sight.
Then after a few seconds the camera panned down. Although smoke still obscured the launch pad, the vague outline of the Redstone was still there. Kraft’s face was incredulous. He stammered for a few seconds, then called out, “Booster, what the hell happened?”
Our booster engineer in the control room came from the Marshall Redstone team. After liftoff he was responsible for reporting booster status—engine and guidance—to Kraft’s team. If something was wrong he was supposed to give us a heads-up so the trajectory people in Mercury Control could better assess what they were seeing on their radar plot boards. Now he reverted to his native German as he tried to figure out what happened and, more importantly, what the blockhouse team should do about it. All hell broke loose. The Redstone had lifted a few inches off the launch pad and then the engine shut down. By some miracle, the rocket had landed back on the launcher cradle.
When the escape tower cut loose, unguided and spewing flame, it corkscrewed to an altitude of about 4,000 feet. As it plummeted back to Earth, loudspeakers around the facility blared out warnings to the astronauts, engineers, and VIPs in the viewing area to take cover. The escape tower ultimately landed some 1,200 feet from the launch pad.
The launch team in the blockhouse was as stunned as Mercury Control. Booster continued talking in German to his counterparts in the blockhouse, oblivious to Kraft’s repeated calls. Television cameras showed the events on the pad as the main and reserve landing parachutes popped out of their stowage compartment at the nose of the capsule, ejected upward and partially opened up. Initially, they hung limply, then they slowly inflated and caught the sea breeze. At the same time strips of tinfoil were ejected from the capsule and spilled over the sides of the booster and capsule. (The strips, or chaff, were used to help radar track the capsule as it was slowed down by the parachute and headed for splashdown, or water landing, in the Atlantic Ocean.) Every controller held his breath, afraid the parachute would topple the rocket and cause an explosion.
The intercom that had been quiet was now busily filled with directions, observations, and opinions. Everything that happened, although it had taken only seconds, passed before me in slow motion. Then it finally clicked.
The Redstone rocket, surrounded by smoke, was armed and fueled but still sitting on the launch pad. Kraft told everyone to calm down, but Booster was still on the hot line, interrogating the blockhouse in German. We all could see the anger glowing in Kraft’s eyes as he walked over and yanked Booster’s headset cord loose from the console, saying, “Speak to
Chaos continued for several minutes until Booster, in halting English, told us that the Redstone engines had fired and the rocket had lifted off the pad enough to drop the umbilical, the bundle of cables that connected launch control with the booster and that normally fell away right after liftoff. Then the engine inexplicably shut down. The Mercury capsule, sensing the booster’s engine shutdown, acted as if it were in orbit and sent the command to jettison the escape tower. The capsule, not sensing any further acceleration, acted as if it were in the recovery phase and so deployed the parachutes. We now had a live rocket on the pad, a fully pressurized Redstone; and, since the umbilicals had disconnected, we had no control of it. The booster’s destruct system was armed and there was no way to secure the system. No one had any idea what to do next.
Kraft walked over to me, eyes blazing. Pointing at Booster he snapped, “The damn Germans still haven’t learned who they work for. Everyone in this control room must work for me.” We sat stunned, helpless in Mercury Control. We had no technical data on the spacecraft or the launch system beyond a simple manual, the equivalent of an owner’s manual for a new car. All of us were still thinking in aircraft, not rocket, terms—and we were definitely behind the power curve. We had no data to work with because we weren’t smart enough to know what we really needed. We were dealing with a
A tentative proposal came from the blockhouse to reconnect the umbilical. The chances of people getting killed doing this were discussed and we decided that it could not be done safely. The next, and equally desperate, suggestion was to get a cherry picker (a kind of crane or boom with a man-holding bucket on the end of it, like those used by telephone and utility line repair crews) and cut the nylon parachute risers. This would at least eliminate the threat of wind filling the parachute and toppling the Redstone, but this idea was also discarded because of the risk to personnel. All the while we were apprehensively watching a partially inflated parachute and praying that the sea breeze did not pick up, fill the parachute, and topple the whole damn rocket over.
After impatiently listening to a pretty far-out proposal to depressurize the rocket by using a rifle to shoot holes in the fuel and oxidizer tanks, Kraft sputtered and growled, “Dammit, that’s no way to do it! They sound like a bunch that just started spring training!” Even to a rookie like me, shooting a hole in the tanks did not seem to be a sound plan.
Kraft listened intently as each of the crazy schemes came across the loops, everybody desperately searching for a way out. Then one of the test conductors came up with a plan that made sense. “The winds are forecast to remain calm, so if we wait until tomorrow morning, the batteries will deplete, the relays and valves will go to the normally open condition. As the oxidizer warms up, the tank vents will open, removing the flight pressure. With the booster depressurized and batteries depleted, it will then be safe to approach the rocket.”
Kraft nodded and growled at his controllers, “That is the first rule of flight control. If you don’t know what to do,
This fiasco was the most embarrassing episode yet for the young engineers of the Mercury program. The history books call this mission, sardonically but accurately, “The Four-Inch Flight.” While the badly shaken booster engineers frantically worked on finding out just what had happened, I promised myself that when I returned to Langley I would use the same technique that had worked for me flying airplanes or flight-testing at Holloman. I would get to know as many technicians, designers, testers, and planners as possible and find out what data they had that would be useful to me. I would then compile a book that contained essential, carefully organized, and easily accessible information so in future emergencies we would have what we needed to know right at our fingertips. The engineers at Langley were tremendously cooperative and even gave me a drafting board where I could study blueprints. The learning curve of my first mission had been steep. But I had gained something precious. I now knew how much I didn’t know.
We went back to Langley and regrouped. The launch team debriefed, fixed the launch umbilical circuit problem that had caused the premature engine shutdown, and a month later we sent the rocket aloft. Project Mercury closed out 1960 with its first successful Redstone launch.
In January of 1961, our second mission gave the chimpanzee Ham a hell of a ride. The Redstone failed to shut down when commanded and went to fuel depletion, landing almost 120 miles downrange from the recovery forces. We wrote our reports and classified the mission a success; after all, Ham survived and the rocket had not blown up.
In these early months, we were plain lucky that America understood there was no achievement without risk, and there were no guarantees in this new business called spaceflight.
To hurl a man into space and bring him back alive, we needed to wire the world. This meant stringing communications across three continents and oceans, building tracking stations, installing the most powerful computers we could lay our hands on, and learning the business of real-time spaceflight with our teams.
We established the thirteen manned network stations, which provided optimal coverage only during the initial three orbits. Cable connections from the United States stretched to switching centers in London, Hawaii, and Australia. The Mercury voice and Teletype communications were controlled by Jim McDowell from the central switching center at Goddard. After logging thousands of hours at his end of the lines, McDowell had an instinctive feel for each of his communications links and was able to predict and anticipate problems to an uncanny degree, bringing alternate circuits on line moments before the prime circuits failed. It was common to lose communications because of construction workers severing cables, or cranes knocking down power lines, sunspot activity, or even
