mind now that we were going – unless some serious malfunction occurred. I had anticipated the nervousness I felt, and I had made plans to counteract it by plunging into my pilot preparations. There were plenty of things to do to keep me busy, and the tension slackened off immediately. I went through all the checklists, checked the radio systems and the gyro switches.
At other places around the Cape at this point, the other astronauts were taking up their positions to back me up in any way they could. Deke Slayton sat at the Capsule Communicator desk in Mercury Control Centre. He would do most of the talking with me during the countdown and flight so that both the lingo and the spirit behind it would be clear and familiar. John and Gus joined Deke as soon as I was firmly locked in and there was nothing more they could do at the pad. Wally and Scott stood by at Patrick Air Force Base, ready to take off in two F- 106jets to chase the Redstone and capsule as far as they could and observe the flight. Gordon stayed in the blockhouse, monitoring the weather and standing by to help put into effect the rescue operations he had worked on which would get me out of the capsule in a hurry if we had an emergency while we were still on the pad. Inside the Mercury Control Centre itself, all the lights were green. All conditions were “Go”. The gantry rolled back at 6:34, and I lay on my back seventy feet above the ground checking the straps and switches and waiting for the countdown to proceed.
I passed some of the time looking through the periscope. I could see clouds up above and people far beneath me on the ground. The view was fascinating – and I had a long, long time to admire it. There were four holds in all, the first at 7:14 when the count stood at T-15 minutes. A thick, muggy layer of clouds had begun to drift in over the launch site, and a hold was called to give the Control Centre an opportunity to check on the weather. Cape Canaveral sits on a narrow spit of land with the Gulf Stream close by to the east and the Gulf of Mexico only 130 miles to the west. The weather is likely to change rapidly between these two bodies of water. The day can be bright and sunny one minute, cloudy and breezy the next. It is fickle and difficult to keep track of, and in order to follow the capsule and the booster closely, photograph their performance and watch for possible emergencies, the men in the Control Centre require a clear view of the first part of a flight.
The appearance of a small hole in the clouds, however, gave Walt Williams, the Operations Director, enough confidence to carry on, and the meteorologists reported that the clouds would soon blow away and that the sky would be clear again within about thirty minutes. Walt decided to recycle the count – or set it back – to allow for this delay, and he let the mission proceed.
Then another problem cropped up. During the delay for weather, a small inverter located near the top of the Redstone began to overheat. Inverters are used to convert the DC current which comes from the batteries into the AC current required to power some of the systems in the booster. This particular inverter provided 400-cycle power which was needed to get the missile into operation and off the pad. It had to be replaced. This involved bringing the gantry back into position around the Redstone so that the technicians could get at it, and eighty-six minutes went by before the Control Centre could resume the count.
I continued to feel fine, however. The doctors could tell how I was doing by looking at their instrument panels and talking it over with me. When the inverter was fixed, the gantry moved away, the cherrypicker manoeuvred its cab back outside the capsule, and the count went along smoothly for twenty-one minutes before it suddenly stopped again. This time the technicians wanted to doublecheck a computer which would help predict the trajectory of the capsule and its impact point in the recovery area.
I think that my basic metabolism started to speed up along about this point. Everything – pulse rate, carbon dioxide production, blood pressure – began to climb. I suppose that my adrenalin was flowing pretty fast, too. I was not really aware of it at the time. But once or twice I had to warn myself – “You’re building up too fast. Slow down. Relax.” Whenever I though that my heart was palpitating a little, I would try to stop whatever I was doing and look out through the periscope at the pad crews or at the waves along the beach before I went back to work.
The last hold came at T minus 2 minutes 40 seconds. This time the people in the blockhouse were worried about the pressure on the supply of lox in the Redstone which we would need to feed the rocket engines. The pressure on the fuel read a hundred psi too high on the blockhouse gauge, and if this meant resetting the pressure valve inside the booster manually, the mission would have to be scrubbed for at least another forty-eight hours. Fortunately, the technicians found they were able to bleed off the excess pressure by turning some of the valves by remote control, and the final count resumed at 9:23. I had become slightly and I think understandably impatient at this point. I had been locked inside the capsule for nearly four hours now, and as I listened to the engineers chattering to one another over the radio and debating about whether or not to repair the trouble, I began to get the impression that they were being too cautious just for my sake and might wind up taking too long. It wasn’t really fair of me, but “I’m cooler than you are,” I said into my mike. “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” They fixed their “little problem” and the orange cherrypicker moved away from the capsule for the last time.
In contrast, after the days of postponement and the holds, the last few minutes leading up to 9:34 a.m. EST (2:43 p.m. GMT) went perfectly. Everyone was prompt in his reports. I could feel that all the training we had gone through with the blockhouse crew and booster crew was really paying off down there. I had no concern at all. I knew how things were supposed to go, and that is how they went. About three minutes before lift-off, the blockhouse turned off the flow of cooling freon gas – I knew it would shut off anyway at T-35 seconds when the umbilical fell away. At two minutes before launch, I set the control valves for the suit and cabin temperature, shifted to the voice circuit and had a quick radio check with Deke Slayton at the Capsule Communicator (Cap Com) desk in Mercury Control Centre. I also contacted Chase One and Chase Two Wally Shirra and Scott Carpenter in the chase planes – and heard them loud and clear. They were in the air, ready to take a high-level look at me as I went past them after the launch.
Electronically speaking, my colleagues were all around me at this moment.
Deke gave me the count at T-90 seconds and again at T-60. I had nothing to do just then but maintain my communications, so I rogered both messages. At T-35 seconds I watched through the periscope as the umbilical which had fed Freon and power into the capsule snapped out and fell away. Then the periscope came in and the little door which protected it in flight closed shut. The red light on my instrument panel went out to signal this event, which was the last critical function the capsule had to perform automatically before we were ready to go. I reported this to Deke, and then I reported the power readings. Both were in a “Go” condition. I heard Deke roger my message, and then I listened as he read the final count: 10-9-8-7… At the count of “5” I put my right hand on the stopwatch button which I had to push at lift-off to time the flight. I put my left hand on the abort handle which I would move in a hurry only if something went seriously wrong and I had to activate the escape tower.
Just after the count of “Zero”, Deke said “Lift-off”.
I think I braced myself a bit too much while Deke was giving me the final count. Nobody knew, of course, how much shock and vibration I would really feel when the Redstone took off.
There was no one around who had tried it and could tell me; and we had not heard from Moscow how it felt. I was probably a little too tense. But I was really exhilarated and pleasantly surprised when I answered, “Lift- off and the clock is started”.
There was a lot less vibration and noise rumble than I had expected. It was extremely smooth – a subtle, gentle, gradual rise off the ground. There was nothing rough or abrupt about it. But there was no question that I was going, either. I could see it on the instruments, hear it on the headphones, feel it, all around me.
It was a strange and exciting sensation. And yet it was so mild and easy – much like the rides we had experienced in our trainers – that it somehow seemed very familiar. I felt as if I had experienced the whole thing before. But nothing could possibly simulate in every detail the real thing that I was going through at that moment, so I tried very hard to figure out all the sensations and to pin them down in my mind in words which I could use later. I knew that the people back on the ground – the engineers, doctors and psychiatrists – would be very curious about how I was affected by each sensation and that they would ask me quite a lot of questions when I got back. I tried to anticipate these questions and have some answers ready.
For the first minute, the ride continued to be very smooth. My main job just then was to keep the people on the ground as relaxed and informed as possible. It was no good for them to have a test pilot up there unless they knew fairly precisely what he was doing, what he saw and how he felt every thirty seconds or so along the way. So I did quite a bit of reporting over the radio about oxygen pressure and fuel consumption and cabin temperature and how the Gs were mounting slowly, just as we had predicted they would. I do not imagine that future spacemen will have to bother quite so much about some of these items. This was the first time, so we were being
