The countdown had been holding for weather when our computer at Goddard crashed, requiring a complete check run. This was our third attempt to launch MR-3 and the pressure from Washington was mounting.
Goddard estimated a delay of ten minutes for the computer check. Kraft, sensing the tension that had built up in the control room over the delay, told his keyed-up team to “take five and get a cup of coffee.”
When I returned from my coffee break I lit another cigarette, and as the test conductors completed the recycle and announced the hold, the air-ground loop to the capsule came alive. To my astonishment, I heard the then popular comedian Bill Dana’s high-pitched parody of a reluctant astronaut:
“My name… Jose Jimenez… Do you know what it really takes to be an astronaut?”
“No, Jose. Tell me.”
“You should have courage and the right blood pressure and four legs.”
“Why four legs, Jose?”
“Because they really wanted to send a dog, but they decided that would be too cruel.”
As the Jose Jimenez routine continued, I punched the loops on my intercom to see if the recording was coming from Mercury Control. “Dammit,” I thought, “who the hell is playing a nightclub act on the countdown loops?” I sure hoped it was not coming from Mercury Control. If it was, I knew I would catch hell from both Kraft and Williams. I expelled a sigh of relief when it became clear that the comedy routine was being piped in from the blockhouse. A wonderful discovery: our German colleagues had a sense of humor. But was now the time to display it? It would be a distraction for the launch and flight team—and if the mission had been scrubbed, the bosses would have been on the warpath. As it turned out, however, Gordo Cooper and Bill Douglas, the surgeon, had conspired to patch Dana’s recording of Jose Jimenez into the capsule. They felt Shepard needed to relax a bit during the hold. This informality added a degree of unreality to the fact that we were only minutes away from launching the first American into space.
Not everybody was amused; I could see that Kraft was not happy. He did not like surprises that would distract his team. But by now the countdown was forgotten momentarily. The controllers were drinking coffee, joking and enjoying Bill Dana’s comic monologue. Dana had been dubbed the Eighth Astronaut by Shepard and Schirra and was a favorite of everyone working on Mercury. Later, in the bar after the launch, I would decide that this bit of humor was exactly what we needed to relax a bit and get loose and ready for launch. But I am damn sure the Russians wouldn’t have tolerated such shenanigans.
Shepard had been in the capsule for more than four hours when the count again resumed. It went smoothly and, after a brief hold at two minutes, continued toward liftoff. During the last seconds I saw Kraft’s hand move to the liftoff switch on his console. I just hoped he didn’t throw it early and start the mission clocks. At T-equals-zero, I glanced at Kraft’s TV, saw the rocket ignition, and then heard Shepard say, “Ahhh, Roger, liftoff and the clock is started.”
I logged the liftoff time (9:34 Eastern Standard Time) as 1434Z (Z for Zulu, or Greenwich mean, time, used to establish a standard time for all the tracking stations scattered throughout different time zones) in the Teletype message, turned in my chair, and took off to the Teletype center. Oops. I had not removed my headset. After I’d run about fifteen feet, the headset cord stretched to the maximum, snagged a chair, and sent it tumbling to the floor. Kraft, distracted, looked in my direction, frowned, then returned to the business of launching the first American into space.
Sheepishly, I picked up the chair and returned to the console as Shepard made his thirty-second status report. Shorty Powers announced to the world that “everything is A-OK,” a phrase hated by the controllers and crews as “too Hollywood,” but one that soon became a part of the American vocabulary. It seems quaint now, all these years later, virtually unused, almost forgotten.
The two previous Redstone missions taught me that a ballistic mission is over in a flash. An energy-charged 142-second rocket launch followed by a five-minute weightless period, retrofire, and then a reentry. The drive from the hotel to Mercury Control was longer than the fifteen-minute flight time. Shepard’s mission was just like my first jet solo, a blur of noise and motion, an event long anticipated that was over far too soon.
Indeed things were A-OK. After over four hours in the capsule, Shepard was in peak form reporting launch events. At liftoff his heart rate had briefly increased to 120, peaking five minutes later at 140 beats per minute as Shepard called, “Booster cutoff.” Now weightless and traveling one mile per second, Al was in the test pilot’s nirvana. I was damn happy that the mission was going well and that Al’s performance would answer the medical scientists’ concerns about whether man could function in space. I had always felt that the flight surgeons were too plodding, too conservative for the rapidly evolving program.
After capsule separation from the booster the automatic system turned the capsule into a heat-shield- forward position. Approaching the 116-mile-high apogee (the highest altitude on the trajectory), Shepard took over manual capsule attitude control, maneuvering in the roll, yaw, and pitch axes and reporting that the capsule responded much as the simulators had. Using the periscope he reported seeing the western coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.
Only moments later, Carl Huss broke into the communications loops, beginning the countdown to retro sequence. His words hung briefly, then were echoed by the MCC CapCom, “5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Retro sequence!” Shepard confirmed he had maneuvered the capsule to attitude for rocket firing.
The weeks of frustration and training were finally paying off in a perfect mission. Now all we needed were the parachutes.
I listened, amazed at the professionalism that had developed in the Mercury team in the six months since I had joined. The pad team, Mercury Control, and the recovery forces were working in perfect synchronization, with an almost casual tone in their voices as if they had done this many times before. In less than fifteen minutes our first manned mission was over.
Shepard was safely aboard the aircraft carrier
3. “GOD SPEED, JOHN GLENN”
We consumed large quantities of beer and barbecue at Fat Boy’s in honor of Al, and reveled in the day’s headlines: “U.S. SCORES SUCCESS IN FIRST TRY TO PUT MAN IN SPACE.” “ALL AMERICANS ARE REJOICING, SAYS KENNEDY.” Alan Shepard had become America’s hero, but more so he was uniquely
The Space Task Group had little time to savor the wine and smell the roses before we had to do it all over again. In two months the second astronaut would go up. This gave Kraft’s team an opportunity to apply the lessons we had learned during the turnaround to our next mission. The combination of our technical successes and President Kennedy’s vow to land a man on the Moon in this decade spurred us on. When I read Kennedy’s speech, delivered to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, “A Special Message from the President on Urgent National Needs,” I found it almost impossible to grasp that our nation had established the lunar target as the prize in the space race. I had always yearned to be involved in an undertaking that would challenge the imagination of man. Any doubt I ever had about moving into space vanished.
To those of us who had watched our rockets keel over, spin out of control, or blow up, the idea of putting a man on the Moon seemed almost too breathtakingly ambitious. Word about the speech spread like wildfire through our offices at Langley; all work virtually came to a halt and people began to offer various opinions. Most wondered if this was for real. It seemed, at that moment, like a pipe dream. I thought, “Well, let them get on with their great
