We had been in training for about three weeks when NASA took us to Cape Canaveral for our first missile launch. We gathered on the night of May 18 on a camera pad about half a mile from one of the big gantries where an Atlas D waited to lift off.
The Atlas was the United States’ first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), built by the Convair division of General Dynamics. Its two Rocketdyne booster engines each produced 154,000 pounds of thrust, and its central sustainer engine generated 57,000 pounds. Two small vernier engines used for guidance added another 1,000 pounds of thrust each. The Atlas was thin-skinned, basically a steel balloon. Its fuel combination of liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene had to be kept under pressure or the missile would crumple like a crushed soft-drink can. It was a very fragile vehicle that had been under development since the mid-1950s and had yet to produce a record of sustained success.
The sight of the Atlas on the launch pad was dramatic enough to have been designed by Disney. Searchlights played on the silver rocket, and clouds of water vapor came off it from the liquid oxygen, or lox, cooled to 293 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
The count went down. Suddenly the engines lit, and the rocket lifted off slowly in a blast of orange flame and billowing smoke. The powerful racket of the engines rolled across the palmettos like a wind. We watched it gain speed, a brilliant phoenix rising into the night sky.
A minute after lifting off, it blew. The explosion looked like a hydrogen bomb going off right over our heads, so close we ducked before we realized the flight path would carry the debris out over the Atlantic. We stood in stunned silence after the roar of the explosion faded. Even Wally didn’t have one of his usual wisecracks. Then Al said, “Well, I’m glad they got that out of the way.”
We were a sober group of astronauts when we sat down the next morning with B. G. McNabb and his engineers in the Convair launch team. They had little to tell us, except that they were analyzing photo and telemetry data from the launch.
Ten days later, on May 28, NASA launched an Army Jupiter missile from Cape Canaveral. In the nose cone were Able, a Rhesus monkey, and Baker, a South American squirrel monkey, both festooned with electrodes to register the effects of weightlessness. The missile achieved an altitude of three hundred miles, and the nose cone was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean with both monkeys alive.
Able died four days later from the effects of anesthesia given for removal of the electrodes. Nevertheless, the heart stoppage and brain alterations that some doctors had thought might result from weightlessness apparently had not occurred. At the very least, it was clear living beings could reach space and return alive – if the rockets that carried them didn’t blow up.
In September 1959 the Soviets reasserted their lead. They launched Luna 2. Luna 2 was an unmanned probe which crash landed on the moon. In October 1959 another Soviet probe, Luna 3, sent back pictures of the dark side of the moon. On 4 December NASA launched and recovered a monkey named Sam to an altitude of 55 miles.
The German-born engineer, then in his late forties, was a handsome, broad-shouldered man with thick dark hair. Von Braun had been a devoted Nazi during World War II, but his rocket expertise was valuable to the United States, and when the war ended he and members of his team of German scientists were brought to this country Other scientists went to the Soviets. Whatever anyone thought of von Braun’s previous allegiances, he had a well-deserved reputation for heading an effective rocket team. He had led the development of the German V-2 guided ballistic missiles that had rained destruction on England and Allied-held Europe near the end of the war. In the new postwar equation, the V-2 became the basis for the Redstone, which gave the United States its effective intermediate-range ballistic missile in the competition with the Soviets. Modifications would allow it to carry a Mercury capsule. Von Braun spoke of men riding the Redstone and other rockets into space and someday to the moon, of humans pitting themselves against enormous odds for the sake of discovery.
His library showed him to be a man whose interests were not confined to rocket science. I wandered into the book-lined room expecting to find nothing but tomes on engineering, astronomy, physics, and other technical matters. There were many of those. But I was impressed to find even more extensive collections in fields such as religion, comparative religion, philosophy, history, and government.
By the time of our trip to Huntsville, we were also doing parabolic flights at Edwards that gave up to a minute of weightlessness at the top of the parabola. We used two-place F-100 trainers. We’d take the rear seat while the pilot would go up to forty thousand feet, make a dive reaching Mach 1.4, and then head up again while pushing over to an angle that would make anything on the cockpit floor float up in front of you, holding that balance all the way over the top of the arc and back toward Earth again. It was like an extension, but much faster and farther, of that brief moment when your car goes over a rise in the road and you’re lifted out of your seat. While we were strapped down and couldn’t float in the cabin, it gave us the chance to try eating and drinking and manipulating equipment during weightlessness.
We had done something similar at Wright-Patterson in a C-131, a cargo plane. This gave us only about fifteen seconds, but was more fun because we were unstrapped and could float and turn flips in the cabin.
Bob Gilruth had made good on his word to involve us in all aspects of Project Mercury. We each had specific areas of responsibility. Since I had probably flown more different types of aircraft than the others, I was handed cockpit layout and instrumentation, spacecraft controls, and simulation.
Scott’s domain was communications equipment and procedures, periscope operation, and navigational aids and procedures. Gordo’s area was the Redstone booster, trajectory, aerodynamics, countdown, and flight procedures, emergency egress, and rescue. Gus was responsible for reaction control system, hand controller, autopilot, and horizon scanners. Wally had environmental control systems, pilot support and restraint, pressure suit, and aero-medical monitoring. Recovery systems, parachutes, recovery aids, recovery procedures, and range network were Al’s job. And Deke had the Atlas booster and escape system, including configuration, trajectory, aerodynamics, countdown, and flight procedures.
Oddly, we were limited in the weight we could rocket into orbit because of our advanced technology. The Soviets lifted far heavier satellites than ours. Both nations’ boosters had been designed as ICBMs, but because we had done a better job of reducing the size of our nuclear warheads we could use smaller missiles. The Soviets had failed at making smaller warheads, and so needed larger boosters. The tables were turned when it came to putting satellites, and eventually manned spacecraft, into space. Our Atlas rocket, with its 367,000 pounds of thrust, could deliver nuclear warheads from the United States to Moscow – but could barely lift the four- thousand-pound Mercury capsule into orbit; the Soviets could have orbited a house if they had wanted to.
Bob Gilruth and NASA’s design team had agreed with us on the window if the weight problem could be solved. Max Faget, the capsule’s original designer, attacked the problem. If the daddy of the spacecraft thought it could be done, it could be done. Eventually Max gave the new design his go-ahead, and soon afterward we got word that McDonnell was incorporating a window in the Mercury capsule.
The ability to recognize constellations and orient the capsule in relation to them could be critical in an orbital flight. The capsule had to be lined up just right at the moment we fired the retrorockets that would slow us at reentry. Too steep a reentry would send the capsule into the atmosphere too fast, and it would burn up; too low and it could skip off the atmosphere like a stone on the surface of a pond and not be able to return. The capsule’s automatic attitude control would probably work perfectly, but knowing how to position the capsule by the stars was at the very least a good backup.
Here was an argument against both the few Air Force test pilots who claimed the astronauts would be just passengers and the heavy thinkers who thought that machines could learn as much about space as humans and for a lot less money. This was to be a different kind of flying, for sure. But machines failed, and only humans in the cockpit could take over when they did. NASA knew that from the start.
