Operations Directorate to hasten preparations for MR-1A. By mid-December 1960, the Redstone team assured Washington that the repeat flight was almost ready:
The November 21 type event will be avoided, in the future, by the addition of a ground cable sufficiently long to maintain a good ground connection until all umbilical plugs are pulled. In addition, the booster circuitry has been modified so that a cutoff signal can only get to the capsule after 130 seconds of booster thrust (normal cutoff occurs at 140 seconds). Before that time, the capsule can only be released from the booster through an abort signal, manually given from the ground.77
Minor additional improvements were made to the capsule systems, a revised master operational schedule was issued, the Mercury ground control operations team was brought up to full strength, and Jerome Hammack, STG's Redstone project engineer, along with Paul C. Donnelly, the Mercury-Redstone test conductor in the blockhouse, worried through each day, hour, and minute before December 19.
MR-1A: Suborbital Quality Proven
Early in the morning of December 19, winds of 150 knots aloft in the jet stream required a 40-minute hold. During the countdown another solenoid valve in the capsule's hydrogen peroxide system had to be replaced, necessitating a recycle of the count by one hour. So it was 45 minutes before noon when the dramatic final 10 seconds of countdown for MR-1A occurred. This time there were no fouls. The 83-foot Mercury-Redstone assembly was cheered on - "Go! Fly, bird! Go!" - as it lifted off, burning brightly for 143 seconds to a velocity (slightly high) of 7,120 feet per second at cutoff. With this impetus, MR-1A coasted on up to 131 miles, its maximum altitude, then nosed over while the bolts in the mating-ring exploded as planned and the booster and its payload parted company. The capsule behaved perfectly in its attitude control and came down along its predestined trajectory to impact 235 miles from Cape Canaveral, 18 miles beyond the desired target impact point.
A P2V aircraft pilot saw the capsule descending on its parachute at 4,000 feet, and about 35 minutes after launch a Marine helicopter from the aircraft carrier Valley Forge retrieved the capsule, and returned it secure to the flight deck of the carrier within 48 minutes from launch. This time Low elatedly reported to Glennan that "the launching was an unqualified success."78
The Goddard Space Flight Center computers, both men and machines, performed admirably in making their first "real-time" impact prediction. On the Valley Forge sailors crowded everywhere topside. Visual inspections of the capsule by a NASA recovery inspection team revealed no damage except a crack in one outer layer of glass in one capsule porthole.
Exuberance was obvious in the postlaunch reports of the various participants. Howard C. Kyle, the capsule communicator, said, "Except for a few minor discrepancies during the countdown, all equipment appeared to operate normally. Technical support was universally superb." Tecwyn Roberts, the flight dynamics officer, wrote, "All communications checked A. OK. Data selection loop had some noise, but intelligible communication was possible at all times." Henry E. Clements, a captain in the Air Force and network status monitor, reported all instrumentation "A. OK," with few discrepancies. One note of caution was entered by Stanley C. White, the Mercury Control Center flight surgeon:
The acceleration associated with the reentry exceeded by at least 1 g the calculated value. If a similar overshoot occurs with the new profile being proposed on future MR flights, we are reaching the point where the astronaut has demonstrated inability to stay alert and to keep up with the events. The consequence of this aberration from predicted should be discussed before the new profile is accepted.79
Later, when the movies from the onboard camera were developed and shown, clean-room engineers and workers saw the necessity for still higher standards of cleanliness. Washers, nuts, and wire clippings came out from hidden niches and floated freely around the cabin during the weightless period. But otherwise, the Mercury team felt the pendulum of luck beginning to swing back in their favor at the end of 1960. They were proud of the Christmas gift represented by the demonstration of suborbital capability of the hardware in MR-1A.
Perhaps the most significant result of the Little Joe 5 and MR-1 failures was a profound reexamination among the managers of Project Mercury of their original design philosophy. Warren North reported to Silverstein at Headquarters on December 6 the results of a series of discussions among field hands on the subject of man- machine integration:
During the week of November 27, Messrs. Gilruth, Williams, Mathews, Preston, Bland, Ricker, Fields, Roberts and others conducted a major review of the capsule and booster sequence logic in an effort to determine what improvements could be made to prevent incidents such as occurred during Little Joe 5 and MR-1. Also involved in the week long series of discussions at Cape Canaveral were key personnel from McDonnell (including Burke), Convair, Marshall, and Aerospace.
As a result of operational experience, it was apparent that some of the original design philosophy should be changed, especially insofar as the role of the pilot is concerned. It has become obvious that the complexity of the capsule and booster automatic system is compounded during the integration of the systems. The desirability of avoiding, for manned missions, a direct link between capsule and booster systems, is therefore being studied. For example, the Little Joe-type failure would be averted by the use of an open loop manually controlled abort system. Similarly, the escape tower would not have jettisoned during the MR-1 launch attempt if this had been a manned flight with manual control over the escape rocket and capsule sequence system.80
Meanwhile the Atlas, the basic vehicle to propel Mercury into orbit, also was undergoing its most critical examination. A special ad hoc technical investigating committee, established on December 19, 1960, composed of both NASA and Air Force personnel, and headed by Richard V. Rhode of NASA Headquarters and Colonel Paul E. Worthman of the Ballistic Missile Division, was ordered to investigate the reasons why the Atlas had failed so often on NASA launches. Called the Rhode-Worthman Committee informally, the dozen members, representing all concerned organizations, looked carefully at three recent failures in the Atlas-Able series of lunar probes, at MA-1, and even at Big Joe, hoping to prevent another fiasco. Since the conferees at the last major coordination meeting, on November 16, had issued a test program summary reviewing MA-1 and subsequent action, the Rhode-Worthman group began with those inconclusive records and a set of 12 agreements on launch conditions for MA-2. Paul Purser and Robert E. Vale flew to Los Angeles the day after Christmas to defend STG's position on MA-1 and to expedite Convair's construction of a "quick-fix" solution for MA-2 and its fabrication of "thick-skin" Atlases for subsequent Mercury flights. Other members of the committee distrusted the original design for the "quick fix," which was in the form of a "belly band," or girdle, to strengthen the interface area around "station 502" on the Atlas booster, where the adapter ring for the capsule nested against the lox dome. Later the dissenting committee members supported a revised version of the fix after a number of their suggestions had been integrated. Both Chamberlin and Yardley had suggested the "belly band," but Hohmann disagreed. On December 31, 1960, Purser warned Charles Donlan, back at Langley Field, that STG and Convair might be overruled by Aerospace, STL, BMD, and NASA Headquarters representatives. As it turned out, on the second day of the new year Rhode sent a message to Seamans at NASA Headquarters that recommended great caution regarding the decision to incorporate the "quick fix," as many of the committee felt that it added uncertainty and possibly a new set of hazards. If so, MA-2 might have to wait three to six months more for a "thick-skin" Atlas from the factory.81
The year 1960 ended in suspense for the Mercury team. The Soviet attempt on December 1-2, 1960, to orbit and retrieve two more dogs from space had, as the Soviets admitted, ended in cremation for "Pchelka" and "Mushka" when their attitude control system failed at retrofire and their vehicle, Korabl Sputnik III, burned up on reentry from its rather too shallow orbit. To appraise the meaning of the flight of the Soviets' third man-sized spaceship from available information was exceedingly difficult. Obviously the Soviets were close to the day when they could put a man into orbit, but the similar failures of their first and third "cosmic ships," on May 19 and December 2, respectively, had made the question "How close?" highly debatable.82
On December 5, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, G. Pokrovsky, had extolled the "socialist system," in spite of its failure to recover Pchelka and Mushka, and boasted that "we are on the threshold of manned space flight, and the first man to be in space will undoubtedly be a Soviet citizen." That same day, Time magazine had bemoaned "Lead-Footed Mercury" and ridiculed Wernher von Braun's calling MR-1 "a little mishap": "Project Mercury's latest failure, third in a row, just about evaporated the last faint wisp of hope that the U.S. might put a man into space before Russia does." A New York Times editorial agreed with that evaluation and advised the new President-elect to persevere: "The first man in space will not be the last, and after the tributes have been paid to that first man and those who made his feat possible the more important question will arise of what man can do in space that is worth the immense cost of putting him there."83
Although there was some exultation in the United States after the success of MR-1A on December 19, the public seemed to sense, without any deep understanding, a difference of several orders of magnitude between Soviet space flight tests and American qualification flight difficulties. Within the Space Task Group, NASA, and the Mercury team, technical understanding, sometimes divorced from political intuition, appeared to buttress the hope that an American manned ballistic flight into space might still precede the substantially more difficult manned orbital flight around Earth. Manned space flight was a name for a series of field events in the space olympics. Although the odds were with the Soviets to win the marathon of the first orbital circumnavigation, perhaps Mercury might win the suborbital sprint.
- Memos, George M. Low to Abe Silverstein, "Information for Program Management Plan Meeting," Oct. 6, 1960; T. Keith Glennan to Silverstein, July 11, 1960; Silverstein to Glennan, "MR-3 Launch Date," July 16, 1960; Silverstein to Robert R. Gilruth, "MR-3 Launch Schedule," July 25, 1960; Walter C. Williams to NASA Hq. International Programs Office, "Monthly Summary of Project Mercury Activities," Aug. 8, 1960. Warren J. North, "History of Mercury Schedules: Earliest Possible Manned Flights," chart, Aug. 13, 1960. See also Abe Silverstein, "Progress in Space Flight," Astronautics, V (Nov. 1960), 24-25, 140-142.X
- For the Report of the President's Commission on National Goals, see Henry M. Wriston, et al., Goals for Americans (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1960). Note especially the section by Warren Weaver, pp. 101-124, on "A Great Age for Science." Cf. J. L. Penick, Jr., et al., eds., The Politics of American Science: 1939 to the Present (Chicago, 1965), 221.X
- House Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 86 Cong., 1 sess. (1959), National Aeronautics and Space Administration Appropriations, testimony of Hugh L. Dryden, 15; House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 86 Cong., 2 sess. (1960), Review of the Space Program, Part II, testimony of George M. Low, Feb. 16, 1960, 761. For an excellent analysis of political positions and public opinion on American space policy (1957-1963) as a whole, see Vernon Van Dyke, Pride and Power: The Rationale of the Space Program (Urbana, Ill., 1964). Eisenhower's position is described on pp. 82-83.X
- Glennan's introspection on the role of international competition was best expressed in an address at a Yale University symposium on Oct. 7, 1960. See also letter Glennan to Eugene M. Emme, Oct. 19, 1965. For an overview of Air Force programs, see Ernest G. Schwiebert, "USAF's Ballistic Missiles - 1954-1964: A Concise History," Air Force and Space Digest, XLVII (May 1964), 51-166, later published as A History of the U.S. Air Force Ballistic Missiles (New York, 1965).X
- The best open monograph comparing Soviet and American space accomplishments is Charles S. Sheldon II, "The Challenge of International Competition," paper, third American Inst. of Aeronautics and Astronautics/NASA Manned Space Flight Meeting, Houston, Nov. 6, 1964, revised and reprinted in Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, 89 Cong., 1 sess. (1965), International Cooperation and Organization for Outer Space, Appendix A, 427-477.X
- "Project Mercury Discussion," brochure, STG, June 20, 1960. See also memo, Dieter Grau to Dir., Guidance and Control Div., Marshall Space Flight Center, "Unsatisfactory Condition on MR Abort Sensing System," Oct. 11, 1960; minutes, "Resume of Mercury-Redstone Panel 2 Meeting," LOD-MSFC, Aug. 24, 1960.X
- "Project Mercury Discussion," B-276, B-187, B-258, B--204; comments, William Underwood, Executive Sec. of CMLC, to Eugene M. Emme, Nov. 1, 1965; draft Ms., B. Leon Hodge, et al., "Recovery Operations Portion," for Mercury Technical History, Aug. 1963.X
- NASA Contract No. NAS-190, "Reliability Study of Mercury Capsule System," June 9, 1960, was signed by William P. Kelly, Jr., for the government and by D. P. Murray for McDonnell Aircraft Corp.X
- Nicholas F. Golovin, "An Approach to a Reliability Prediction Program," American Society for Quality Control. Transactions of 1960 Convention, San Francisco, May 25, 1960, 173. See also, memos, Silverstein to Deputy Assoc. Administrator, "Project Mercury Reliability Analysis," June 21, 1960; Golovin to Dir., Office of Space Flight Programs, "Project Mercury Reliability," June 23, 1960. "Old data and wrong ground rules gave bad figures from our standpoint," said Walter Williams in interview, Houston, Aug. 23, 1965. Silverstein and Low tended to side with the working levels on this issue: see Low, comments, Oct. 5, 1965.X
- Letter, Glennan to James S. McDonnell, Jr., June 30, 1960, with enclosure [from which next quotation is taken], "Proposed Work Statements for McDonnell on Mercury Capsule System Reliability," June 30, 1960, 2.X
- Letter, McDonnell to Glennan, July 13, 1960, NASA Central Files, Washington. Apparently Mr. McDonnell was unaware of the NASA-MAC reliability contract NAS-190.X
- Paul E. Purser, log for Gilruth, July 21, 1960; "Informal Reliability Discussion for STG by AAR Staff," July 21, 1960; Ms. notes on reliability meeting, Purser, July 21, 1960; F. John Bailey, Jr., interview, Houston, July 16, 1964. For a later statement of Headquarters' policy see Landis S. Gephart, "NASA Requirements for Reliability and Quality Assurance," in Western Space Age Industries and Engineering Exposition and Conference: NASA Day, April 27, 1962, NASA SP-4 (Washington, 1962), 49-56.X
- John C. French, interview, Houston, Aug. 3, 1964; memo, Gephart to Everett W. Quintrell, "Background Information on Astronaut's Task Description and Performance Evaluation," Aug. 31, 1960. Cf. letter, J. Y. Brown, Contract Manager, McDonnell Aircraft Corp., to W. P. Kelly, Jr., NASA Contracting Officer, Aug. 24, 1960.X
- See Low, comments, Oct. 5, 1965; Aleck C. Bond and Maxime A. Faget, Ms., "Technologies of Manned Space Systems," Chap. 14, "The Role of Ground Testing in Manned Spacecraft Programs," 167 - 177.X
- Mercury operations were governed by the agreement "Overall Plan - Department of Defense Support for Project Mercury Operations," Jan. 15, 1960, but some of the difficulties in working out specific operational procedures at the Cape may be found in Francis E. Jarrett, Jr., and Robert A. Lindemann, "Historical Origins of NASA's Launch Operations Center," Kennedy Space Center, Historical Monograph No. 1, Cocoa Beach, Fla., Oct. 1964, 69-76. See also letters, Henry N. Moore to distribution, AFMTC, "NASA Organizational Changes at AMR and PMR," June 27, 1960; and Kurt H. Debus to G. J. Weber, MAC, July 28, 1960; and Ms. paper, anonymous, "Responsibilities and Procedures for AMR Support of Project Mercury," ca. Aug. 1, 1960.X
- J. F. Shields, personnel study chart, MSC Florida Operations, Jan. 4, 1964; G. Merritt Preston, interview, Cape Kennedy, April 29, 1964; George F. Killmer, Jr., interview, Houston, Sept. 14, 1965. See also Ms. paper, Gilbert B. North, "Development and Checkout of the NASA Mercury Capsule," McDonnell Aircraft Corp. [ca. Sept. 1960].X
- John F. Yardley, William Dubusker, interviews, St. Louis, Aug. 31, Sept. 1, 1964. See also Ms. paper, H. H. Leutjen, "Ground Checkout and Launch Procedures for Man-in-Space Operations," McDonnell Aircraft Corp. [ca. Aug. 1961]; McDonnell Aircraft Corp. interoffice memo, J. T. Dale to W. F. Burke, "Mercury-Redstone Panel I Meeting at MSFC on 11 August 1960," Aug. 16, 1960. Field procurement was standardized to some extent by memo, Harold G. Collins to all Mercury Hangar S personnel, "Procurement Procedures on Contract NAS 5-59," Sept. 8, 1960.X
- Project Orbit is not to be confused with Project Orbiter; see p. 29. Yardley, Robert L. Seat, interviews, St. Louis, Sept. 1, 1964; memo, Lewis R. Fisher for Project Director, "Proposal for Environmental Qualification Test of Mercury Capsule," June 21, 1960; A. E. Wilkes, "Proposal for Full Scale Simulated Mission Test, Orbit Phase; Immediate Capabilities," McDonnell Aircraft Corp. report No. 7730, Aug. 29, 1960; memo, Floyd W. Fults to distribution, "Project Orbit Team Member's Responsibilities," McDonnell Aircraft Corp. memo No. P0-650-3, Feb. 2, 1961. For an overview of Project Orbit, see A. M. Paolini, "Evaluation of a Mercury Spacecraft in a Simulated Orbit Environment," McDonnell Aircraft Corp. preliminary report, May 29, 1962.X
- Gilruth quoted by John J. Williams and Donald M. Corcoran, "Mercury Spacecraft Pre-Launch Preparations at the Launch Site," paper, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Space Flight Testing Conference, Cocoa Beach, Fla., March 18-20, 1963, 18. Cf. p. 28. See also draft Ms., Frank M. Crichton, "Quality Control and Inspection," for Project Mercury Technical History, July 3, 1963.X
- Bond and Faget, "Technologies of Manned Space Systems"; Development Engineering Inspection Data Book, SEDR 183, McDonnell Aircraft Corp., Aug. 16, 1960. For Project Orbit, see F. W. Fultz, A. E. Wilkis, J. J. Mazzoni, et al., informal McDonnell Aircraft Corp. memos, Sept. through Dec. 1960, including preliminary McDonnell report 7869-9 [no title], June 7, 1961: all included in file by Robert A. Hermann and Joe W. Dodson, "Project Orbit notes."X
- Bailey interview; Mss., "Briefings, NASA-Industry Apollo Technical Conference," July 18, 1961; "Reliability and Flight Safety Problems," April 4, 1962, 8; "Reliability and Crew Safety in Manned Space Flight," Feb. 20, 1963; Bailey, "Review of Lessons Learned in the Mercury Program Relative to Spacecraft Design and Operations," paper, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Space Flight Testing Conference, Cocoa Beach, Fla., March 18, 1963.X
- Abe Silverstein, interview, Cleveland, May 1, 1964; House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 87 Cong., 1 sess. (1961), Fourth Semiannual Report of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 208-209.X
- Ms., Karl F. Greil, for Mercury Tech. History, "History of the Reaction Control System," July 1962, 160 - 161. Cf. 145, 67-68 [English trans. by L. S. S.]. See also another draft Ms. by Norman B. Farmer, "Instrumentation," June 27, 1963, for some discussion of equally acute problems.X
- See R. D. Korando, "Mercury Capsule No. 7: Configuration Specification (Mercury-Redstone No. 3) ," Report 603-7, McDonnell Aircraft Corp., Aug. 1, 1960, revised Nov. 10, 1960; R. F. Mackey, "General Flight Plan: Atlas Boosters for Project Mercury," Aerospace Corp. report AS-60-0000-0036, Sept. 1960. X
- Memo, Faget to Flight Systems Div., "Mercury-Atlas Meeting on Feb. 26, 1960 at Space Technology Laboratories," March 4, 1960, 3.X
- NASA News Release 60-233, "MA-1 Capsule Instrumentation," undated; memo, Charles J. Donlan to Langley Research Center, attention Clyde Thiele, "Inspection of MA-1 Capsule," March 18, 1960; memo, R. E. McKann to Chief, Flight Systems Div., "Trip to Mercury Project Office at Patrick Air Force Base," April 14, 1960. The basic preflight documentation for MA-1 is found in the following NASA Project Mercury working papers: "MA-1 Mission Directive," No. 132, April 11, 1960; "General Information for MA-1 Recovery Force," No. 142, July 8, 1960; "Landing Area Prediction MA-1," No. 143, July 13, 1960; "Summary of Calculated Preflight Trajectory Data for MA-1," No. 144, July 25, 1960. See also "Data Acquisition Plan, MA-1," undated; and "Project Mercury Description of Plans for MA-1," prelaunch report, June 24, 1960.X
- Letter, Walter Williams to Cdr., DesFlotFour, March 15, 1960, with enclosure, "Test Objectives and Recovery Requirements for the Project Mercury Atlas Test One."X
- Detailed descriptions of preflight operations for all Mercury launches are summarized in Ms., George F. Killmer, Jr., et al., "Mercury Technical History - Preflight Operations," MSC Florida Operations, Dec. 30, 1963. For MA-1, see pp. 68-71. For an overview of the coordination and cooperation mechanics among the Mercury-Atlas team, see letters, Silverstein to Courtland D. Perkins, Asst. Secy. of the Air Force (R and D), Aug. 26, 1960, and Gilruth to Silverstein, "Project Mercury Coordination between NASA-MAC and BMD-STL-Convair," Aug. 26, 1960, with enclosures.X
- Memo, Low to Administrator, "Mercury-Atlas Test No. 1," July 26, 1960. For the more general "man-rating" procedures for the Atlas Booster about this time, see STL report TR-60-0000-69079, "Atlas Booster Flight Safety Review General Operating Procedures and Organization," June 6, 1960.X
- Memo, Low to Administrator, "Mercury-Atlas 1, Post-Launch Information," July 29, 1960; see also Ms., "MA-1 Operation, 7/29/60," launch diary, anon. This same day George Low delivered a paper before the first NASA-Industry Conference that officially and publicly named for the first time "Project Apollo" as a manned lunar circumnavigation program for the future: see NASA-Industry Program Plans Conference, Washington, D.C., July 28-29, 1960, 80.X
- Memo, North to Administrator, "Analysis of MA-1 Malfunction," Aug. 22, 1960. See also Sally Anderson, ed., Final Report Mercury/Atlas Launch Vehicle Program, Aerospace Corp. report No. TDR-269 (4101)-3, El Segundo, Calif., Nov. 1963, VIII-14.X
- Joseph A. Kies, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, "Atlas-Mercury Failure: Examination of Failed Parts," report, Aug. 30, 1960, 3; Andre J. Meyer, Jr., "Trip Report," Aug. 30, 1960.X
- "Flight Test Report for Mercury-Atlas Mission No. 1 (capsule No. 4)," NASA Project Mercury working paper No. 159, Nov. 4, 1960, 12-1. Some idea of the complexity of data reduction procedures for Mercury in general and of the impact of MA-1 on data coordination procedures in particular may be gleaned from the draft Ms. by Richard G. Arbic and Robert C. Shirley, "Data Coordination," for Mercury Technical History, Part III, M., July 10, 1963.X
- Minutes, "Mercury-Atlas Coordination Panel, Sept. 14, 1960," Sigurd A. Sjoberg, secretary, with enclosures, Sept. 29, 1960.X
- Transcript, "Press Group Interview with Gilruth, Williams," Oct. 26, 1960, 2. Leading questions were asked by Douglas Dederer of the Cocoa (Fla.) Tribune. Gilruth also was reported to have said that he would not be surprised "to wake up any morning" to find the Soviets had accomplished manned orbital flight. Alvin B. Webb, Jr., Washington Post, Oct. 30, 1960. Webb also editorialized to say, "Mercury - named for a winged-footed Roman God - appears to have both feet in a molasses vat." House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 87 Cong., 1 sess. (1961), A Chronology of Missile and Astronautic Events, 123, 124, 132; Sheldon, "The Challenge of International Competition," passim. X
- For an overview of the parallel development of this rocket research aircraft see Thomas A. Toll and Jack Fischel, "The X-15 Project: Results and Research," Astronautics and Aeronautics, II (March 1960), 20-28.X
- Eugene M. Emme, Aeronautics and Astronautics: An American Chronology of Science and Technology in the Exploration of Space, 1915- 1960 (Washington, 1961), 126-130.X
- Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960-61 (Washington, 1961), 630; A Chronology of Missile and Astronautic Events, 121, 123. See also Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, 88 Cong., 1 sess. (1963), Documents on International Aspects of the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, 1954- 1962, May 9, 1963, 181. Eisenhower listed Pioneer V, Tiros I, Transit 1, Echo 1 and the X-15 flight in the "impressive array of successful experiments" during the year preceding Aug. 17, 1960. He omitted mention of the first successful Polaris launches from the submerged nuclear submarine George Washington, on July 20, for flights of over 1000 miles down the Atlantic Missile Range, and he also avoided publicizing the solid-fueled Minuteman missile and the SAMOS and MIDAS satellite programs.X
- Washington Post, Sept. 27, 1960. Chapman Pincher reported in the Washington Daily News, Dec. 1, 1960, that Victor Jaanimets, a sailor who deserted the Russian ship that brought Khrushchev to New York, had told U.S. intelligence services that the ship, the Baltika, was equipped with mockups and demonstration equipment to advertise the Soviet feat in case they succeeded in an early attempt to put a cosmonaut in orbit.X
- A Chronology of Missile and Astronautic Events, 129. See also Nancy T. Gamarra, "International Aeronautical Federation (FAI)," section in Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, 89 Cong., 1 sess. (1965), International Cooperation and Organization for Outer Space, 419-426.X
- Silverstein quoted in news story in Newport News Times-Herald, Aug. 8, 1960. See also Brig. Gen. Thomas R. Phillips, "U.S. Out of Man-in-Space Race Until Saturn Is Ready in 1965," and "Criticism of Mercury Space Program Said to Lack Validity," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 1 and 2, 1960; "Astronauts Hope for '61 Flight," New York Times, Sept. 19, 1960; "NASA's Chief Expects Red Space Shows," Baltimore Sun, Sept. 20, 1960; Warren Rogers, Jr., "Man-in-Space Effort by U.S. Rolls Again," New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 25, 1960.X
- Newsweek, LIV (Oct. 19, 1959), 73-76. This magazine continued with blanket criticisms in LIV (Nov. 2, 1959), 26; LV (Feb. 8, 1960), 67-68; LV (Feb. 15, 1960), 35; but a special report on the manned space race in Newsweek, LVI (July 11, 1960), 55-59, was entitled "The Dawn," symbolizing better understanding of STG's efforts.X
- Hanson W. Baldwin, "Neglected Factor in the Space Race," New York Times Magazine, Jan. 17, 1960, 77; Arthur C. Clarke, "Rocket to the Renaissance," Playboy, VII (July 1960), 34, 84.X
- James Barr, "Is Mercury Program Headed for Disaster?" Missiles and Rockets, VII (Aug. 15, 1960), 12-14. See also Carl R. Huss, comments, Oct. 5, 1965.X
- Memo, Gilruth to staff, "Favorable Press Comments (for a change)," with two enclosures, Sept. 16, 1960: Marvin Miles' article described the "recent splurge of sniping at the Mercury program," and Glennan's letter of August 26 commended the article "as a shot of adrenalin" for all the workers on Mercury.X
- Memo, North to Administrator, "Background of Project Mercury Schedules," with enclosures, including a chronology, Aug. 14, 1960. Significant excerpts from this memo illustrated other features of Headquarters concerns:
"A major factor in the compressed Mercury schedule is concurrent effort in the areas of research and development, design, and manufacturing. As a result of this concurrent effort, many of the capsule subcontractors underestimated their costs and delivery dates. As early as October 1959, McDonnell anticipated cost increases ranging from 200% to 450% from some of their major subcontractors, such as Bell Aircraft, AiResearch, Collins Radio, and Grand Central Rocket.
"Because of different flight test objectives, it is possible to fly some of the early capsules with incomplete and unqualified systems.
"From the standpoint of project urgency, it was consistent policy to set . . . classified target schedules as tight as possible… . However, since problem areas cannot be pinpointed in advance, it was felt that the project objectives could be most rapidly achieved by purposely setting optimistic target schedules and keeping everyone working to meet these dates… .
"One is tempted to extrapolate … thereby obtaining May 1961 and November 1961, as the actual launch dates for the manned Redstone and manned orbital flights. It is hoped, however, that based on past experience, subsequent capsules can be more accurately scheduled through capsule systems checkout. Conversely, it must also be remembered that as yet none of the production capsules have been qualified during the maximum Q abort and reentry missions."X
- Low, "Project Mercury Progress," an address before UPI Editors Conference, Washington, Sept. 9, 1960, NASA News Release 60-275; Low, comments, Oct. 5, 1965.X
- For the significance of the AACB, see Robert L. Rosholt, An Administrative History of NASA, 1958 to 1963, NASA SP-4101 (Washington, 1966), 172-173; see also NASA News Release 60-260, Sept. 13, 1960.X
- Richard M. Mansfield, "Project Mercury: Race or Pure Science?" Virginian-Pilot and Portsmouth Star, Sept. 11, 1960.X
- "An Open Letter to Richard Nixon and John Kennedy," Missiles and Rockets, VII (Oct. 3, 1960), 10-11; John F. Kennedy, "If the Soviets Control Space They Can Control Earth," Missiles and Rockets, VII (Oct. 10, 1960), 12-13; "Nixon 'Declines' to Join Defense/Space Debate," Missiles and Rockets, VII (Oct. 24, 1960), 13; Richard M. Nixon, "Military has Mission to 'Defend' Space," Missiles and Rockets, VII (Oct. 31, 1960), 10-11. Cf. a similar set of questions and answers in Western Aviation, Missile and Space Industries (Nov. 1960). See also Edward C. Welsh, interview, Washington, Sept. 1, 1965.X
- See Robert Hotz, editorial, "The Gathering Storm Over Space," Aviation Week, LXXIII (Nov. 7, 1960), 21; and "Sharp Defense/ Space Changes Expected," Aviation Week, LXXIII (Nov. 14, 1960), 30.X
- Hans W. Gatzke, The Present in Perspective: A Look at the World Since 1945 (2 ed., Chicago, 1961), 188. See also Philip C. Jessup and Howard J. Taubenfeld, Controls for Outer Space and the Antarctic Analogy (New York, 1959), 200, 282.X
- House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 86 Cong., 2 sess. (1960), The Practical Values of Space Exploration, Report No. 2091, July 5, 1960, 1. Cf. revision as House Report No. 1276, Oct. 2, 1961, 20-22.X
- Ibid., 54. Aside from the better illustrations and the updated figures on space costs and accomplishments, the August 1961 revision of this report contained one significant addition, namely a two-page (20-22) discussion in the national security section entitled "Interpreting The Race," which said in part:
"The fact that we are racing the Russians to the moon and the planets should not be allowed to obscure certain facets of the precise situation we are in.
"To begin with, it is essential to realize that sending men beyond earth's environment requires rockets of very high thrust - big boosters. The Soviets, who have about a 5-year jump on the United States in this field, have such rockets in operation. Our biggest ones are still in the development stage, although they are showing considerable promise. So we begin this particular phase of 'the race' under a marked handicap and doubtless will be in second place for some time to come.
"It is equally important, however, to recognize that 'getting there first' is only one part of the race. Two other parts are just as crucial:
- What will we learn from our effort to explore beyond the Earth?
- How will we use this knowledge after it is acquired?
"The Vikings had the technique to get to the New World 'first,' but England, France, and Spain won the prizes.... With no intent to deprecate the notable achievements of the Soviet Union in space research, it can nonetheless be said that the broad scope of the American effort has - thus far at least - been outstanding in its scientific results. And, as subsequent parts of this report suggest, our free enterprise system has been quick to take advantage of the technological fall out.
"In summary, our international prestige and stature, so far as they are influenced by our space activities, depend on all three elements of 'the race' - not on one or two."
X - Memo, Benjamine J. Garland to Project Director, "Possible Meteoroid Damage to Mercury," with enclosure, June 2, 1960, 3. X
- Letter, Smith J. DeFrance to Alan B. Kehlet, "Information Requested by STG on Pressure Transducers and an Auxiliary Drag Device for Mercury," with enclosures, Sept. 16, 1960; memo, Caldwell C. Johnson to Faget, "Auxiliary Drag Device - Mercury," Nov. 2, 1960; John P. Mayer, comments, Sept. 8, 1965. Back in 1957 Avco had proposed a metallic drag chute shuttlecock configuration for the same purpose for the Air Force Man-in-Space studies. See also "Summary of Several Short Studies Pertaining to the Retro-Rocket System Capabilities for the Mercury Mission," NASA Project Mercury working paper No. 160, Nov. 9, 1960.X
- The reinstatement of development work on the pneumatic impact bag followed after Gerard J. Pesman learned the details of more experiments on human impact at Wright-Patterson late in 1960. For a resume of this work see J. W. Brinkley, R. A. Headley, and K. K. Kaiser, "Abrupt Acceleration of Human Subjects in the Semi-Supine Position," paper, Symposium on Bio-Mechanics of Body Restraint and Head Protection, Naval Air Materiels Center, Philadelphia, Pa., June 14-15, 1961.X
- Memo, Peter J. Armitage and E. N. Harrin to Chief, Operations Div., "Mercury Capsule Water Stability," Oct. 31, 1960.X
- Memo, Harrin to Chief, Operations Div., "Static Water Stability Tests of Personal Egress Capsule," Jan. 10, 1961.X
- "Project Mercury Status Report No. 8 for Period Ending October 31, 1960," STG, 17-18; "Astronaut Preparation and Activities Manual for Mercury-Redstone No. 3," NASA Project Mercury working paper No. 174, Feb. 6, 1961.X
- Memo, Yardley and G. M. Preston to Silverstein, et al., "Summary of Conclusions Reached Regarding the CST Plans and Cape Checkout Plans for Capsules 5 (MR-2) and 7 (MR-3)," Sept. 9, 1960, 3. For MAC's home factory response to the field workers' difficulties with electrical, piping, sequencing, inspection, and cleanliness problems, see draft memo by H. Earle Moore and Walter F. Burke, "Quality Assurance - Project Mercury," Sept. 12, 1960.X
- Memo, Richard Sachen and James T. Rose to W. H. Gray, "General Summary of Capsule Systems Tests on Capsule No. 7," Dec. 1, 1960, with enclosures. Convair/Astronautics had encountered the skin- cracking problem in 1955 during the Atlas development program. At that time no solution had been discovered.X
- Memo, Jerome B. Hammack and Rose to W. H. Gray, "General Summary of Capsule Systems Tests on Capsule No. 7," Dec. 1, 1960, 5, 6. This memo, with enclosures 1-17, gives a detailed engineering history of the problems encountered during the systems testing of the first manned Mercury capsule. Although STG inspectors found 189 electrical and mechanical discrepancies in their final acceptance test, MAC's own inspectors had listed some 370 such discrepancies before their final cleanup prior to delivery.X
- See Leutjen, "Ground Checkout and Launch Procedures," 3. Revised procedures for expediting checkout "squawk sheets" and discrepancy reports were issued shortly thereafter: see memo, Yardley and Preston to Hangar S Supervisors, "Cape Inspection Policy Clarification," Oct. 20, 1960.X
- Letter, Williams to Commanding Officer, Air Force Missile Test Center, attention Lt. Col. R. D. Stephens, Sept. 6, 1960; "T-605 Operation, MR Mission," STG, Sept. 8, 1960; "MR-1 Mission Rules," STG, Nov. 2, 1960; letter, Williams to Kurt H. Debus, "Flight Safety Review for MR Missions," Sept. 22, 1960, with enclosure, "Flight Safety Review Plan"; letter, Williams to Cdr. DesFlotFour, "NASA Personnel Assignment for MR-1 Test," Sept. 28, 1960, with enclosures; memos, Low to Administrator, "Tests of Mercury Redstone 1 and Little Joe 5," Nov. 2, 1960; and "LJ-5 and MR-1 launchings," Nov. 4, 1960; Williams, Management Memorandum, No. 13, "Working Hours, Launch Operations Branch," Oct. 5, 1960.X
- Letter, James P. Gleason to Kenneth E. BeLieu, Nov. 7, 1960. For one source of this concern, see Drew Pearson, "Space Shot Moved to Election Eve," Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1960.X
- "Project Mercury Status Report No. 8"; "Project Mercury Discussion," briefing charts, Oct. 31, 1960.X
- "Project Mercury Flight Test Report for Little Joe Mission No. 5 (capsule No. 3)," NASA Project Mercury working paper No. 166, Dec. 23, 1960; letter, Williams to R/A F. V. H. Hilles, Dec. 14, 1960; memo, Low for Administrator, "Report on Little Joe No. 5 and Mercury Redstone No. 1," Nov. 10, 1960. See also Fisher, comments, Sept. 15, 1965.X
- Memo, North to Dir., Space Flight Programs, "Project Mercury PMP Charts," Sept. 21, 1960, explains why the chimp was eliminated from LJ-5. John C. Palmer, "Test Directive for Little Joe V," approved countdown procedures, undated. See also minutes, "Little Joe V AeroMedical Operations Review Meeting," Richard S. Johnston, secretary, July 12, 1960; "Mission Document for Little Joe No. 5 (Capsule No. 3)," NASA Project Mercury working paper No. 121, May 25, 1960.X
- Low memo, Nov. 10, 1960; memo, Low to Asst. Administrator for Congressional Relations, "Mercury Redstone and Little Joe 5 Launchings," Nov. 16, 1960. The additional Little Joe airframe was suggested by Silverstein. Memos, William M. Bland, Jr., to Faget, "Visit of representatives of NAA-MD to STG," Feb. 1, 1960, and "Further Development of Little Joe Booster," Feb. 8, 1960; North to Silverstein, "Request for Approval Project Mercury Funding," June 27, 1960; Silverstein to Budget Office, "Budget on Approval of Project Mercury Funding," June 29, 1960. Cf. memo, C. J. Donlan to LRC Procurement Officer, "Contract NAS 9-59, Refurbished Little Joe Static Booster, Expedited Delivery," Nov. 16, 1960.X
- Memo, Johnson to Faget, "Mercury Weight Growth - Effect upon Orbit Insertion Probability, Retrograde Maneuver, Parachute Loads, and Flotation," Nov. 22, 1960, 1-3. Johnson speculated on possibilities:
"The really interesting scheme requires starting all over. Consider six (6) Pioneer or Explorer second stage motors clustered together as a posigrade-retrograde power pack… .
"On the subject of parachutes and weights: it is quite likely that the impact skirt system and its associated 100 pounds of weight could be eliminated if the capsule impact attitude could be restricted to 'pilot feet first' and without much swing. The main difficulty now is the pilot's low tolerance to lateral acceleration… . This is not a proposal but it's worth thinking of."
See also Huss comments.
X - Letter, Gleason to BeLieu, Nov. 3, 1960. For the description of events following, see memos, Low to Administrator, "MR-1 Launching," Nov. 7, 1960; Low to Dir., Space Flight Programs, "Mercury-Redstone 1 Launching," Nov. 14, 1960; Low to Administrator, "MR-1 Launching," Nov. 18, 1960.X
- For news criticism in the wake of MR-1, see William Hines, "Mercury Failure Puts Early Flight in Doubt," Washington Evening Star, Nov. 21, 1960; "Astronaut Flight Still Slated in '61," New York Times, Nov. 26, 1960; Louis Kraar, "Man in Space Tests Far Behind Schedule," Wall Street Journal, Nov. 28, 1960; and "Space Experts Sniping at Mercury," Space Age News, Nov. 21, 1960.X
- Memo, Low to Administrator, "Attempted Launching of MR-1," Nov. 21, 1960; Hammack, interview, Houston, Feb. 13, 1964; and memo report, Hammack for Proj. Dir., "Attempted Launch of Mercury-Redstone No. 1 Mission on November 21, 1960," Nov. 23, 1960.X
- Memo, Low to Administrator, "Explanation of MR-1 Failure," Nov. 23, 1960; Joachim P. Kuettner, interview, Huntsville, April 28, 1964.X
- Memo, Low to Dir., Space Flight Programs, "PMP Briefing on December 2, 1960, Project Mercury," Nov. 28, 1960; and Low comments.X
- Memo, Low to Administrator, "MR-1 Launch Information," Dec. 15, 1960. For retest preparations, see "Mercury-Redstone, NASA, LOD-LOB, Master Operational Schedule," rev. Nov. 15, 1960, for MR-1, Report No. M-LOD-G-TR-49.4-60; rev. Dec. 2, 1960, for MR-1A, Marshall Space Flight Center. Ms., "MR-1A Review," STG, Dec. 17, 1960.X
- Memo, Low to Administrator, "Mercury-Redstone 1 Launching," Dec. 20, 1960. See also Jerome B. Hammack and Jack C. Heberlig, "The Mercury Redstone Program," paper, American Rocket Society, Space Flight Report to the Nation, New York City, Oct. 9-15, 1961, 16-17.X
- Memos, Howard C. Kyle to Mercury Flight Dir., "MR-1 Launch on December 19, 1960 - observations"; Tecwyn Roberts to Flight Dir., "Report on Test No. 5111," Dec. 20, 1960; and Stanley C. White to Flight Dir., "MR-1A Test No. 5111," Dec. 20, 1960. For the later post-flight inspection of MR-1A, see letter, Purser to Burke, "Contract NAS 5-59; Post-Flight Evaluation of Capsule Number Two," Jan. 31, 1961, with two enclosures. See also Chap. X, footnote 26.X
- Memo, North to Dir., Space Flight Programs, "Mercury Capsule Changes and Flight Schedule," Dec. 6, 1960:
"Open loop operation of the Abort Sensing and Implementation System (ASIS) is a change which does not detract from the effectivity of the system. This change, in fact, makes the system more reliable and effective because a pilot who is placed in the control loop has the ability to assess whether a true abort situation exists. In this concept, the pilot would get a red light indication that an abort is called for but would manually activate the escape sequence. The inherent aerodynamic stability and high structural strength of the Redstone should provide a sufficient time constant between capsule abort light indication and time for abort decision. The pilot, after observing the abort light, can either immediately abort, if he is in a critical flight regime, or he can rely on secondary cues such as changes in acceleration, changes in attitude, and radio voice transmissions from visual observers or telemeter monitors. Although it is reasonably clear that the Redstone should be flown with an open loop ASIS, the Atlas operational procedure is not yet resolved because allowable pilot reaction time will be somewhat less. I feel, however, that experience with the manned Redstone will convince us that the manned Atlas should also be flown open loop. Incidentally, three Atlas ASIS systems have been flown open loop to date; two would have caused inadvertent aborts."
Warren North was himself a test-pilot engineer, and this viewpoint became even stronger over the next year; see North and Walter Williams, "The NASA Astronaut Program," Aerospace Engineering, XX (Jan. 1962), 13-15.X - For an overview of the meetings and conferences on the MA-1 failure, see James M. Grimwood, Project Mercury: A Chronology, NASA SP- 4001 (Washington, 1963), 111, 112. On the MA-1 review of Nov. 16, 1960, see "Mercury-Atlas Program," briefing brochure Nos. AD-60-0000-02356 and AT-60-0829-00415, undated. Minutes, "Summary of Test Programs and Recommendations for MA-2 Launch," Sjoberg, secretary, Nov. 16, 1960; Ms. notes, Purser, "STG Position on MA-1," Dec. 20, 1960; draft letters, Purser to Donlan, Faget, and James A. Chamberlin, Dec. 31, 1960, and Jan. 1, 1961; memo, Low to Dir. Space Flight Programs, "Project Mercury Status," Dec. 29, 1960; and Richard V. Rhode, interview, Washington, Jan. 18, 1966.X
- A Chronology of Missile and Astronautics Events, 135; Sheldon, "The Challenge of International Competition," 11, 26, and comments, Aug. 12, 1965.X
- G. Pokrovsky, "We Give Space to the Russians," Washington Daily News, Dec. 5, 1960; "Lead-Footed Mercury," Time, Dec. 5, 1960; "Man in Space," editorial, New York Times, Dec. 2, 1960.X