boarded a train and rode through the night to Orlando.
During their few hours at Langley, several of the controllers had picked up their wives and children. After getting the order to return, they had the wives and children frantically pack for the trip to the Cape. Our families met us at Langley to get on the buses that would take us to the train in Richmond. The wives and kids were assigned chair cars. The rest of us had no places reserved to sit or sleep, so we sat through the night in the dining car, playing poker or rehashing how we would resume our support to the launch countdown. By the time we got to Glenn’s mission, we started bringing families down to stay during the time we were deployed at the Cape. It worked out pretty well; we would work through the night and return to our motel and go to bed in the early morning hours. The wives would take the kids to the pool for the day while we slept. Then we would get up late in the afternoon, find some food, go to work, and the wives and kids would take our places in the motel rooms. The only trouble was that the per diem we got for deployment to the Cape was so meager that after our families left and we were just down there on our own we slept two guys to a room to make ends meet.
After all this, the countdown had to be scrubbed again, this time for repair of a leaking tank bulkhead on the Atlas. It seemed that we would never get Glenn’s rocket off the launch pad.
Back to Langley. Next deployment to the Cape was for a Valentine’s Day launch, and, once more, we scrubbed it, this time for weather. At the Cape, we were focused and on top of the job, but the ups and downs of the launch preparation were nibbling at us. Tempers started to fray. The delays were hard to endure; we knew the stakes were enormous, both for the country and for John Glenn, but we were eager to move to launch and ready to go at a moment’s notice.
When I look back, I find it hard to believe that when we launched John Glenn we had had a total of three orbits’ worth of experience during the two preceding missions. Two of the Mercury-Atlas rockets had failed. As formidable as the Atlas appeared, it was essentially a pressurized metal balloon. If pressurization was lost while the rocket was on the pad, the rocket would have collapsed. We were rolling the dice in a way that would not be allowed in today’s space program.
After ten postponements and eighty-two days of delays, this countdown had the usual glitches. The pad crew broke a bolt in the hatch while inserting Glenn and had to scurry off to get a new one. Watching from Kraft’s TV, I was amazed as always by the close quarters of the Mercury capsule. The cockpit was smaller than any fighter aircraft I had flown. Glenn entered the capsule feet first, through a hatch less than two feet square, assisted by the pad crew, then ducked under the instrument panel. In the silver space suit, gloves, and helmet, Glenn was the modern-day explorer ready to embark to a new world.
During the hold, Kraft had his customary pint of milk to settle his stomach, and Williams made increasingly frequent trips outside to look at the weather. After the hatch was repaired, the countdown resumed.
Williams polled the mission team, receiving a solid Go from Kraft and the Mercury capsule and Atlas booster test conductors. With each succeeding Go the energy level in the control room threatened to burst through the doors. Scott Carpenter called from the blockhouse, “God speed, John Glenn.” Then he counted down: “Three seconds… two… one… zero.”
As the umbilical cables were ejected, I filled in the liftoff message and started a continuous voice briefing for the Bermuda site team. My hand was trembling as I jotted 14:14:39Z on my notepad. When I heard Glenn’s report, “Roger, the clock is running, we are underway,” I took off for the Teletype room. This time, I remembered to remove my headset.
Returning, I continued to brief Bermuda via the Teletype order wire until they acquired data at three minutes. Other than during the high-G periods, Glenn’s reporting was just like his training runs. I consciously had to fight to keep doing my job and avoid being mesmerized by the words.
Shortly after five minutes, Glenn calmly said, “Sustainer engine cut-off, and the posigrades have fired.” The posigrades provided the thrust to separate the capsule from the Atlas booster.
The room hushed as Kraft and Tec Roberts engaged in the Go NoGo dialogue. The answer came swiftly and, after checking with John Hodge, the Bermuda flight director, Kraft nodded to Shepard, who gave Glenn a resounding, “Go! You are Go for at least seven orbits.” (The orbital trajectory was designed to provide more orbit lifetime than needed for the mission plan in case we had problems and could not come down at the planned end of mission time.)
Glenn, now in the element of the test pilot, was reporting the control system status, closing out the checklist items, and continually reassuring the doctors that he felt fine. It was a jam-packed ten minutes, but everything had gotten done as
For the first time I was nervous. My site controllers were going to see a manned spacecraft for the first time, and now they would have to communicate with an astronaut, run the site, and direct their team. This was it, real- time and pretty heady work for a bunch of young guys. Communications were clear and I listened intently as Glenn reported his status to Llewellyn: “Control check complete. I have the booster in sight out the window. It’s probably about one mile away, going down under my position and a bit to the left.”
Llewellyn stammered a bit in his first communication, “
After all of the attempts to get Glenn off the ground, this one seemed unbelievably easy. When it finally happened, it was smooth as apple butter. John kept clipping through the first orbit without a glitch. Teletype messages and occasional voice contacts indicated that the controllers’ adrenaline was pumping. It was difficult at such times to maintain my focus. I felt a strong urge to yell out, “We’ve got an American in orbit!” My remote site controllers were working well and the lines were humming. I felt a burst of pride for our team and how it had progressed in the fifteen months since we had bungled our Four-Inch Flight back in November of 1960.
I had sat next to Chris Kraft since the first mission and was amazed at his aplomb now that he finally had an American in orbit. High-risk leadership beckons many, but few accept the call.
The Teletype post-pass reports filled the gaps when we could not listen to Glenn. The messages, when pieced together, indicated he was on the flight plan and the capsule was performing well. At the completion of each site pass, controllers prepared a systems summary message containing the values of sixteen key systems measurements, recorded during the pass. The short time intervals between tracking sites did not allow the MCC and site controllers to plot the measurements, so the Teletype messages were cut into strips and aligned with the measurements from the preceding sites, then taped together. Trend predictions from this data were rough but this was the best we could do.
The control team at Canton Island in the South Pacific received Glenn’s report of a brilliant “bright red” sunrise, then were startled as he continued, “I am in the middle of a mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they are luminescent. They are a bright yellowish green, about the size and intensity of a firefly on a real dark night. I have never seen anything like it. They look like little stars. They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window.”
I showed the Teletype of Glenn’s finding to Kraft. He nodded, then said, “Keep me advised.”
Other than modest increases in temperature, there were no concerns as we approached the end of the first orbit. The only unusual occurrence was Glenn’s report of the “fireflies” he spotted at sunrise over the Pacific.
Before the Cape pass, Kraft walked over to me and said, “Shorty [Powers] has confirmed that President Kennedy will make a call through the Cape at the end of the first orbit. Get with the communications people and make sure everything is set up.” When caught off guard I tend to be inflexible, particularly when I am distracted from the business at hand by details that could have been worked out earlier. This was one of those times. Kraft saw the expression on my face, frowned, and then chided, “The President is the boss!”
The presidential call did not surprise the audio technicians; they had been advised of the call by the White House switchboard the night before launch, and I was assured everything was already checked out. I had a lot to learn about the politics of space.
As the capsule passed over the Cape, Shepard, the Cape CapCom, called, “
