Gus’s flight was set for July 19, the day after my fortieth birthday He would have a view Al didn’t have. Al had ridden the Mercury capsule as originally designed, with a porthole and no window. We had discussed other changes with Max Faget and the engineers at McDonnell. Deke wanted foot pedals to make the capsule’s controls more like a plane’s. I had wanted to replace the gauges with tape-line instrumentation that would provide information at a glance. Both systems would have added too much weight. But Gus’s Liberty Bell 7, as he had named his capsule, had a window.
One problem nobody had figured out the answer to, however, was the one that had plagued Al.
The night before Gus’s flight, I was staying with him in crew quarters as his backup. There was a little medical lab next door. We went in and set to work trying to design a urine collection device. We got some condoms in the lab, and we clipped the receptacle ends off and cemented some rubber tubing that ran to a plastic bag to be taped to his leg.
It seemed to work well enough, and Gus put it on in the morning before he suited up.
I was disappointed, however, after spending four hours in the couch. And I did not look forward to spending another forty-eight hours on the Cape. It would take that long to purge the Redstone of all its corrosive fuels, dry it out and start all over again. But I felt sure we would get it off on the next time around. And we did. The build-up was normal. I got up at 1:10 a.m. and was in the spacecraft at 3:58. I was to lie there for 3 hours 22 minutes before we finally lifted off.
We had a few problems with the countdown. One of the explosive bolts that held the hatch in place was misaligned, and at T-45 minutes they declared a hold to replace it. This took thirty minutes. Then the count was resumed and proceeded to T-30 minutes where it was stopped so the technicians could turn off the pad searchlights. It was daylight by this time, anyway, and the lights were causing some interference with the booster telemetry. There was another hold at T-15 minutes to let some clouds drift out of the way of the tracking cameras. This one lasted forty-one minutes. I spent some of this time relaxing with deep breathing exercises and tensing my arms and legs to keep from getting too stiff. We finally got to the final act and I heard Deke Slayton count down to 5-4-3-2-1.
I felt the booster start to vibrate and I could hear the engines start. Seconds later, the elapsed time clock started on the instrument panel. I punched the Time Zero Override to make sure that everything was synchronized, started the stopwatch on the clock and reported over the radio that the clock had started. I could feel a low vibration at about T+50 seconds, but it lasted only about twenty seconds. There was nothing violent about it. It was nice and easy, just as Al had predicted. I looked for a little buffeting as I climbed to 36,000 feet and moved through Mach 1, the speed of sound. Al had experienced some difficulty here; his vehicle shook quite a lot and his vision was slightly blurred by the vibrations. But we had made some good fixes. We had improved the aerodynamic fairings between the capsule and the Redstone, and had put some extra padding around my head. I had no trouble at all, and I could see the instruments very clearly.
I did experience a slight tumbling sensation when the Redstone engine shut off at T+142 seconds and when the escape tower went ten seconds later. There was a definite feeling of disorientation. But I knew what it was, and it did not bother me. I could hear the escape rocket fire and the bolts blow that held the tower to the capsule. And I could see the escape rocket zooming off to my right. I saw the tower climb away, and it still showed up as a long slender object against the black sky when I heard the posigrade rockets that separated the capsule from the Redstone fire off. I could hear them bang and could definitely feel them kick. I never did see the booster, though. Neither had Al.
Now, I was on my own. Shortly after lift-off I went through a layer of cirrus clouds and broke out into the sun. The sky became blue, then a deeper blue, and then – quite suddenly and abruptly – it turned black. Al had described it as dark blue. It seemed jet black to me. There was a narrow transition band between the blue and the black – a sort of fuzzy grey area. But it was very thin, and the change from blue to black was extremely vivid. The earth itself was bright. I had a little trouble identifying land masses because of an extensive layer of clouds that hung over them. Even so, the view back down through the window was fascinating. I could make out brilliant gradations of colour – the blue of the water, the white of the beaches, and the brown of the land. Later on, when I was weightless and about a hundred miles up – almost at the apogee of the flight – I could look down and see Cape Canaveral, sharp and clear. I could even see the buildings. This was the best reference I had for determining my position. I could pick out the Banana River and see the peninsula which runs farther south. Then I spotted the south coast of Florida. I saw what must have been West Palm Beach. I never did see Cuba. The high cirrus blotted out everything except the area from about Daytona Beach back inland to Orlando and Lakeland, to Lake Okeechobee and down to the tip of Florida. It was quite a panorama.
At one point, through the centre of the window, I saw a faint star. At least I thought it was a star, and I reported that it was. It seemed about as bright as Polaris. John Glenn had bet me a steak dinner that I would see stars in the daytime, and I had bet him I would not. I knew that without atmospheric particles in space to defract the light, we should be able to see stars, at least theoretically. But I did not think I would be able to accommodate my eyes to the darkness fast enough to spot them. As it turned out, John lost his bet. It was Venus that I saw, and Venus is a planet. John had to pay me off, after all.
The flight itself went almost exactly according to plan. I had a really weird sensation when the capsule turned around to assume retro-fire attitude. I thought at first that I might be tumbling out of control. But I did not feel in the least bit nauseous. When I checked the instruments, I could see that everything was normal and that the manoeuvre was taking place just as I had experienced it on the trainer.
Just as this turnaround began, a brilliant shaft of light came flashing through the window. This was the sun. I knew it was coming, but when it started moving across my torso, from my lower left, I was afraid for a moment that it might shine directly into my eyes and blind me. Everything else in the cockpit was completely black except for this narrow shaft of light. But it moved on across my body and disappeared as the capsule finished its turnaround.
I did have some trouble with the attitude controls. They seemed sticky and sluggish to me, and the capsule did not always respond as well as I thought it should. This meant that it took longer for me to work the controls than I had planned, and when my time for testing them was up I was slightly behind schedule. I wanted to fire the retros manually and at the same time use the manual controls to stay in the proper attitude. This was not critical on my flight since I was on a ballistic path and we were just exercising the retrorockets for practice. But it did indicate that we still had a few improvements to make with the controls. Actually, even if I had been in orbit, I could have handled the situation. It was not serious. It just wasn’t perfect. This was the main reason I was up there, of course – to find the bugs in the system before we went all the way.
I was looking out of the window when I fired the retros manually, right on schedule. I could see by checking the view that a definite yaw to the right was starting up. I had planned to use the view and the horizon as a reference to hold the capsule in its proper attitude when they fired. But when I saw this yawing motion start up, I quickly switched back to instruments. You have to stay right on top of your controls when the retros fire, because they can give you a good kick in the pants and you cannot predict in which direction they may start shoving you. Here was where some extra training on the ALFA would have come in handy. It would have given me more confidence in the window as a visual reference for the controls, and I would not have felt it so necessary to go right back to the instruments that I knew best.
It was a strange sensation when the retros fired. Just before they went, I had the distinct feeling that I was moving backwards – which I was. But when they went off and slowed me down, I definitely felt that I was going the other way. It was an illusion, of course. I had only changed speed, not direction.
Despite my problems with the controls, I was able to hold the spacecraft steady during the twenty-two seconds that it took for the three retros to finish their job.
The re-entry itself, which I knew could be a tricky period, was uneventful. But it did produce some interesting sensations. Once I saw what looked like smoke or a contrail bouncing off the heatshield as it buffeted
