Atlas testing moved into its final phase. A September 13 Atlas launch, MA-4, carried a dummy astronaut into orbit and back after circling Earth once, and the capsule landed on target in the Atlantic. At that point the system seemed ready. The Atlas had been strengthened not only by the belly band but with the use of thicker metal near the top. But Bob Gilruth and Hugh Dryden, NASA’s deputy administrator, wanted to send a chimp into orbit before risking a man.
This time the chimp was named Enos, and he went up on November 29. Like Ham, he had been conditioned to pull certain levers in the spacecraft according to signals flashing in front of him. Like Ham’s, his flight was not altogether perfect. The capsule’s attitude control let it roll 45 degrees before the hydrogen peroxide thrusters corrected it. Controllers brought it down in the Pacific after two orbits and about three hours.
When Enos was picked up he had freed an arm from its restraint, gotten inside his chest harness, and pulled off the biosensors that the doctors had attached to record his respiration, heartbeat, pulse, and blood pressure. He also had ripped out the inflated urinary catheter they had implanted, which sent his heart rate soaring during the flight. It made you cringe to think of it.
Nevertheless, Enos’s flight was a success and he appeared unfazed at the postflight news conference with Bob and Walt Williams, Project Mercury’s director of operations. All the attention was on the chimpanzee when one of the reporters asked who would follow him into orbit.
Bob gave the world the news I’d learned just a few weeks earlier, when he had called us all into his office at Langley to tell us who would make the next flight. I had been elated when, at last, I heard that I would be the primary pilot. This time I was on the receiving end of congratulations from a group of disappointed fellow astronauts. Now, as the reporters waited with their pencils poised and cameras running, Bob said, “John Glenn will make the next flight. Scott Carpenter will be his backup.”
I woke up at about one-thirty on the morning of February 20, 1962. It was the eleventh date that had been scheduled for the flight. I lay there and went through flight procedures, and tried not to think about an eleventh postponement. Bill Douglas came in a little after two and leaned on my bunk and talked. He said the weather was fifty-fifty and that Scott had already been up to check out the capsule and called to say it was ready to go. I showered, shaved, and wore a bathrobe while I ate the now-familiar low-residue breakfast with Bill, Walt Williams, NASA’s preflight operations director, Merritt Preston, and Deke Slayton who was scheduled to make the next flight.
Bill gave me a once-over with a stethoscope and shone a light into my eyes, ears, and throat. “You’re fit to go,” he said and started to attach the biosensors. Joe Schmitt laid out the pressure suit’s various components, the suit itself, the helmet, and the gloves, which contained fingertip flashlights for reading the instruments when I orbited from day into night. I put on the urine collection device that was a version of the one Gus and I had devised the night before his flight, then the heavy mesh underliner with its two layers separated by wire coils that allowed air to circulate. I put the silver suit on – one leg at a time, like everybody else, I reminded myself. In a pocket in addition to the small pins I had designed, I carried five small silk American flags. I planned to present them to the President, the commandant of the Marine Corps, the Smithsonian Institution, and Dave and Lyn.
Joe gave the suit a pressure check, and Bill ran a hose into his fish tank to check the purity of the air supply; dead fish would mean bad air. I was putting on the silver boots and the dust covers that would come off once I was through the dust-free “white room” outside the capsule at the top of the gantry when I said casually, “Bill, did you know a couple of those fish are floating belly-up?”
“What?” He rushed over to the tank and looked inside before he realized I was kidding.
I put my white helmet on, left Hangar S carrying the portable air blower; waved at the technicians, and got into the transfer van. In the van, I looked over weather data and flight plans. About two hundred technicians were gathered around Launch Complex 14 when I got out of the van. Searchlights lit the silvery Atlas much as they had the night we had watched it blow to pieces. I thought instead of the successful tests since then. Clouds rolled overhead in the predawn light. It was six o’clock when I rode the elevator up the gantry. Scott was waiting in the white room to help me into the capsule. In addition to white coveralls and dust covers on your shoes, you had to wear a paper cap in the white room. It made the highly trained capsule insertion crew look like drugstore soda jerks. I bantered with Guenter Wendt, the “pad fuhrer” who ran the white room with precision, before wriggling feet first into the capsule and settling in to await the countdown.
The original launch time passed as a weather hold delayed the countdown. Then a microphone bracket in my helmet broke. Joe Schmitt fixed that, I said goodbye to everybody, and the crew bolted the hatch into place. They sheared a bolt in the process, so they unbolted the hatch, replaced the bolt, and secured it back into place. That took another forty minutes. I still didn’t believe I would actually go.
I heard a steady stream of conversation on my helmet headset, weather and technical details passed between the blockhouse and the control center in NASA’s technical patois. A voice said the clouds were thinning. Up and down the beaches and on roadsides around the Cape, I knew thousands of people were assembled for the launch. Some of them had been there for a month. The countdown would resume, then stop. I just waited. Then the gantry pulled away, and I could see patches of blue sky through the window. The steady patter of blockhouse communications continued. Scott, in the blockhouse, made a call and let me know he had patched me through to Arlington so I could talk privately with Annie. “How are you doing?” I said.
“We’re fine. How are you doing?”
“Well, I’m all strapped in. The gantry’s back. If we can just get a break on the weather, it looks like I might finally go. How are the kids?”
“They’re right here.” I spoke first to Lyn, then Dave. They told me they were watching all three networks and the preparations looked exciting. Then Annie came back on the line.
“Hey, honey, don’t be scared,” I said. “Remember; I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.”
Her breath caught. “Don’t be long,” she said.
“I’ll talk to you after I land this afternoon.” It was all I could do to add the words, “I love you.” I heard her say, “I love you too.” I was glad nobody could see my eyes.
In a mirror near the capsule window, I could see the blockhouse and back across the Cape. The periscope gave me a view out over the Atlantic. It was turning into a fine day. I felt a little bit like the way I had felt going into combat. There you are, ready to go; you know all the procedures and there’s nothing left to do but just do it. People have always asked if I was afraid. I wasn’t. Constructive apprehension is more like it. I was keyed up and alert to everything that was going on, and I had full knowledge of the situation – the best antidote to fear. Besides, this was the fourth time I had suited up, and I still had trouble believing I would actually take off.
Pipes whined and creaked below me; the booster shook and thumped when the crew gimballed the engines. I clearly was sitting on a huge, complex machine. We had joked that we were riding into space on a collection of parts supplied by the lowest bidder on a government contract, and I could hear them all.
At T minus thirty-five minutes, I heard the order to top off the lox tanks. Instantly the voices in my headset vibrated with a new excitement. We’d never gotten this far before. Topping off the lox tanks was a landmark in the countdown. The crew had begun to catch “go fever.”
There was a hold at twenty-two minutes when a lox valve stuck, and another at six minutes to solve an electrical power failure at the tracking station in Bermuda. Then the minutes dwindled into seconds.
At eighteen seconds the countdown switched to automatic, and I thought for the first time that it was going to happen. At four seconds I felt rather than heard the rocket engines stir to life sixty-five feet below me. The hold-down clamps released with a thud. The count reached zero at 9:47 am.
My earphones didn’t carry Scott’s parting message: “Godspeed, John Glenn.” Tom O’Malley, General Dynamics’ test director, added, “May the good Lord ride with you all the way.”
Liftoff was slow. The Atlas’s 367,000 pounds of thrust were barely enough to overcome its 125 ton weight. I wasn’t really off until the forty-two-inch umbilical cord that took electrical connections to the base of the rocket
